Sample Lesson Plans
In this lesson, students engage in close readings with Milton's Paradise Lost and Cavendish's Blazing World. Students perform a free-writing activity, work collaboratively, and engage in group discussion to build and enhance their understanding of these two texts.
An important element of this lesson is that students also understand and demonstrate the ways in which shifting attitudes towards science, philosophy, history, and statecraft are reflected in the content and structure of Milton and Cavendish's works.
In this lesson, students become familiar with different critical concepts of ethics, including deontology, virtue ethics, and teleology. Using an example from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, students analyze the behaviors of a character through the lenses of ethical schema.
In this lesson, students apply theoretical concepts from literary critical theory to a work of speculative fiction. An important element of this lesson is bridging the gap between philosophy and the "real" world.
In this lesson, students become familiar with different critical concepts of ethics, including deontology, virtue ethics, and teleology. Using an example from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, students analyze the behaviors of a character through the lenses of ethical schema.
In this lesson, students
In this lesson, students apply their understanding of audience, rhetorical appeals, and rhetorical situation to create a research proposal for a competitive research funding opportunity.
A key element of this lesson is its insistence that students inhabit non-institutional roles. Students compose research proposals that mimic real-world situations in order to see the multiple applications of the genre.
In this experimental lesson, designed for a graduate seminar in writing and rhetorical studies, students explore the implications and applications of spatial thought to their own interest areas and methodologies. Using a "speed dating" format to explore mapping methods, students actively construct and expand their understanding of foundational spatial theory, working to apply it in political, pedagogical, and critical contexts. Attentive to the localness and materiality of spatial dynamics in active learning environments, this lesson plan seeks to explore the seminar's larger conversations with mapping tools, while also interrogating the elisions and affordances that spatial representations make possible.
Pictured above:
A medieval floating compass