Author: Joe Riccio

by Isabel Ortiz

As a teacher of ENG 2100 and 2150 for the last three semesters, I have often wondered if I am enacting what bell hooks calls “education as the practice of freedom.” What does the practice of freedom look like? I’ve asked myself. What does it feel like? What does it sound like? How will I know that it’s taking place in my class? Though to a certain degree unanswerable, these questions acquired a particular urgency last semester as, at some of the worst moments of the ongoing U.S.-sponsored genocide of Palestinians, the brutalization of protesting students and faculty, as well as the firing of faculty who spoke out about Palestine threatened to quiet this type of work in the classroom.

Continue reading ““I Destroyed White Baby Dolls”: The Bluest Eye and The Practice of Freedom “ →

by Eugene Marlow, MBA, Ph.D.

Hands-On

There was a sign on the back of my high school science room door which read (and I paraphrase): “What I hear, I may forget; what I read, I may learn; but what I do, I will know forever.” In my Freshman English First Year Writing classes, I therefore put an emphasis on “visceral” activity (translate this into a high level of student participation) as opposed to passive listening to a lecture. I find as many ways as possible for students to interact with me in the classroom and to interact with each other in the process of learning how to copy edit their non-fiction draft essays.

Continue reading ““On Teaching Non-Fiction Writing”” →

by Iuri Moscardi

Note: This is an abridged translation of an article that was originally published in Italian on América Crítica, 4 (2), 2020 titled “Betwyll: A Digital Social Reading tool for teaching Italian in North America”. I have extended its flexibility with any reading and writing classes.

In recent years, mobile devices with access to the Internet have reached all age groups, especially young people. For this reason, educators in North America (like Ryan Becker and Penny Bishop, Victoria Rideout, Lara Lomicka and Gillian Lord) have theorized the use of social networks for educational purposes. In this article, I analyze the results of educational projects carried out at North American universities with non-native Italian students, which used Twitter dynamics applied to the app Betwyll to read and comment on texts in Italian. These projects realized “Twitterary micronarrative”, i.e., “the possibility […] of producing short texts, even as a reformulation of other texts” (Nobili 2016, 141).

Continue reading “Betwyll: A Digital Social Reading Tool” →