How classrooms reflect, challenge theoretical frameworks (literary, linguistic, pedagogical); how graduate students can creatively integrate teaching and research in language, composition, and survey courses. Abstract (250 words), CV by 15 March to Caroline Egan (eganc@stanford.edu) and Fatma Tarlaci (ftarlaci@utexas.edu).
After a productive discussion about graduate student teaching opportunities at MLA16, the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession invites presentations that consider the site of the classroom as a space of theoretical practice.
The relationship between teaching and research is a consistent professional concern in the study of languages and literatures. To echo the 2017 Presidential themes, literature and language classrooms (physical, virtual, and hybrid) are the most concrete and regular “parameters that define the space” of our professional lives. Incorporating our often-specialized research into the undergraduate classroom is both a challenge and an opportunity, and one that graduate students are expected to approach in both pragmatic and philosophical terms. This panel asks participants to reverse the terms of the question “how do you bring your research to bear on your teaching,” and instead to consider the formative role of teaching in developing research questions and theoretical frameworks. In what practical ways can graduate students inform and enhance their research through the (inter)disciplinary, scholarly, and spatial boundaries of their classrooms?
Topics of discussion might include, but are not limited to:
- How can graduate students develop practices that render the relationship between teaching and research symbiotic rather than divisive?
- How can graduate students productively exercise theoretical frameworks through course design, even when working with curricular content and objectives that are predetermined?
- How can graduate students make teaching, as a pedagogical experience, augment their research on non-pedagogical topics?
- How classroom experiences and pedagogical challenges shape our views of broad theoretical frameworks (for example, what are the ethics of presenting Marxist literary critique in an environment of increasing economic disparity? How does the diverse makeup of a particular classroom affect our understanding of cultural studies?)
- What role can the classroom play in a public humanities agenda?
- What assignments, activities, and modes of evaluation work best in a theory-oriented classroom (that is, where specific theoretical frameworks inform pedagogy, even if they are not the object(s) of study)?
Please send abstract (250 words) and CV to Caroline Egan (eganc@stanford.edu) and Fatma Tarlaci (ftarlaci@utexas.edu) by 15 March.