Posts that focus primarily on teaching and pedagogy.
By: David Measel Musical Listening “Musical Listening” is a pedagogy that applies the theory of musical expectation to patterns in text. It helps students to analyze media and consider their own reading and composition choices. As a pedagogy, it puts course curriculum in the context of a discussion about pattern recognition… Continue reading
Integrating AI into College Writing and Communication Classes AI (Artificial Intelligence) platforms like ChatGPT and Dall-E2 have galvanized higher education, particularly for those of us who teach college writing. The full potential of AI is not yet realized, and the AI platforms are limited. ChatGPT and DALL–E2 cannot comprehend the… Continue reading
By Shane Snyder ChatGPT, the Political Situation, and the Classroom ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) trained to respond convincingly to language inputs, has dominated headlines since December 2022. Stories and editorials come replete with catchy headlines, some of them designed to elicit fear, like Time Magazine’s unscrupulous use of… Continue reading
Science Fiction’s Potential in the Communications-Classroom As an instructor who teaches introductory English communication courses (ENGL 1101 and 1102) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a leading institution in the fields of engineering and computer science, I was confronted by the challenge of engaging STEM majors in the communication course… Continue reading
During the pandemic, university instructors, staff, and students have faced numerous challenges within the context of higher education, and mental health and wellbeing have emerged as key issues in discussions relating to equitable student support and classroom learning. We asked Brittain Fellows to share their experiences with making student mental… Continue reading
Introduction For many teachers, the following “Syllabus Day” template might sound familiar: Introductions. Syllabus. Course calendar. Please mask up for class. Any questions? No? All right, email me if anything comes up. Looking forward to working with you this semester. Have a great day! There is nothing inherently wrong with… Continue reading
Anxious campesina grasping peaceful power, struggling. Rocio Soto, fourth-year undergraduate, LMC major Educators and scholars lead stressful personal and professional lives, and, knowing that, we at TECHStyle wanted to create a space for self-expression in addition to our usual scholarly and pedagogical fare. To achieve this goal in an accessible… Continue reading
What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions? The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these and other related questions. The interview below — with Stephen Addcox, a teacher and administrator at The Westminster… Continue reading
What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions? The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these and other related questions. The interview below — with Stephen Addcox, a teacher and administrator at The Westminster… Continue reading
At the beginning of last year we asked for reflections from Brittain fellows on teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in instructive articles from “The Shift to Online Consulting at Georgia Tech’s Communication Center” by Jeff Howard et al. to “A Sense of Belonging in the Archive and the… Continue reading
By Kendra Slayton (Continued from Part 1) Closing Distances In addition to helping students close the distance between the premodern and the modern, Perusall has been an invaluable tool for building a sense of community in my remote classroom. Students quickly begin to form comment chains, debating the meaning of… Continue reading
By Kendra Slayton As a medievalist, I have always felt moved by Chaucer’s optimism in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales when he describes how into a inn came “nyne and twenty in a compaignye / Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle / In felaweship” (“nine and twenty in… Continue reading
By Lizzy LeRud In my first few years of teaching poetry, I quickly grew to expect my students’ slightly sick expressions when words like “iamb” and “trochee” came up in class. Many students were weary from memorizing these Greek words for poetic meters, a necessary task for getting by in… Continue reading
By Danielle Gilman Is it possible to feel a sense of belonging to a place you’ve never been? I grappled with this question quite often last summer as I prepared to teach three sections of my “Archival Narratives” course to a cohort of students who had, by and large, never… Continue reading
By Shane Snyder Introduction: A Glaring Omission Two months into my Fall 2020 composition course, “Possibility Spaces and Rhetoric in Video Games,” I realized something was wrong. Within sixteen weeks, I had scheduled only one lesson on the LGBTQ+ video game narratives Gone Home and Dys4ia, two discussions about predatory corporate capitalism and environmental destruction in The McDonald’s Videogame, and one week on violence and nationalism in Undertale. Most… Continue reading
What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions? The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these and other related questions. The interview below — with Kellie Meyer, a teacher at TMI Episcopal School of Texas, and a former Brittain Fellow — is… Continue reading
By Jill Fennell and Jeffrey Howard (Continued from Part 1) Technical Communication and Information Design Techniques in Assignment Design Extant scholarship on technical communication, information design, and user experience design (UX) provides many ideas that instructors can implement to enhance the effectiveness and expand the purpose and usability of assignment… Continue reading
By Jill Fennell and Jeffrey Howard “We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.” ~ Stephen Dunn, “A Little Essay on Form” Introduction In his “Little Essay on Form,” noted writer Stephen Dunn argues that even when writers work within the constraints of generic conventions, they also can reshape… Continue reading
What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions? The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these questions and more. The interview… Continue reading
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
by Genny Onyiuke-Kennedy, Emily Nguyen, Stephanie Oliva, Raneem Rizvi, Rocio Soto, Sophia Tone, Jeff Howard, and Eric Lewis This article is the second installment of a two-part series on the views of six peer consultants who have worked at the Naugle Communication Center during its transition from in-person/face-to-face consultations to online consultations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This installment focuses… Continue reading
Introduction While the senseless deaths of Black men have gained national attention, Black women are often excluded in the national debate concerning this topical issue of state violence. There is minimal coverage in the mainstream media of Black women’s bodies, and often the maltreatment of Black women by police goes… 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
by Genny Onyiuke-Kennedy, Emily Nguyen, Stephanie Oliva, Raneem Rizvi, Rocio Soto, Sophia Tone, Jeff Howard, and Eric Lewis This article is the first installment of a two-part series relating the views of six peer consultants who have worked at the Naugle Communication Center during its transition from in-person/face-to-face consultations to online consultations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This… Continue reading
I’ve always wanted to teach outside, and the COVID-19 pandemic practically forced me into it. As an environmental humanist who teaches courses on settler-colonialism and the Anthropocene, being outside seemed like an opportunity to engage with nature and have students be able to relate our work to a more immediate… Continue reading
