Public-Facing Humanities, Literary Adaptations, and K-16 Connections
Sunday, 12 January 2020, 8:30 AM-9:45 AM
Session Description: Through interlinked, interactive presentations, the three panelists will show how adaptation studies provides a productive way to bridge college curriculum, scholarly research, and teacher education programs. The three participants (from two institutions) collaborate with each other on research, teaching, and public-facing projects that combine adaptation studies, arts integration, literature, history, and media studies. In June 2018,
Szwydky and Connors co-directed “Remaking Monsters and Heroines: Adapting Classic Literature for Contemporary Audiences,” an NEH Summer Institute for K-12 educators at the
University of Arkansas, with Jellenik serving as guest faculty for the Institute. Jellenik regularly teaches “Film and Literature,” a course required for Education majors at the University of Central
Arkansas. Szwydky and Jellenik are Romanticists who also work in adaptations studies, and Connors is an English Education professor with specialization in YA literature, graphic novels, and
multimodal literacies. Together, their experience offers a multipart case study demonstrating that—through collaboration on an interdisciplinary topic like adaptation—faculty members can
transform their teaching and research into public-facing humanities projects that have a broader reach and higher impact.
In “Adaptation, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration, and Professional Development” Lissette Lopez Szwydky highlights the ways that developing and running a professional development Institute for school teachers has both transformed and invigorated teaching and research among the group. Using adaptation studies and her training as a literary and cultural historian, Szwydky’s
pedagogical goals focus on helping students build bridges among subjects as a form of critical literacy that extends well beyond the classroom. By working on a summer institute for K-12 educators, Szwydky has been able to develop new interactive, multimodal assignments for the college courses she teaches that helps students make clearer connections between their liberal arts training, public engagement, and professional possibilities. From its early conceptual stage, to execution, to ongoing programming, these collaborations have impacted the
courses that Szwydky teaches, while also feeding directly into research expected at an R1 institution through presentations at conferences, to co-authored book chapters, and three co-written or co-edited books in progress. The goal of this presentation is to provide a framework for thinking about how interdisciplinary, collaborative projects can help faculty at different stages of their career rethink and reinvigorate their research and publications as well as update their teaching methods by adapting their work to public-facing projects.
Sean Connors will focus on the value of “Incorporating Digital Composing Projects in K-16 English Classes.” The proliferation of digital technologies in the twenty-first century has made it
easier than ever before for the average person to produce multimodal texts—texts which integrate two or more modes—in the service of making meaning. The ramifications of this shift are profound for English educators at all levels: today, supporting students’ development as critical producers and critical consumers of texts necessitates teachers’ creating opportunities
for them to experiment with the diverse array of mediums available to them. Adaptation provides a way to extend these opportunities beyond Language Arts classrooms and offers a bridge to art, music, theater, computer, and media classes through interdisciplinary and integrated approaches to the study of language and storytelling. Grounding his presentation in research on multimodality and multiliteracies, Connors will offer a rationale for incorporating digital composing assignments in college and K-16 English classes. Drawing on his experiences collaborating with Szwydky to facilitate an NEH Summer Institute for Teachers, he will discuss the benefits of college faculty building collaborative partnerships with school teachers. He will share a series of projects that he has undertaken with teachers and students at both the college and secondary level, all of which have involved their adapting literary texts in the service of creating digital films, podcasts, comics, and stop-animation videos. To conclude, Connors will offer practical suggestions for college educators interested in partnering with K-12 educators and including multimodal, digital composing projects in the curriculum.
In “Adaptation: Storytelling, Technology, and What It Means to Be Human,” Glenn Jellenik will discuss the ins and outs of adapting research and teaching to provide quality professional
development to college students preparing to be teachers as well as in-service teachers. Jellenik’s teaching focuses on developing a vocabulary to critically engage the intersections of
literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. The ethos of his “Film and Literature” course begins with two Salman Rushdie codas: “Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was,” and “In the end, storytelling is storytelling. Every time you tell a story, you have to struggle with form and the question of how to tell it.” The class functions as a hybrid film/literary studies course on narrative, paying particular attention to introducing the specific vocabulary and stocking the critical toolbox of film studies. Further, the class is heavily invested in critically unwinding unproductive clichés about adaptation (specifically, the cry of “the book was better!” that dominates many academic conversations). These conversations can provide productive models not only in college courses focused on literature and film, but especially in K-12 education where students need to develop engaged models of critically assessing and engaging with storytelling in narrative across forms and media. Just as we ask our students to find connections through
storytelling across forms and media, we should also find ways to work collaboratively to engage in continuous professional development, becoming better teachers, researchers, and humans along the way. As a whole, the panelists will discuss essential questions for humanities and education in the 21st century such as: How do the skills students learn in our classrooms extend across other disciplines and beyond the university and into their professional lives? And how does the cultural literacy developed in adaptation studies allow students to better understand themselves and their world? The projects discussed by the three participants bring together research, teaching, and service, and they provide an opportunity to explore ways that faculty can create more cohesion between these three areas of scholarly work through collaboration while
also cultivating productive, interdisciplinary pipelines among humanities disciplines, education departments, and broader communities outside of the University.
