WITL #3: Paper Balls & Digital Literary Excavation

Welcome to Week 3 in the Life of Teaching Faculty, a blog series documenting the hidden labor of teaching faculty, celebrating milestones inside and outside of the classroom, and sharing new pedagogy resources.

This week, I’m sharing the active learning strategy I use to improve students’ ability to write thoughtful discussion questions, as well as a look into excavating “The Nineveh Bull” in my intro to fiction course using the social annotation tool Hypothesis.

The Art of Asking Questions: The Reverse Entropy Exercise

Back in August before the semester started, I was invited back to present at IUB’s New Faculty Orientation on active learning. During these sessions, I shared my spin on my favorite classroom activity: Crowd-Crumple or Reverse Entropy. This is an activity I have adapted over the last five or so years across my literature and honors courses, ever since I initially learned of the concept from Benjamin Widiss in the fantastic resource The Literature Pocket Instructor: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom (Princeton UP, 2016). To learn more about how I use this activity in the classroom and collect evidence of learning for my dossier, click here to read consultant Leslie Drane’s write-up on this activity for the IU Center for Innovative Teaching & Learning Blog.

On Teaching an Obscure Victorian Short Story

Hypothesis, a digital tool for facilitating social annotation, is a staple in my intensive writing curriculum. Last year, I published this open educational resource on how I use social annotation to teach close reading. Instead of using the 3-2-1 annotation format described in the OER to introduce my intro to fiction students to the tool this semester, I used a different approach.

A few years ago, when I was in the throes of dissertation writing, I stumbled upon a rather obscure short story by W.H. Stone titled “The Nineveh Bull,” published in 1851 in Household Words. This story, in which an Assyrian lamassu (a hybrid creature and protective deity sculpted in gypsum) narrates its observations from its creation to its excavation and removal from the Near East to the British Museum, became a major feature of my study of British reception of Ancient Assyrian art and archaeology in the nineteenth century. At the time, I never anticipated bringing this text into the classroom.

This semester, however, I was looking for a fictional text that could push students to think about the art of annotating, or how annotations can fuse together observations about literary form and content with multimodal, contextual research. Additionally, I was looking for a text that would well-suit our recent studies of narration and narrative structure.

Enter, then, “The Nineveh Bull,” which you can read here.

Students’ initial preview of the text for homework invited more questions than answers (“Who is Cyaxares?” for example, or “Where in the world is Ashur?”). Their collaborative annotations, then, allowed them to flesh out the ancient and imperial contexts required to fully comprehend the narrative, on top of paraphrasing sections and making literary observations about narrative structure, voice, setting, themes, imagery, & symbolism.

Essentially, Hypothesis empowered small groups to carefully craft annotated editions of the story, and they later synthesized their annotations into an introduction to the text, a mini-essay not unlike the kinds of introductions students are used to seeing in their beloved Nortion or Broadview critical editions. Along the way, students were able to think critically about what this text says about the fate of empires and how antiquity speaks to modernity, a big topic for a course that also brings various ancient myth retellings into the mix.

Preview of Coming Attractions

Next week, I’ll share how I brought corpus analysis into my honors courses as a way to further their study of Frederick Douglass’s “Blessings on Liberty & Education.”

As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.