Carrie Sickmann, School of Liberal Arts
Principal Investigator: Carrie Sickmann, assistant professor, Department of English, School of Liberal Arts
Project Title: Virtual Education and the Liberal Arts: Enhancing Engagement and Inclusion in Literature Survey Courses
DEI Focus
Funding Level: $5,000
Abstract: Literature survey courses traditionally employ a coverage model that resists the implementation of engaged and student-centered learning. These courses are usually structured around major anthologies that are prohibitively expensive, fail to employ new pedagogical technologies, and reinforce racist ideologies. I plan to redesign the English Literature Survey II course using COVE (the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education)—an inexpensive, open [1] sourced, scholar-driven platform—to develop new theories and strategies for creating engaging, inclusive, and student-centered survey courses. For a fee of $10, COVE supplies students with access to COVE Studio—a customizable and interactive anthology—and COVE Editions—a set of tools for creating multimodal timelines, maps, and galleries using vetted, peer-reviewed content. Using COVE, I will re-conceptualize the survey course in a way that empowers students to pursue and disseminate research on a topic of their choosing, to explore culturally diverse texts and topics often omitted from the canon, and to investigate how literature of the past informs our present. Though redesigning the English Literature Survey II will be the focus of this project, the implementation of COVE and the pedagogical theories I develop throughout the year will be applicable to anyone teaching a literature or history survey course or teaching related material in their classes. Since the focus of this course redesign is on enhancing student engagement, I also hope to attract non-majors to the course and establish the liberal arts as a culturally relevant and dynamic field.