Presentation ID# 11329: “Adaptation, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration, and Professional Development” Lissette Lopez Szwydky (lissette@uark.edu), U of Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas where she teaches and publishes in the areas of nineteenthcentury
literature and culture, gender studies, adaptation and media studies, and professional development for liberal arts majors. She collaborates with the other panelists on adaptation-focused research, teaching, and public-facing projects. She has published on the early adaptation histories of nineteenth-century texts, and specializes in Frankenstein’s 200-year multimedia cultural history. Her most recent essays appear in Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Live in Popular Culture (2018), The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018), and she has forthcoming essays in the following: A Cultural History of Tragedy (2019), Teaching
Girls on Fire (2019), and others. Szwydky’s book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century is forthcoming in 2020.
Presentation ID# 11331: "Incorporating Digital Composing Projects in K-16 English Classes"
Sean Connors (sconnors@uark.edu), University of Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Sean P. Connors is an associate professor of English education at the University of Arkansas, where he teaches courses on new literacies, digital composing, and young adult literature. His scholarship and teaching focuses on the application of diverse critical
perspectives to young adult literature. He is the editor of The Politics of Panem: Challenging Genres, a collection of critical essays about the Hunger Games series, and the host of The
Storyteller’s Thread, a monthly podcast devoted to children’s and young adult literature.
Presentation ID# 11330: “Adaptation: Storytelling, Technology, and What It Means to Be Human”
Glenn Jellenik (gjellenik@uca.edu), U of Central Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Glenn Jellenik is an assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas, where he teaches courses on British literature and adaptation studies. He serves on the Board of Advisers for the Palgrave series: Adaptation and Visual Culture, and is the area chair and coordinator for the Cultural Adaptation section of the Popular Culture Association national conference. His most recent essays appear in The Oxford Companion for Adaptation Studies (2018) Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture (2018), and The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018).
Sunday, 12 January 2020, 8:30 AM-9:45 AM
Session Description: Through interlinked, interactive presentations, the three panelists will show how adaptation studies provides a productive way to bridge college curriculum, scholarly research, and teacher education programs. The three participants (from two institutions) collaborate with each other on research, teaching, and public-facing projects that combine adaptation studies, arts integration, literature, history, and media studies. In June 2018,
Szwydky and Connors co-directed “Remaking Monsters and Heroines: Adapting Classic Literature for Contemporary Audiences,” an NEH Summer Institute for K-12 educators at the
University of Arkansas, with Jellenik serving as guest faculty for the Institute. Jellenik regularly teaches “Film and Literature,” a course required for Education majors at the University of Central
Arkansas. Szwydky and Jellenik are Romanticists who also work in adaptations studies, and Connors is an English Education professor with specialization in YA literature, graphic novels, and
multimodal literacies. Together, their experience offers a multipart case study demonstrating that—through collaboration on an interdisciplinary topic like adaptation—faculty members can
transform their teaching and research into public-facing humanities projects that have a broader reach and higher impact.
In “Adaptation, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration, and Professional Development” Lissette Lopez Szwydky highlights the ways that developing and running a professional development Institute for school teachers has both transformed and invigorated teaching and research among the group. Using adaptation studies and her training as a literary and cultural historian, Szwydky’s
pedagogical goals focus on helping students build bridges among subjects as a form of critical literacy that extends well beyond the classroom. By working on a summer institute for K-12 educators, Szwydky has been able to develop new interactive, multimodal assignments for the college courses she teaches that helps students make clearer connections between their liberal arts training, public engagement, and professional possibilities. From its early conceptual stage, to execution, to ongoing programming, these collaborations have impacted the
courses that Szwydky teaches, while also feeding directly into research expected at an R1 institution through presentations at conferences, to co-authored book chapters, and three co-written or co-edited books in progress. The goal of this presentation is to provide a framework for thinking about how interdisciplinary, collaborative projects can help faculty at different stages of their career rethink and reinvigorate their research and publications as well as update their teaching methods by adapting their work to public-facing projects.
