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Full-Text Articles in Humane Education

Tackling History In The Cultural Studies Seminar, Becca Cragin Nov 2024

Tackling History In The Cultural Studies Seminar, Becca Cragin

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

While cultural theory developed in past eras was often marred by the biases of its privileged authors, we are still often required to teach the canon, so that graduate students can recognize past intellectual trends to which current critiques of the canon respond. In this article, a “History of Feminist Theory” course is employed as an example of larger principles of foundations course design that can be used in any cultural studies seminar to productively address the tension between old and new schools of thought. It provides suggestions for structuring syllabi and discussions in ways that productively engage with earlier …


Teaching The Grateful Dead, Happenings, & Spontaneous Pedagogy, Ryan Slesinger Nov 2024

Teaching The Grateful Dead, Happenings, & Spontaneous Pedagogy, Ryan Slesinger

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

To teach a course on the Grateful Dead I developed a praxis I call “spontaneous pedagogy” that pairs academic rigor with flexible curriculum details to enable creativity and engagement among students in a truly studentcentered classroom. The pairing of spontaneous pedagogy with the Grateful Dead course worked well because the subject emphasizes improvisation, which initially inspired and—during the course—paralleled my praxis. I had developed this praxis previously, implementing it each semester from 2007 to2010 for one Composition II unit on definitional arguments entitled, “The Nature of Reality.” Students were asked to define what they consider as real and apply that …


Reflections On Building A Popular Writing Course, Emily Howson, Chris Massenburg, Cecilia Shelton Nov 2024

Reflections On Building A Popular Writing Course, Emily Howson, Chris Massenburg, Cecilia Shelton

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Composition pedagogy has typically employed traditional academic texts in the instruction of first-year writing courses. In this article, three first-year writing instructors reflect on their experiences employing popular culture artifacts in lieu of more traditional academic texts in writing classrooms at a small, private, historically black institution (HBCU). By retrospectively analyzing the intersections between theory and practice, the instructors’ autoethnographic reflections explore the utility of popular culture artifacts as tools for teaching and learning writing, with an emphasis on rhetorical knowledge and transfer. Though preliminary, their conclusions point to the potential of popular culture for integration into traditional best practices …