By Professor Ann McClellan

Let’s face it: not all English majors aspire to a career in academia, so how do we help our students understand the role their English education plays in professional environments? How can they take the skills they learn—close reading, attention to language and its subtleties, creativity, collaboration, research, and analysis—and translate them into twenty-first-century careers?

These questions have been driving recent changes some of my English department colleagues and I have made in our teaching.

Thanks to the Academic Technology Institute, a University System of New Hampshire workshop I attended in 2011, I’m working on ways to include digital technology in my classes—both in how I teach and in how I ask my students to show what they’ve learned. I use open educational resources (texts available free on the internet) to address rising textbook costs. In addition, my students are building skills in digital technology, from blogging to creating videos—skills that will enhance their competitiveness when they enter the job market.

Two years ago, I piloted a new upper-level English course called Digitalit: Storytelling in the Digital Age, in which students learned about electronic literature, hypertext literature, interactive books, fan fiction, and transmedia storytelling. For their assessments, they used the same digital technologies that they were analyzing. For example, students created an interactive, non-linear hypertext (text that contains hyperlinks to other texts that readers can immediately access, like this one by Addie Weller ’15) for their analysis of a published hypertext they read for class. When studying the phenomenon of fan studies and participatory culture, they wrote a fan fiction about a book, TV show, or movie they were passionate about and published it on the Internet. For transmedia storytelling, they created a transmedia project that used at least three different kinds of media (e.g., video, newspaper, blog, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, website, game) that analyzed a popular transmedia franchise like The Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and more. Alexa Moore ’14 used Instagram and YouTube to create transmedia on the popular AMC horror series The Walking Dead.

I’ve also included digital projects in the core courses of the English major, such as Currents in British Literature II. We may be discussing 400-year-old literature, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do cool, modern projects analyzing these texts. The important thing is that we keep the course goals at the forefront of our learning.

One of the wonderful benefits of teaching at a university like Plymouth State is the small class sizes. English literature courses are generally capped at 25 students, which gives everyone the chance to participate in class discussion. However, discussions are ephemeral things, and even the best note takers can’t always capture what happened in the classroom once we leave. So one project I had students do was to tweet class discussions. For each literary period we studied, five students were designated to highlight the main points of the class discussion on Twitter, after which they used a free Internet platform called Storify to create a digital study guide for the unit for the entire class. The Storifys for the Romantic and Victorian periods came out particularly well!

For “Two-Minute Histories,” students research and create videos about important literary, cultural, and/or historical elements that relate to the course readings. Not only do students have to learn and employ research skills that are integral to a university education in English, but there’s a “hidden curriculum” in these kinds of assignments as well: They need to research and teach themselves the best video software for their project. Such initiative and resilience are great assets in any career they choose. One of my favorite Two-Minute Histories is a piece on the 2011 London riots.

Another particularly successful assignment for the Currents in British Literature II course asks students to design and pitch a mobile phone app that teaches a particular literary text or movement. Students must consider the audience, the purpose of the app, and what it might look like. They also have to propose at least five different functions for the application and create a PowerPoint or Prezi that pitches the concept to a mobile app developer. As you can see from this “Wordsworth in your Pocket” project, the students had a great time with this. The assignment itself was a wonderful culminating project for the course because it encouraged students to build on and use all of the technologies and approaches they’d been learning in the course, including Twitter, Storify, podcasting, and creating videos.

This past fall, I piloted another exciting digital project in Currents in Global Literature, a required course for all English majors. The course doubles for a general education requirement in global awareness, so it seemed particularly important to highlight the actual geographic locations of each literary text, as well as its key historical and cultural elements. Students worked in groups and mapped the actions of two characters from Salman Rushdie’s historical novel, Midnight’s Children. Using Google Earth, students mapped the physical locations where key events occur in the novel, connected them to a specific passage from the book, and illustrated each geographic point with images, video, and/or hyperlinks.

Do all of these digital projects mean that English majors no longer write in-depth analyses of great texts from literary history? No. But I believe we need to change the way we think about writing across the curriculum. We no longer experience print text in isolation, solely as the printed word on a paper page. Rather, most of us experience text like this article: digitally, with interactive hyperlinks, embedded images, and video. Our students need to learn how to communicate three-dimensionally in what I like to call 360-degree writing (also called “multi-modal writing”). 360-degree writing includes all of the elements above: text, images, video, sound, and interactive hyperlinks. Knowledge and information are intertextual; they depend upon other sources, context, and audiences, so our students need to learn how to communicate across all of these disciplines.

What do our students think about these changes? I must admit, at first some are resistant and uncomfortable. After all, they’ve been taught to write about literature and to be creative writers, not video producers. They experience anxiety and spend hours on projects and technologies they’ve never used before, all of which are grade-bearing and can affect their success in college and beyond. We provide as much support as possible and give them the time and space they need to learn these new methodologies. As I tell my students, I don’t expect production-ready videos; what’s most important is how well they’ve met the learning outcomes for the assignment and the course. Once they’ve successfully completed the assignments, students immediately see the impact and advantage they give them in the job market. In fact, over the past few years, we’ve had an increasing number of English majors earning internship credits in diverse, technologically advanced fields ranging from social media marketing, blogging, event planning, sports journalism, public radio, and television.

Here in PSU’s English department, we’re thinking beyond the book—and our students are the better for it.

Ann McClellan is a professor of twentieth-century British literature and chair of the Department of English.

Tags:  Academic Technology Institute Ann McClellan British literature Currents in British Literature Department of English Digitalit English department literature