7 Brittain Fellows Reflect on Antiracist Pedagogy

A memorial mural for reonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd.

In response to the protests for racial justice during the summer of 2020, we here at TECHStyle discussed steps we could take to promote antiracism and antiracist pedagogy in higher education. As we noted in our call for submissions from August, “Black people have experienced systemic racism for as long as… Continue reading

Teaching in All Seasons: Poetics, Ideal Tendencies, and Food Literacy

In November 2020, the Georgia Tech community experienced a tragic loss: the passing of Dr. Darcy Mullen, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and a faculty member in the Writing and Communication Program. Darcy was a scholar, teacher, writer, musician, colleague, and friend to many of us; we miss her… Continue reading

“ethical issues that may arise…”: Scaffolded Ethics in CS 3311/LMC 3432 & ENGL 1102

This article is a collaboration with Dr. Dori Coblentz, third-year Brittain Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. It is the third part in a series on the development and implementation of an interactive ethics training module for Georgia Tech’s first-year composition and computer science students. See the… Continue reading

Toward a Scaffolded Ethics in the Writing Classroom

This article is a collaboration with Dr. Dori Coblentz, third-year Brittain Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. It is the second part in a series on the development and implementation of an interactive ethics training module for Georgia Tech’s first-year composition and computer science students. See the… Continue reading

Archives as Instructional Environments at Georgia Tech and Emory University

Teaching with Primary Sources at Georgia Tech and Emory University: An Introduction Teaching with primary sources is central to my pedagogy as an instructor at Georgia Tech, where I’m a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, and Emory, where I’ve taught as Visiting Faculty in the Creative Writing Program. I’m fortunate… Continue reading

Rethinking Instructional Scaffolding

This article is a collaboration with Dr. Dori Coblentz, third-year Brittain Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. It is the first part in a series on the development and implementation of an interactive ethics training module for Georgia Tech’s first-year composition and computer science students. When… Continue reading

7 Brittain Fellows Reflect on Summer Pedagogical Experiments in First-Year Writing

Frankenstein in alternative genres, freshly redesigned periodic tables, poetry and digital archives, feminist editorial interventions in Wikipedia, sustainable futures, pop culture, and crisis—these are the Writing and Communication course topics that Brittain Fellows experimented with in the 2019 summer semester at Georgia Tech. The compressed six-week course schedule and opportunities… Continue reading

Taking Twitter Higher, Further, Faster: Leading the #Womenonpanels Event

In our current moment, when many of us think of Twitter, we think of it as a space of broadcasting, unproductive argument, or even, for some, of violence. In comics fandom, Twitter has been the primary space of Comicsgate, a hate group against the diversification and what they term politicization,… Continue reading

16 Brittain Fellows Write About the Archives They Love

Archives, research libraries, and special collections are the crucial spaces where study begins. While public and school libraries hold a space in the popular imagination as a catalyzing site of intellectual curiosity—as seen in the recent piece “12 Authors Write about the Libraries They Love” in The New York Times—archives are… Continue reading

Things To Do in Wivenhoe; Or, So Going Around “The Basketball Diaries”: A New York School Travelogue

“Wake up high up / frame bent & turned on,” begins Ted Berrigan’s iconic “Things to Do in New York (City),” a lyric list poem that shows Berrigan moving through the literary landscape of the city in timeless style. Berrigan was fond of this genre, also writing poems like “Things… Continue reading

Teaching in All Seasons: Poetics, Ideal Tendencies, and Food Literacy

SUMMER   “Once I remember looking into the freezer can the next morning and finding the leftover ice cream had all returned to milk. It was like the disappearance of Cinderella’s new clothes.” (Lewis 53) Midway through my Spring composition course, “Food Literacy of Atlanta,” my students and I had… Continue reading

Sonnets @ Tech: The Pedagogy of Writing as Making

When modernist poet William Carlos Williams antagonistically announced, “To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance. What does it matter what the line ‘says’?”, I wonder whether or not he’d approve of poet and punk rock singer Matt Hart playfully directing students to arrange and rearrange pieces… Continue reading

Flash Readings, Episode 6: “Colson Whitehead Will Break You, Too”

In Flash Reading 6, Brittain Fellow Matt Dischinger analyzes a scene from the South Carolina chapter of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s prize-winning novel set in the antebellum United States. In this scene, the protagonist, named Cora, gives the “evil eye” to a former charge, Maisie, who doesn’t recognize her in costume as a… Continue reading

Why Not?: On Punk and Pedagogy

Not long before the Primitives changed their name to the Velvet Underground, the band’s singer, Lou Reed, wrote to his Syracuse University professor, poet Delmore Schwartz, I decided that I’m very very good and could be a good writer if i work and work. i know thats what ive got to… Continue reading

Putting Lux in the Darkness: Remembering Poet and Professor Thomas Lux

Editor’s Note: When I first had the idea to teach an English 1102 course about the The New Yorker magazine, I had hoped that Thomas Lux, who has published five poems in the magazine, would come speak to my students. Vijay Seshadri, former editor at The New Yorker and frequent contributor to the… Continue reading

The Doubleplusgoodspeak of Newspeak: Poetry and Orwell’s 1984

Two days after President Trump’s inauguration, on January 22, 2017, the newly-minted Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd. She discussed White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s first press briefing the night before, in which he claimed, despite the existence of much… Continue reading

“Should I Go to Work?”: On Participating in A Day Without Women

On the morning of March 8, 2017, I, like many women around the country (and perhaps the world) faced a particular question: should I go to work? On this particular day, the question was triggered by International Women’s Day and its attendant call for a women’s strike. Named “A Day… Continue reading

Offseason Musings: Football, Pedagogy, and the Multimodal Composition Classroom

College football is increasingly in the news, and usually for all of the wrong reasons. One of the most concerning things for educators is the relationship between the academic and athletic programs at our nation’s colleges and universities. And it is a tenuous, problematic relationship, undoubtedly. Imagine my surprise then… Continue reading

Translation and Transformation: International Modernism in the Classroom

One of the advantages of teaching at Georgia Tech is the linguistic diversity within any given classroom. Not only is there a wealth of World Englishes, but many of the students are multilingual, with fluencies in a wide variety of spoken/written languages as well as a hyper-fluency in programming languages…. Continue reading

Taking on the Trivial in English 1102

When this school year began, everyone was talking about the GT convocation video that went viral. “You can do that!” was the theme of the speech, where “that” meant things like changing the world, crushing the shoulders of giants, and building the Iron Man Suit. Big ideas! Big risks! Epic… Continue reading