This category is reserved for high-focus articles
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Abstract: The creative student in the Digital Humanities classroom. What does it mean to be a “creative” person in a digital era? Standard practice in the humanities is to divide “critical” activities from “creative” ones. This post is the first in a possible series on the creative student in a… Continue reading
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
When many of us think of virtual worlds they think of working in or doing things in them, or perhaps in some instances creating things in them. In 2009, there were over 579 million subscribers to virtual worlds (Keegan, 2009) doing things, building things, experiencing things, and playing games. Virtual… Continue reading
This weekend I planned class sessions for my “Fictional Life of College” composition course, sent emails, pet my cats, talked with a friend about going to poetry readings, worked on my book at a coffee shop, and talked with my partner about a linguistic theorist. All pretty ordinary for a… Continue reading
In his D-Day speech on the beaches of Normandy, French president Francois Hollande not only paid his respects to the some 150,000 Allied soldiers who sacrificed everything to bring one of the world’s most tyrannical regimes to an end. He also declared that it was time to recognize the sacrifice… Continue reading
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
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
Like so many writing instructors, I frequently find myself frustrated with what appears to be a lack of attention to editing in the papers I receive from my students. In the Fall 2013 semester, I tried something new in an effort to address this issue by inviting students to record… Continue reading
