Romantic Circles Blog » Pedagogies

Call for Contributors to the new Pedagogies Commons

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:56:21 +0000

In an effort to make the Romantic Circles Pedagogies section a true commons, we are looking for a crew of commentators with varying levels of experience for our new blog and pedagogies group. We hope to launch the blog with several regular contributors of various interests and experience, creating a space for sharing ideas on teaching, texts, and techniques. We may be able to offer the participants a small stipend for their efforts. These bloggers will offer one or two posts per week, offering dispatches from the front that reflect on their own Romantic pedagogy and the pedagogy of Romanticism.

Essentially the blog will be the first set in a series of proposed changes to the Pedagogies section of the Romantic Circles website. We will continue to produce peer-edited volumes of essays, and we hope soon to feature interactive digital projects, interviews, notes on using digital tools such as Wikis and databases, along with the arsenal of syllabi and other teaching materials the site already has to offer (http://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/). We are imagining this site as a place where professors and students of all levels can debate approaches to particular texts, explore innovative classroom techniques, and report on new Romantic topics.

Interested techno-Romanticists should send a short paragraph of interest to Kate Singer at ksinger[at]mtholyoke[dot]edu, by Sept 3rd. Please feel free to send any questions as well.

Romantic Pedagogy Commons: Innovations

admin — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 15:34:23 +0000

The first issue of the new peer-reviewed venue, Romantic Pedagogy Commons, called “Innovations,” is now available at Romantic Circles. It offers numerous tools for teaching, some that are technologically innovative, others that make use of more traditional classroom practices but transfer them to the web (online slide shows, for instance). These tools are primarily for enhancing Romanticism classes, but some of them apply to any literature courses. Mark Phillipson presents the Wiki as an anti-authoritarian class tool: it de-centers classroom authority and participants produce an on line text book, as it were, authored collectively by the class members. Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker describe IVANHOE, a new program (still in beta testing) that stimulates creative reading practices and interpretive activity among students in a literature course.

The inaugural issue of the Romantic Pedagogy Commons might be of wider interest, however, since it discusses new pedagogical theories and their relation to web tools (the introduction), and defines and explains “Visual Literacy” (three essays by Seiffert, Simmons, and Bjork).

Laura Mandell

Call for Proposals: Romantic Pedagogies

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 15:50:33 +0000

“Wordsworthian Pedagogies” at Romantic Circles

Proposals are invited for an online collection of essays on “Wordsworthian Pedagogies,” to be edited by Brad Sullivan. Romantic Circles is launching a new peer-reviewed series, called The Pedagogy Commons, which is designed to explore and highlight emerging teaching theories and practices in Romanticism.

This issue of the Commons will focus on “Wordsworthian” teaching and learning. How do we teach Wordsworth now? How does our pedagogy reflect or dispute critical understandings of Wordsworth and his views of poetry, creativity, and learning? How do we employ Wordsworthian ideas about the mind, experiential learning, and personal engagement in our teaching? What can we (as teachers and students) learn from Wordsworth?

This collection of essays is mainly intended for teachers of undergraduate courses on British and European Romantic literature. The editor is seeking submissions that are grounded in research (on Wordsworth, on teaching and learning, in classrooms) and (in true Wordsworthian fashion) well-considered personal experience.

You are invited to submit an essay proposal (250-word abstract) on some aspect of “Wordsworthian Pedagogies.” Essays for this volume may vary in length from 3,000 to 10,000 words, and you should indicate the proposed length of your submission. Please submit your proposal to Brad Sullivan, Associate Professor of English, Western New England College [dsulliva@wnec.edu], by June 30, 2004.

The digital format of the Commons can accommodate publications which include resources such as sample syllabi, lesson plans, links to handouts, primary reading texts, or in-class exercises, web pages or samples of web-based student activities, full-color illustrations and designs, sound files, and so on. In your proposal, please include comments about your plans to use these kinds of elements. If you’d like to see examples of what’s possible in this medium, you might take a look at the Romantic Circles Praxis volumes. Generally we encourage all essays to include the following elements: (1) a guide to further reading, and (2) links to useful online resources.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed. Romantic Circles editorial staff will adapt the code and design of essays and materials to site standards, so submissions may be in MSWord or HTML. Final essays (and permissions) will need to be submitted to Brad Sullivan as e-mail attachments by September 30, 2004.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS: June 30, 2004. Please submit your proposal to Brad Sullivan . If you have questions about the proposed volume, or wish to discuss possible topics, please contact the editor at the same email address.

New: Romantic Circles Pedagogies

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 14:42:29 +0000

Next month, Romantic Circles will launch a special section called Romantic Pedagogies, which will continue to expand well into the summer. Within this section, we plan to set up a “Romantic Commons” in which teaching issues can be discussed and teachers’ materials shared with one another.

We plan to establish the section on a firm scholarly footing, including peer-review and MOO conference participation as part of each thematic-based “issue” or site produced. All Romantic Circles materials are peer-reviewed, of course, but we add this by way of indicating that we would work to ensure that people’s work “published” and discussed in this site will be adequately valued by their home institutions.

Leaders would serve as editors of thematically named issues within the Pedagogy Commons. For example, we could imagine a special issue called “Wordsworth’s Pedagogy,” or, say, one on Romantic Ecology. We had originally planned to launch the Commons with the theme “Romantic Women Writers,” asking in particular our continental associates how they teach British Romantic women writers. Those interested in helping to establish Romantic Pedagogy Commons as part of the RC Pedagogies section should contact us.

Laura Mandell
Ron Broglio
Tilar Mazzeo