Sean Connors will focus on the value of “Incorporating Digital Composing Projects in K-16 English Classes.” The proliferation of digital technologies in the twenty-first century has made it
easier than ever before for the average person to produce multimodal texts—texts which integrate two or more modes—in the service of making meaning. The ramifications of this shift are profound for English educators at all levels: today, supporting students’ development as critical producers and critical consumers of texts necessitates teachers’ creating opportunities
for them to experiment with the diverse array of mediums available to them. Adaptation provides a way to extend these opportunities beyond Language Arts classrooms and offers a bridge to art, music, theater, computer, and media classes through interdisciplinary and integrated approaches to the study of language and storytelling. Grounding his presentation in research on multimodality and multiliteracies, Connors will offer a rationale for incorporating digital composing assignments in college and K-16 English classes. Drawing on his experiences collaborating with Szwydky to facilitate an NEH Summer Institute for Teachers, he will discuss the benefits of college faculty building collaborative partnerships with school teachers. He will share a series of projects that he has undertaken with teachers and students at both the college and secondary level, all of which have involved their adapting literary texts in the service of creating digital films, podcasts, comics, and stop-animation videos. To conclude, Connors will offer practical suggestions for college educators interested in partnering with K-12 educators and including multimodal, digital composing projects in the curriculum.
In “Adaptation: Storytelling, Technology, and What It Means to Be Human,” Glenn Jellenik will discuss the ins and outs of adapting research and teaching to provide quality professional
development to college students preparing to be teachers as well as in-service teachers. Jellenik’s teaching focuses on developing a vocabulary to critically engage the intersections of
literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. The ethos of his “Film and Literature” course begins with two Salman Rushdie codas: “Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was,” and “In the end, storytelling is storytelling. Every time you tell a story, you have to struggle with form and the question of how to tell it.” The class functions as a hybrid film/literary studies course on narrative, paying particular attention to introducing the specific vocabulary and stocking the critical toolbox of film studies. Further, the class is heavily invested in critically unwinding unproductive clichés about adaptation (specifically, the cry of “the book was better!” that dominates many academic conversations). These conversations can provide productive models not only in college courses focused on literature and film, but especially in K-12 education where students need to develop engaged models of critically assessing and engaging with storytelling in narrative across forms and media. Just as we ask our students to find connections through
storytelling across forms and media, we should also find ways to work collaboratively to engage in continuous professional development, becoming better teachers, researchers, and humans along the way. As a whole, the panelists will discuss essential questions for humanities and education in the 21st century such as: How do the skills students learn in our classrooms extend across other disciplines and beyond the university and into their professional lives? And how does the cultural literacy developed in adaptation studies allow students to better understand themselves and their world? The projects discussed by the three participants bring together research, teaching, and service, and they provide an opportunity to explore ways that faculty can create more cohesion between these three areas of scholarly work through collaboration while
also cultivating productive, interdisciplinary pipelines among humanities disciplines, education departments, and broader communities outside of the University.
Presentation ID# 11329: “Adaptation, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration, and Professional Development” Lissette Lopez Szwydky (lissette@uark.edu), U of Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas where she teaches and publishes in the areas of nineteenthcentury
literature and culture, gender studies, adaptation and media studies, and professional development for liberal arts majors. She collaborates with the other panelists on adaptation-focused research, teaching, and public-facing projects. She has published on the early adaptation histories of nineteenth-century texts, and specializes in Frankenstein’s 200-year multimedia cultural history. Her most recent essays appear in Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Live in Popular Culture (2018), The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018), and she has forthcoming essays in the following: A Cultural History of Tragedy (2019), Teaching
Girls on Fire (2019), and others. Szwydky’s book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century is forthcoming in 2020.
Presentation ID# 11331: "Incorporating Digital Composing Projects in K-16 English Classes"
Sean Connors (sconnors@uark.edu), University of Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Sean P. Connors is an associate professor of English education at the University of Arkansas, where he teaches courses on new literacies, digital composing, and young adult literature. His scholarship and teaching focuses on the application of diverse critical
perspectives to young adult literature. He is the editor of The Politics of Panem: Challenging Genres, a collection of critical essays about the Hunger Games series, and the host of The
Storyteller’s Thread, a monthly podcast devoted to children’s and young adult literature.
Presentation ID# 11330: “Adaptation: Storytelling, Technology, and What It Means to Be Human”
Glenn Jellenik (gjellenik@uca.edu), U of Central Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Glenn Jellenik is an assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas, where he teaches courses on British literature and adaptation studies. He serves on the Board of Advisers for the Palgrave series: Adaptation and Visual Culture, and is the area chair and coordinator for the Cultural Adaptation section of the Popular Culture Association national conference. His most recent essays appear in The Oxford Companion for Adaptation Studies (2018) Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture (2018), and The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018).
