Teaching

Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture, Faculty of Arts, UPEI

Putting Arts to Work I (Fall 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)

This course examines the history, purpose, and uses of a Liberal Arts education, with a focus on the three key areas identified in the major: Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture. In this course, students explore the meaning of community engagement, citizenship, and social responsibility. Students are introduced to community-based research and participatory action research. Current trends in the use of technology to promote social change are examined. This course is for students who want to develop skills and knowledge related to civic engagement and community service learning.

Putting Arts to Work II (Winter 2019, 2020, 2021)

Building on ACLC 1060, students develop a deeper understanding of the Liberal Arts in theoretical, historical, and contemporary concepts. Students also explore the key career areas for Liberal Arts majors, such as journalism, human resources, marketing, NGOs, Arts and Culture, Government, and Education. Drawing upon skills learned in ACLC 1060 and ACLC 1080, this research-based course examines the skills and knowledge necessary to complete a research project. Each research project explores aspects of the Liberal Arts’ intrinsic value, practical applications, social good, and/or personal benefits through a specific theme and primary text(s) of the student’s choosing. While each student designs, researches, and presents an independent research project, students are supported by peer workshopping and feedback.

Putting Arts to Work III (Fall 2019, 2020, 2021)

Following on ACLC 3060, this course guides students through the development of a second, more ambitious project. Included in the course are an introduction to project management concepts and methods, with instruction on the process of developing a business plan, and an introduction to some of the fundamental techniques of modern marketing. Team projects require students to apply what they have learned to the work of community organizations. Each year, these course outcomes will be achieved through the study of different sets of social and cultural themes.

Digital Literacy (Fall 2017, 2018)

Digital Literacy is designed to prepare students for 21st century learning and employment. Four skill areas are focused upon in this course: i) Desktop Publishing – Students are introduced to the software that allows them to develop a professional media campaign. Students experiment with designing posters, promotional literature, and brochures. ii) Social Media – Students are introduced to various social media packages. iii) Video Production – Students are introduced to the basics of video productions. Topics include camera and editing techniques; critical review and assessment of video productions. iv) Web Design – Any project or new venture requires a slick web presence. Students are introduced to the basics of web design. This course involves the application of these tools in a project-based setting to create meaningful and relevant products. The technical learning of the different forms of digital literacy is combined with deconstruction and critical analysis of media products. Students experience the course in a hybrid model of face-to-face and online formats.

Digital Humanities (Winter 2018)

Digital Humanities involves the use of computational skills, programs, and applications in the gathering of evidence and data, preserving and representation of texts and other artifacts, and the use of such tools and techniques in the analysis of this evidence. Digital Humanities approaches can encompass highly sophisticated computational analysis of texts and visualization of data, or the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tools to map and analyze spatial and geographical aspects of a topic. In this course students explore the tools, methods, and analytical potentials associated with digital humanity studies through team-based digital humanities projects. Each year, these course outcomes will be achieved through the study of a specific thematically based subject.

English & Diversity and Social Justice Studies, UPEI

Writing by Women (Winter 2021)

This course, “Writing by Women,” will particularly focus on women writing the city, exploring how women have experienced, imagined, and written about the city in fiction. We will focus on psychological, emotional, sensual, imaginative, and bodily experiences of urban space. Students will bring their own interdisciplinary interests to course discussion and assignments; possible topics will include gender, sex and sexuality, the environment/ecocriticism, place/geography, time, walking, the five senses (sight, smell, touch, sound, taste), romance, marriage, class, work/labour, race, health/well-being, nationality, social justice, and the connection between the ‘real’ and the imagined.

English, Dalhousie University

Romantic Literature I (Fall 2016)

English 3026 explores the traditional themes of Romanticism—nature, the imagination, the self, childhood, memory, and the supernatural—while also broaching these topics from newer critical perspectives such as ecocriticim and Romantic urbanisms. This class will also explore the interaction between imaginative writing and pressing political debates over rights—for men, for women, and for the enslaved. Students will also have the opportunity to think about how British Romanticism impacted our corner of the British Empire by linking course readings to nineteenth-century Nova Scotia and its literature. The course’s central themes will converge on our final text, Northanger Abbey, by the most well-known, stylistically innovative, and enduringly popular novelist of the period, Jane Austen. Other authors include William Wordsworth, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Burns, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, John Thelwall, Mary Robinson, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, John William Polidori, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Prince.

English, Memorial University

Critical Reading and Writing I (Fall 2014, 2 sections)

This course is an introduction to such literary forms as poetry, short fiction, drama, and the essay. Emphasis is placed on critical reading and writing: analysing texts, framing and using questions, constructing essays, organizing paragraphs, quoting and documenting, revising and editing.

Critical Reading and Writing II (Winter 2015)

Critical Reading and Writing II is a study of such forms as the novel, the novella, and
the story sequence. Emphasis is placed on critical reading and writing: analyzing texts,
framing and using questions, constructing essays, organizing paragraphs, conducting research, quoting and documenting, revising and editing. In this course we will study four novels: Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Lisa Moore’s February, Patrick deWitt’s The Brothers Sisters, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

English, University of Warwick

Modes of Reading (Fall-Winter, 2012-13, 4 sections)

Modes of Reading (Fall-Winter, 2010-11)

This course offers an introduction to the practices of criticism. Form, genre and literary inheritance will be among the topics addressed. The module aims to enable students to work with a variety of critical approaches, and to develop an informed awareness of the possibilities available to them as readers and critics. Thematically organized lectures provide a frame of cultural reference on which the students will draw in their close readings in seminars.