Resources and Assignments

Writing instruction is one of my priorities as a teacher, coming out of my previous experience as a Writing Intensive Teaching Assistant as the University of Georgia. Any type of writing requires a degree of higher order thinking to translate our thoughts into words and communicate with others, so I incorporate it as a major element of my classroom.

Resources:

• Assessing Documents Notes: These notes dive into how to look at a collection of documents in a DBQ, including comic strips, political cartoons, poems, and quotes. The notes break down how to analyze them for evidence one can use in a response.

• Building Relationships Notes: These notes think about how to build relationships between evidence that might show up in a DBQ. Building relatinships as a form of analysis was an idea that some of my students were struggling with, so I designed these for specific practice of that skill.

One of the major ideas that emerged in my PhD work is the materiality of Religion and Literature. These are not just experiences of the mind, but things that become embodied and require an attention to our physically to fully appreciate. As such, I include an emphasis on material work in my courses, pushing against the sense that technology should be at the heart of 21st Century instruction. This also reflects an element of my teaching philosophy that emphasizes the need for students to practice digital wellness by taking breaks from technological devices (see my Definition of Digital Citizenship for more).

Resources:

• Zine Resources: In the past, my course team did a "Multigenre Project," in which students created artifacts from a number of genres of writing and incorporated those into a slide show to demonstrate a range of composition skills. We struggled, however, with the quality of those projects. I introduced the concept of a Zine to shift that project into a more material mode, bringing with it the 90s aesthetic. We immediately saw an uptick in the quality of the projects, with students feeling a greater degree of investment in their work and engagement with the material.

• Classroom Journals: Next year, I plan to explore returning to some roots of material learning with classroom journals for notetaking, daily writing practice, and skill assessment/goal setting. During Summer 2025, I will be in the process of designing resources for these.

While I do place an emphasis on the materiality of learning (particularly for the study of literature and composition), I understand the importance of preparing students for the digital world as part of their college and career readiness. As a reflection of my Definition of Digital Citizenship, I want to be intentional about where I incorporate technology, communicating with students why I chose to use technology in that instance and encouraging the responsible use of technology. My goal is to avoid the use of technology for technology's sake in favor a critical approach to its benefits and challenges.

Resources:

• Mapping the "Letter from Birmingham Jail": I created this story map as part of a background knowledge build for students preparing to read Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The goal is to help them contextualize the timeliness of this letter and how it reflects conditions on the ground in Birmingham.