Category Archives: Pedagogy

Wingate’s ESU Shakespeare Competition: March 4, 2015

Posted on February 23, 2015 by allisonkellar

“I would be loath to cast away my speech: for besides that it is excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it” (1.5.167-69). –Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night One of my favorite scenes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is … Continue reading →

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Twitter’s biggest challenge post-IPO: Optimising for advertising is a double-edged sword

Posted on October 5, 2013 by allisonkellar

Originally posted on Gigaom:
As Twitter tries to get its financial house in order prior to going public at a multibillion-dollar valuation, one of the aspects of its business that will be under an intense spotlight — as it was…

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Invoking Grammar Girl

Posted on August 9, 2013 by allisonkellar

Even though I am an Assistant Professor of English, I have never thought of myself as a stickler for grammar rules. My twenty-first century composition pedagogy classes encouraged me to focus on an essay’s content over the mechanics, and I … Continue reading →

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Death and Satan in Paradise Lost

Posted on April 10, 2013 by allisonkellar

After I attended a session on emblems and literature at the Renaissance Society of America conference, I was inspired to show more images of the scene between Satan, Sin, and Death for my class’s discussion of Paradise Lost, Book II. … Continue reading →

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Personal Narratives

Posted on January 27, 2013 by allisonkellar

I always enjoy reading the first essay drafts of each semester because I find out so much about my first-year writing students. Before a semester begins, amidst the syllabus planning, I sometimes debate whether I should start with the personal … Continue reading →

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Shoes and Teaching

Posted on January 14, 2013 by allisonkellar

When I took acting classes and performed, teachers and directors always emphasized how important it was to pick the kind of shoes a character would wear and begin wearing those shoes immediately in rehearsal to get used to walking that … Continue reading →

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Decisions, decisions . . .

Posted on January 8, 2013 by allisonkellar

As I begin a new semester, teaching a new class (Desktop Publishing), I am hyper-focused on the amount of projects I *could* have my students work on and the amount of materials we *could* read. I literally have been collecting … Continue reading →

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On good ideas . . . and mistaken hypotheses

Posted on January 31, 2012 by allisonkellar

In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steve Johnson observes that the “history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. And not just wrong, but messy” … Continue reading →

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Beginning the new semester . . .

Posted on January 19, 2012 by allisonkellar

I love the first quiet days of the semester when I have time to reflect on last semester’s accomplishments and what goals I have for teaching this semester’s classes. In starting off the new semester, I am arming myself with … Continue reading →

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