As part of my pedagogical directive, I was required to create 3-4 syllabi for courses ranging from First-year Writing to undergraduate survey and upper-level literature courses, to graduate-level classes. I chose to create a syllabus for First-year Writing; one for an undergraduate survey course in Romantic literature that focuses on women authors; and a graduate-level, writing-heavy course on Victorian literature that focuses on housekeepers, governesses, and maids.
The First-year Writing course attempts to center student writing as a primary text of the course: it is therefore a “writing about writing” course, designed to encourage students to probe their own preconceived ideas about writing; to challenge themselves in areas of style, medium, and audience; and finally, to ask serious questions about the intra-actions (a la Karen Barad) of writing, identity, and ideology.
The undergraduate literature course in Romanticism is a survey course, but focuses specifically on writing by women in order to encourage students to expand their understanding of the period and to question definitions of the field based primarily on the authorship and critical work of men. It uses but adapts some of the assignments developed for the graduate level course in order to encourage students to work in community and to see themselves as agentive actors in creating a course.
The Victorian Literature course asks students to consider persons who existed both in the center and the periphery: housekeepers, governesses, and maids. As people who lived and/or worked in the houses and families of the rich, these people groups offer a unique perspective on the state of English politics, class struggles, childhood, and gender politics. The course offers students a chance to “get their hands dirty,” as it were, by working with digitally archived periodicals in a project that could potentially provide the foundation for the final project.
Finally, in response to concerns over the lack of writing support graduate students receive during their time in graduate school (see Madden et al. and Micciche and Carr), I have intentionally constructed the graduate level course so that it focuses not only on marginalized working women, but also the texts my students are producing as laborers in my class. Over the course of the semester, students submit a predetermined number of “musings”: short, reflective papers that wrestle with both primary and secondary sources–not, ultimately, to agree or disagree with a given critic or line of thought, but rather to write themselves into conversation with the scholars by whom we are surrounded. These short texts are read alongside of longer critical pieces and primary texts, enriching both local and global conversations.