Musings on children's and YA literature, the academy, and the relationship between them, from an English professor and mother.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

teaching, again

The fall semester is upon us, and I'm teaching two sections of a class I'm really excited about: Twice-Told Tales, Fairy Tales in Literary and Popular Culture. I'm just focusing on one fairy tale (Cinderella), and I've had a terrible time narrowing down the syllabus. What I've got still feels like a work in progress, but classes start Monday so it's as done as it's going to be for now.

The biggest experiment in this class will be the use of freewriting and focused freewriting, which we'll do (almost) every day. I took a fantastic workshop at Bard's Institute for Writing and Thinking which introduced me to this technique, and consultants from IWT came and worked with our faculty on it (and other things) over the summer, as we all prepare for teaching our first-year seminars for the first time. I don't know if anyone else has converted as fully as I have, but I'm really looking forward to the experiment.