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Courses Taught
For descriptions of former classes and links to syllabi, please click here: Courses Taught
Course Assignments and Teaching Materials
Commonplace Book Assignment:
The commonplace book assignment is the foundation of my classes in many ways. It is a semester long project in which students collect quotes from the assigned reading for each day and write a short analysis of it–which they later turn into an expanded short analysis essay (Assignment sheet below) and potentially their final essay in the class. As a class, we construct the notebook by hand, which fuels an appreciation for the materiality of texts and builds community as they work through the crafting process together. Student bring their commonplace books to class every day, which prepares them to bring at least one topic into our classroom discussion. Previous iterations of the assignment have included specific writing prompts related to course themes.
Commonplace Book Crux-Buster (Short Analysis Essay)
Community-Engaged Memoir Essay Assignment:
This was my first attempt at crafting a “creative” non-fiction assignment for my community-engagement section of Interpretation of Literature. This class consists solely of non-English Majors and one of the difficulties I’ve been dealing with in this class is getting the students to view themselves as writers. They often complain that their lives are “not interesting enough.” To help them overcome these feelings, we discuss the art of “navel-gazing” after reading Melissa Febos’s “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma As A Subversive Act” in Poets & Writers . Empowering students to tell their stories is an essential skill which often gets overlooked. In many ways we construct our identity through narrative: the stories we tell about ourselves shape the person we present to the world. In addition to the assignment detai;s, I’ve included an exemplary example of an exceptional student essay produced by this assignment.
Make your Own Poem (Blackout Poetry Exercise)
This is the first of two creative writing exercises I’ve designed for general education students, with a very specific caveat: I do not want to put the burden of creativity upon them. To that end, and inspired by our class reading of Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations(which features prominent section of blackout poetry, I assigned a sequence of two blackout poetry exercises. For the first I provided the material (pages of academic journals which had been left on the departmental “free book” table) and for the second they chose a piece of media with significance to them. By providing the material for crafting the poem, students are free to focus on the form and style of the poem and gain a better understanding of the choices poets must make to create a poem. Student example included.
Make your Own Story (Creative Writing Exercise)
This is the second creative writing exercise for general education students designed to help them gain an appreciation of the creative writing process without having to create from scratch. Students are asked to choose a “writing prompt” from a curated collections of tweets from the Iowa City Police Log twitter account–an account which posts the many ridiculous incidents reported to the Iowa City Police on a regular basis. The tweet provides the inciting incident for the student’s story. What events led to this incident? Who are the characters involved? From what perspective will they tell the story? (Student Sample and Iowa City Police Log tweets Included)
Presentation: Riddle Me This: The Making of Medieval Manuscripts and Early Printed Books
Teaching the history of the book is a difficult task in any classroom. Teaching the history of the book to a class full of undergraduate Non-English Majors during a single visit to Special Collections is nigh impossible. But, that doesn’t mean it cannot be an intensely rewarding educational experience which introduces students to the materiality of books and reinforces within them that they are special enough for Special Collections. This presentation was designed for classes entitled Getting Medieval in the Midwest and it was intended to provide a foundational base of knowledge with which to approach and engage with the medieval manuscripts (and print medievalisms) on display. Since the classes had enjoyed the Old English Riddles so much (especially the dirty ones) I used a particular riddle(#23) to “flesh out” the process of making medieval manuscripts.
Close Reading Worksheet:
Close reading is one of the most difficult skills to teach to non-English majors (and maybe to majors as well). From polling my fellow graduate students, the most common response to the question: "How were you taught to close read?", is a vague response about just kind of picking it up on their own. I've recently become a worksheet enthusiast, so I decided to try and develop a scaffolded worksheet which guides students through the process of close reading and results in the "deliverable" of the first body paragraph of their literary analysis essay. Students approach the worksheet in steps, some in-class and some out of class, they workshop the resulting paragraphs with their peers, and I provide feedback as well, so that they go into their rough draft with the makings of a solid paragraph and an understanding of what crafting a solid body paragraph entails.
Class Discussions: Gossip Girl Style:
One of the recurring challenges in a discussion-based classroom is, well, getting students to discuss the readings. Over the course of a typical semester, I try more a variety of discussion formats to help students feel comfortable being active and engaged classroom participants. Sometimes, I get creative–perhaps a little too creative. Inspired by my semi-annual marathon of Gossip Girl (The best and worst show of all time), I attempted to design a discussion modality which mimicked one of the show’s defining features: The Gossip Girl Blast, an early 2000s blog post which detailed scandalous moments in the lives of Manhattan socialites. Oddly enough, I saw a striking similarity between Gossip Girl and William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, so I tried my best to mimic the Gossip Girl Blast format, assigned students to each blast, and asked them to identify the passages the blast was referring too, craft two discussion questions related to the blast, and lead the class in a discussion of their questions. It actually worked surprisingly well, especially since the vast majority of my students had no idea what Gossip Girl is/was.
PJ Zaborowski 