Connecting the Humanities to Gainful Employment: Career Education and the Undergraduate Curriculum
Sunday, 12 January 2020, 12:00 PM-1:15 PM
Program Description: The current conversation around professionalization overemphasizes graduate education. Meanwhile undergraduates—the largest portion of our students—are sidelined. This panel discusses the opportunities and
challenges of creating space in the undergraduate humanities curriculum for professional development, career coaching, and mentoring that models the humanistic perspectives and goals of our disciplines.
Session Description:
Over the last decade, career preparation for humanities majors has received much needed attention, and this conversation needs to grow within the profession. However, the current conversation overemphasizes graduate education, particularly alternative-academic (“alt-ac”) or post-academic careers for humanities PhDs. Meanwhile undergraduates—who make up the largest portion of our students—are sidelined. The national conversation about the decline of humanities enrollments regularly cites a false-but-no-less-real perceived lack of professional opportunities for humanities majors as the driving reason for the decrease in majors. Clearly, there is a need for reimagining how to create spaces for intentional conversations and tangible efforts that address the connections between the humanities and professional possibilities. The format of this panel will be five (5), 10-minute presentations followed by discussion (both among the panelists and the audience) of the opportunities and challenges of creating space in the humanities curriculum for professional development, career coaching, and mentoring that models the humanistic perspectives and goals of our disciplines. All of the faculty
panelists are actively infusing professional topics into the undergraduate humanities curriculum through a combination of for-credit courses, formal assignments, and service learning opportunities that directly apply the skills developed in literature and language courses to a range of public and professional uses.
In “Shadowing for Life,” Helene Meyers (Southwestern University) will cover some of the most valuable tools for career seekers: job shadowing and informational interviews. Meyers teaches “Novel English Majors,” a course that is part traditional literary criticism and part career coaching, at a national liberal arts college in Texas. She has written about this course for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it has been discussed in several publications on the humanities and liberal arts, including George Anders’s You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education (2017). After providing a brief overview of the course and the reception it has received from students and parents, she will focus on one of the course assignments: a shadowing/interview report. This assignment not only efficiently provides rich content on diverse career possibilities for English majors but also furthers and explicitly identifies some of the marketable and transferable skills provided by the major: research skills, writing skills, and oral presentation skills.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky (University of Arkansas) teaches job market courses for both undergraduates and graduate students based on her alt-ac experience, and her presentation will focus on “The Professional Functions of Storytelling.” Her courses ask students to use the same critical rigor they apply to the interpretation of texts to think about their educational training and its varied applications. Focusing on how to use a central function of the literature classroom—effective storytelling—on the job market, Szwydky’s approach to these courses helps students articulate the value of the humanities in their personal, public, and professional lives, connecting them to professional skills that will help them land gainful employment. By identifying their strengths, passions, and skills, and discussing them through carefully crafted stories in varied genres—résumés, cover letters, interviews, and networking situations—students are able to make clearer connections between the skills developed in the arts and humanities and their application in various professional contexts.
Next, Holly Jones (University of Alabama-Huntsville) and Julie Naviaux (Slippery Rock University) will discuss their work as departmental Job Placement Advisors for undergraduates. They’ve collaborated to build fruitful relationships with both Career and Alumni Services and their department, hosted document workshops, crafted recruitment materials (handouts and videos) for instructors and advisors, and proposed a 1-credit hour college-wide Career Planning Workshop. Their presentation will overview their struggles and successes (which include Naviaux’s acceptance of a tenure-track job offer at SRU). They will address the administrative hurdles of initiating job placement activities at the departmental level with limited
resources. They will also speak to the value of job placement services for undergraduates, which runs against the common assumption amongst faculty that quantifying the value of students’ educational experiences somehow devalues it. Instead, they advocate for job placement advising as a process that offers a dual valuing of the Humanities: first, as training that enables students to reflect upon and communicate their intrinsic value as humans and citizens and second, as a skill set that prepares them for quality internships and employment.
Svetlana V. Tyutina (California State University-Northridge) will cover service-learning projects in her presentation “Taking Your Students to Court: Service-Learning Projects for Students in Humanities,” focusing on establishing meaningful partnerships with the community through service-learning projects (SLP) while acquiring professional experience directly related to their academic work. The presentation will review main challenges of SLP implementation in Spanish courses (project design, assessment, institutional support), as well as the benefits. Practical examples of SLP implementation at California State University, Northridge, a large public Hispanic-Serving institution, include a region-wide, collaborative service-learning project running a free income tax clinic for low-income families (supported by IRS) and an externship with the LA Superior Court, recognized, along with its coordinator on the court side, Judge Shirley Watkins, by the San Fernando Valley Bar Association with the Administration of Justice Award (2019).
