Last week saw the final of our pedagogy posts uploaded on to JVC Online and I would like to thank everyone who participated. As I start my own PGCert at Liverpool John Moores University it was great to be involved in this showcase and to reflect more broadly on the innovative ways in which we are teaching nineteenth century studies. Judging from Facebook comments/likes and the Twitter response, it has also been popular with you, our readers! Just in case
Read moreTag: Pedagogy Showcase
Punking the Victorians, Punking Pedagogy: Steampunk and Creative Assignments in the Composition Classroom
Dr. Kathryn Crowther (Georgia Perimeter College) As a Victorianist teaching primarily first-year English, I have to look for creative ways to bring my 19th-century interests into the classroom. A few semesters ago I was teaching freshman composition at Georgia Tech, and I began brainstorming for a way to design a course that combined Victorian texts with a focus on technology. I thought that 19th-century literature would be a hard sell in a class of engineers and programmers until conversations with
Read morePutting Undergraduates on Trial: Using the Old Bailey Online as a teaching tool
Walking the Corridors of the Past: A tour of Singleton Abbey
Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) In a recent blog for History Workshop Online, Toby Butler suggests that field trips should become ‘an essential part of the…university curriculum’, noting that ‘[s]urely no history degree taught in a city could not find a place for a visit to a museum or a historic site, and perhaps a talk from a curator?’ I agree with Toby. As university teachers, I believe we should be thinking of imaginative ways to teach our modules
Read moreEncountering the Fin-de-Siècle: Utilising Archives for Undergraduate Teaching
Dr Sarah Parker (University of Birmingham) Never judge a book by its cover. Clearly the late-Victorians didn’t hold much by this adage, or we would not have inherited so many stunning examples of book design from the fin-de-siècle period. As critics such as Nicholas Frankel and Joseph Bristow have emphasised, one of the central goals of the aesthetic and decadent movements was to produce the ‘beautiful book’ as an objet d’art in its own right. John Gray’s Silverpoints (1893), for
Read moreTeaching the Victorian City
by Matthew McCormack, University of Northampton matthew.mccormack@northampton.ac.uk How do you teach urban history? Moreover, how do you inject life into the midterm slump of a 25-week, second-year survey module? These were questions that I sought to address three years ago as I prepared to teach HIS2006 ‘Victorian Britain’ at Northampton University. I had taught the module since 2004 and – as every ‘action researcher’ should – had altered it slightly every year in the light of my experience of teaching
Read moreTeaching with Blogs: “The English 19th century Novel”
Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) Context The English Nineteenth-Century Novel is an honours-level undergraduate module in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, on which I teach 3 classes of 15 students in weekly 1.5 hour lecture-seminars. I set up a teaching blog for this module at the start of the 2011-12 academic year, having previously experimented with using a teaching blog for a first-year literary theory module. There are many ways in
Read moreBlogging about Hacking the Book
Jim Mussell (University of Birmingham) Hacking the Book’ is a third-year undergraduate module run in the English Department at the University of Birmingham. The module came about after a discussion on Twitter between myself and a colleague, Oliver Mason in the summer of 2010. I was at a conference in Edinburgh and had just tweeted that I thought lecturers needed to ‘integrate digital humanities research and teaching in undergrad classes.’ Oliver’s response was to suggest that we put on a
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