Teaching

I have been told that my Lake Forest College interview in 2000 was distinguished by my crouching on the classroom floor while teaching a sample lesson, and a graduate once noted that he has considered standing on a piece of furniture to emulate my pedagogy (while teaching English in China). Admittedly, I often find myself in the throes of physical contortions while teaching, speaking from the ground, from a chair, or hopping unceremoniously between the two.

My classrooms provide a rotating forum—for discussion, reading, lecture, and presentation (staffed with crayons, poster board, tape-recorders, and VR viewers)—and I strive to construct a space to link creatively related materials and material culture: In Introduction to Literary Studies, students engage in a variety of theater games before blocking and performing scenes from a play ; in Introduction to Creative Writing, students throw water balloons at a visual representation of a group-created town, before writing about its final moments; long ago, in Literature, Art & Rebellious Consumers, students map the College campus, assigned the roles of police, protestors, and Yippies (as per the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention) to role-play an imaginary conflict at our local college; in the Senior Writing Seminar, students engage in “homophonic translation,” listening to texts in other languages and transcribing the sounds into possible English.

My current teaching interests include Remix Culture/Mash-Ups, Uncreative/Creative Writing, Postmodernism and Avant Literature, American Literature/Culture, American Studies / Chicago Literature and History, World’s Fairs, VR technology, podcasting, and the Grateful Dead.