"I decided to go into academia at a panel about Scandal. It was 2015 and I was a college senior."

Students will employ their sociological imaginations, which connects individual lived experiences to larger societal forces, to think about how all objects (and people) are entangled in a historical, cultural, and social context with a specific focus on gender. This activity will “make the familiar strange” for students, whereby they will start to think about the importance of interactional and structural forces influence our daily lives. 

In this audio recording, graduate student Jingyi Li describes how a late twentieth-century academic study of the book in Japan upended her expectations by rejecting the Eurocentric and Orientalist bias of many comparable scholarly works. Her experience with this text inspired her to move beyond her own linguistic insecurities and to continue with her research on premodern Japan.

This activity is part of a course on Black Feminist and Womanist Theology and Theory. The current activity is intended for the second class lecture, which introduces learners to the so-called first wave of black feminism. One primary underlying tenet is that the “first wave” did not usually (if ever) refer to themselves as black feminists, or feminists at all.  Their writings, speeches and activism qualify as black feminist work based on our contemporary understandings of such.  

This lesson is meant for a health humanities course, where students from pre-professional health disciplines engage with a variety of genres to better understand the experience of illness. This activity prompts students to engage in the practice of “close looking.”

This lesson will explore how the Bonus Army is represented in various media sources.  Students will compare these representations of how official entities---like the federal government---responded to public concerns during the early years of the Great Depression.

Through this lesson, students will understand how real spaces can inform imagined ones, but also how writers transform those spaces into new ones that reflect their own experiences, symbolism, different perspectives, memory of real spaces, etc. Thus, though a space in a text might be “real” in that it reflects a real space, we can read it as a new, separate space, interpreted by both the author and by us, as readers.  The lesson will also allow students to compare two different settings to see how the difference in descriptions helps us understand what is happening in the novel, the feelings of the characters, and how these spaces may represent different themes or ideas in the text.  

Through this lesson, students will be able to identify how the formal elements of various documents produce representations of the Caribbean as a complex and layered space impacted by slavery, industry, agriculture, and colonial and touristic desire. They will be able to describe the differences between textual and visual representations of landscape and articulate how form impacts content. Building on an understanding of the multiplicity of ways the same space can be represented, they will also be able to critically interrogate the rhetoric of representative media.

While this assignment allows students to analyze a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s creative work, it also reflects the very challenging lived experiences and concerns of various people across the country and around the world, both historically and possibly currently.

This activity is intended to lead to a conversation about the evolution of contraceptive devices, how concepts of gender impacted the development of these technologies, and the ways in which provider control contraceptive can and have been used to forcibly sterilize poor and minority women.

Written and published in 1988, this article summarizes the Structured Academic Controversy model for student inquiry.  Through controlled argumentation, students can broaden their perspectives, learn material more thoroughly, and make better decisions.

Institutions that host exhibitions often produce ephemeral materials for marketing, publicity, informational, social, and record-keeping purposes. We can understand much about exhibitions and their function through these official, public documents that are produced for audiences/visitors to the exhibition. This lesson does not require extensive knowledge of exhibitions or their history, simply a broad understanding of exhibitions and how they work so that students can think critically about the kinds of information organizers produce and what that can tell us about the event itself. 

"My humanities moment connects to a book, titled Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases written by Adina Nack, a sociologist and women’s and gender studies (WGS) scholar writing about health, sexuality, and society. This book is about women’s experiences living with HPV. I read this book in my undergrad in a WGS course about medicine, right around the time I was starting to learn more about WGS and before I decided to double major in this discipline. In particular, one of the book’s themes focuses on provider-patient interactions and the misinformation that spreads surrounding women’s sexuality and who can be affected by HPV, which really stood out to me at the time. Women reported being told inaccurate information about their risk of contracting the disease based on their sexuality."

Graduate student Justina Licata explains how a junior high school teacher's passion and influence led her to embrace the study of history as a lifelong vocation.

In this exercise, students will decode queer messages in a popular film featuring lesbians in the U.S. South. As a result of the lesson, students will understand applications of “hidden transcripts” as ways for marginalized people to make their presence known to other members of their community. 

In this workshop, we will explore how to design for and facilitate significant learning experiences both in and out of the classroom. As we learn more about the effectiveness of high impact practices such as active learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning, new models and methods of instruction are required to help facilitate learning. How do we design for these new learning contexts? What innovative models and examples can we learn from? What specific strategies and tools are most effective? As we explore this new terrain, we will attempt to practice what we preach by working collaboratively in teams and drawing from our collective knowledge and experience.

Students will engage with the specific impacts of climate change and be able to discern how data and storytelling can combine with maps and other multimedia tools in an ArcGIS Story Map. They will be able to identify why maps and geographic information systems are “the primary tools by which scientists, policymakers, planners, and activists visualize and understand our rapidly changing world.”

This series of activities explores Ramón de Valle-Inclán’s genre – elesperpento – and his un-representable play, Luces de bohemia. Through a comparison with El sí de las niñas (one of the quintessential well-made plays), students will form conclusions about how Luces deviates from the traditional well-made play both in terms of structure and content. Students are asked to focus on the un-representability of the play as well as the elements of esperpento. 

Both spatial and visual rhetorics attend to issues of boundaries. From the structure of our classroom spaces to the margins of the page, rhetoricians and compositionist are investigating the ways spatial and visual experiences are impacting our work as scholars and teachers.This syllabus was designed by Amy Kimme Hea for English 696e at University of Arizona.

Equity-minded instruction developed from current research on teaching and learning helps to improve student retention, persistence, academic achievement, and sense of belonging. As educators, we hope to contribute to an inclusive campus climate where every student can thrive, including first-generation college students, multilingual students, and students historically and currently underrepresented on campus. This work can happen at the level of our teaching practices, and a commitment to equity can be infused in all aspects of classroom climate and culture as well as curriculum.