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The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning
Heath A. Diehl
3.1
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This interdisciplinary seminar seeks to introduce students to select foundational thinkers, ideas, and intellectual movements that have shaped human civilizations across a variety of temporal, geopolitical, cultural, and historical conditions. Individual sections of the course expose students to a variety of political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual ideas and perspectives. Students are encouraged to understand these ideas within the context of the social, human, intellectual, and physical worlds of which they are part, as well as identify relationships between and among competing perspectives about these ideas and ultimately to integrate aspects of these ideas and perspectives into their own worldviews. Click here to continue reading.
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James Baldwin: Nonfiction of a Native Son
Sonya Huber
3.1
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Part of the challenge in teaching Baldwin's nonfiction is that he didn’t write to be cherry-picked or to be recorded in nonfiction for posterity. He wrote for commercial outlets from Playboy to The Nation, often on current events of the day. He writes in bouncy, free-ranging, ebullient, conversational juggling of current events, often including asides about topical conflicts that require footnotes in retrospect. Baldwin brings up messy stuff that anthology editors might shy away from in almost every essay—and not just political topics such as race relations during the Civil Rights Movement. He admits he was in socialist groups but grew disenchanted. He writes in later years about queerness. He writes about sex, love, and literature in a rapid-fire tornado of language. Click here to continue reading.
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Using CNF to Teach the Realities of
Intimate Partner Violence to Advocates: An Annotated Bibliography
Christian Exoo
3.1
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Because creative nonfiction allows survivors to speak in their own words, the genre gives us the opportunity to train advocates in aspects of IPV that remain unexamined in popular media. Because depictions of IPV in popular media typically end with the dissolution of the relationship, survivors often have trouble connecting the aftereffects of trauma to issues they may be experiencing. Providing survivors with creative nonfiction by writers who have shared their experiences, and can articulate phenomena that may elude a particular survivor, helps to explain what they may be feeling. In particular, I used the following essays to demonstrate the relationship between IPV and chronic illness, the neurobiology of IPV-related trauma, traumatic brain injury, and the unique challenges faced by LGBTQ survivors of IPV. Click here to continue reading.
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Teachin' BAE: A Reclamation of Research and Critical Thought
John Proctor
3.1
celebrating 30 years of BAE |
Like many of the denuded souls who willingly and knowingly call themselves essayists, I’ve intuited what an essay is (in the non-standardized, anti-five-paragraph sense) by ingesting as much as I could of any things that were called essays. This included many volumes of The Best American Essays. I’ve thought and written some on this relationship I’ve had with the series as a writer, but I’d love to spend some time thinking about how I’ve begun, over the past three years, to integrate it into my practice as a teacher of writing, especially with freshmen, many of whom are ripe for deprogramming from five-paragraph essay format. Click here to continue reading.
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Classics Lite: On Teaching the Shorter, Magazine Versions of
James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," Jonathan Lethem's "The Beards"
Richard Stuart Gilbert
3.1
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A writer whose aesthetic seriousness I respect, however, had given me grief, a few years before, when I first pondered teaching the Harper’s version. Granted, “Notes of a Native Son” is a classic. I call it America’s greatest essay because it’s about America’s great topic, race, and because of its memoiristic and structural brilliance. Balanced perfectly between the memoir that pivots on the self and the personal essay that uses the self to inquire into a larger subject, it rebukes those of us who reflexively categorize nonfiction. But most people, like my writer friend, aren’t aware that “Notes of a Native Son” initially appeared in the slightly more slender form. Maybe “Me and My House” is stronger or weaker than the canonical version depending on its audience. I’d rather have certain students be more likely to read it than zone out, or not be exposed at all, to Baldwin’s ideas, artistry, and experiences. Click here to continue reading.
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The Power of Words to Build Bridges of Empathy
Dawn Duncan & Micaela Gerhardt
3.1
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At a table in Belfast, Ireland, a slightly built 16-year-old boy with ebony skin sits silently beside a chubby 60-year-old woman with skin the color of light sand. What can these two strangers have to say to one another? How can they understand anything about the other’s life in the townships of South Africa or on the northern plains of Minnesota? If each could pick up a book and read a story that encapsulates the other’s life, each might gain entry to the other’s heart, but most of us will never be a character in a book; we are, merely and completely, the central character in our own life story. Narrative 4, a global organization committed to fostering radical empathy across this tension-fraught world by using a non-fiction, lived and shared story-telling process, provides a way that these two strangers can walk across a bridge of words and enter one another’s story, even learn to tell the other’s story as if it were their own. Click here to continue reading.
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