September 2010

Teaching Collaboration around Romantic Individualism

Submitted by Roger Whitson on

As a scholar and a teacher, I enjoy experimenting with both individual and collaborative projects. I tend to feel that the humanities are unique in their ambivalence about collaboration. On the one hand, the web is offering humanities scholars many opportunities for collaboration; on the other hand, I always find myself wondering how much a collaborative article, project, or book will "count" when it comes to hiring or tenure.

The topic is especially interesting for someone who teaches the Romantic period, since Romanticism is often associated with individualism. And yet, Romantic authors also expressed collectivist sentiments. As Beth Lau points out, even famously individualistic male Romantic writers struggled with individualism:

Pedagogies Blog Categories: 

Starting the semester and naming names

Submitted by Deidre Lynch on

How to begin?  According to scary statistics that are always quoted by my university’s Centre for Teaching, students are frighteningly quick to make up their minds about a course --and make their first impressions of the first quarter-hour of the first class bear heavy evidentiary weight.  That is not the only reason to steer clear of the defeatism that Arthur Lovejoy models in one passage in his "The Discriminations of Romanticism" essay (1924): "When a man [sic!] is asked, as I have had the honor of

Pedagogies Blog Categories: 

Welcome to TR at RC

Submitted by Kate Singer on

At Romantic Circles, we've spent the past year thinking about how we might rework the Pedagogies site into something that is really dynamic and usable.  Phrases like "Web 2.0" "interactive classroom" or "digital literacy" get tossed around almost too frequently these days, but when discussing how best to reenvision Pedagogies, we found ourselves returning to the idea of the digital, interactive "Commons." As some of you might know, this is the name of the e-journal portion of the Pedagogies site, and we do have some great volumes of essays on specific pedagogical issues in the works.  But what about an online common: people moseying through with (virtual) book-filled satchels, their minds meandering between research ideas and recent class discussions, briefly stopping to talk shop about a particular author, topic, or situation, feeling connected and maybe re-energized to return to all the work tasks a week encompasses.