In “Career Education for the Global 21st Century,” Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Jenny Strakovsky (Georgia Institute of Technology) will describe an interdisciplinary course offered to both undergraduates and graduate students. The course, “Career Design for Global Citizenship,” responds to the changing world of work and aims to help students take narrative ownership of their career trajectory. Taking the professional world as a network of cultural communities, the course trains students to leverage cross-cultural communication to explore career pathways. The course also emphasizes the importance of meaning-making in personal growth, challenging students to position themselves as agents in a global society. Students learn the role of humanities expertise in a variety of professional sectors, from media and communication to international business, engineering, and the tech sector. The presentation will also touch on how the course is evolving to serve Georgia Tech’s new M.S. in Global Media and Cultures, which prepares students to leverage cultural expertise to launch careers in business, media, and non-profit.
Organizer
Lissette Lopez Szwydky (lissette@uark.edu), U of Arkansas
Speakers and Bios
Helene Meyers (meyersh@southwestern.edu), Southwestern U
Expertise and Scholarship: Helene Meyers is Professor of English and McManis University Chair at SouthwesternUniversity; she is currently serving as chair of the English department there. Committed to traditional academic and public scholarship, she is the author most recently of Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness and has bylines in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, Ms. Magazine Blog, Lilith, and Tablet. Her book-in-progress is on Jewish American movies.
Speaker
Lissette Lopez Szwydky (lissette@uark.edu), U of Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas where she teaches and publishes in the areas of nineteenth-century literature, gender studies, adaptation studies, and professional development for liberal arts majors. After completing her PhD, she spent four years in an alt-ac, administrative role in higher education before returning to the academic track in 2013. She is heavily involved in public-facing projects and co-directs an NEH summer institute for K-12 educators on the topic of literary adaptation and arts integration (June 2018 and June 2020). Her book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century is forthcoming in 2020.
Speaker
Holly Jones (holly.jones@uah.edu), University of Alabama-Huntsville
Expertise and Scholarship: Holly Jones is Associate Professor English at The University of Alabama in Huntsville where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Placement and teaches Ethnic and Minority American Literature. Her research engages issues of citizenship, race, and technology and has been published in American Literature; The Bilingual Review; LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Peace Review; and Ilha Desterro.
Speaker
Julie Naviaux (julie.naviaux@uah.edu), Slippery Rock University
Expertise and Scholarship: Julie Naviaux is Assistant Professor of English at at Slippery Rock University. Before that, she was a Lecturer at The University of Alabama in Huntsville where she serves as Undergraduate Job Placement Advisor. Her research focus is in African American literature and performance studies, and her work has appeared in College Language Association Journal, African American Review’s E-Projects, and as a contributor to the edited collection Code Meshing as World English.
Speaker
Svetlana Tyutina (svetatyutina@yahoo.com), California State U, Northridge
Expertise and Scholarship: Svetlana V. Tyutina is an Assistant Professor of Spanish, coordinator of the Spanish Graduate Program, and Director of Student Engagement and Service Learning at the Office of Community Engagement at California State University, Northridge. Her research interests include Hispanic Orientalism and high impact practices in teaching languages and literatures. She writes and presents on these topics and is currently working on an international service-learning project to benefit the ASL and Mexican Sign Language communities. The outcome of this project, a bilingual Spanish-English edition of Guillermo Gonzalez’s Stories of Silence, will be published in 2019. Dr. Tyutina has founded an internship project in collaboration with VITA, free income tax clinic, and an externship with the LA Superior Court.
Speaker
Anna Westerstahl Stenport (aws@gatech.edu), Georgia Inst. of Tech.
Expertise and Scholarship: As Chair of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology, Professor Anna Westerstahl Stenport leads a dynamic group of seventy tenure-stream faculty, lecturers, and staff in the unit’s multi-varied research foci, academic and curricular priorities, numerous study abroad programs in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Holding a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley (2004), Dr. Stenport’s expertise includes transnational cinema and media, modern literature and drama, and visual and cultural studies. Her teaching includes courses in Global Cinema (“Green Screen: Environments in World Cinema”), Introduction to Global Media and Cultures, and Career Education for the Global 21st Century. Dr. Stenport serves as the inaugural co-Director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, a consortium with Georgia State University.
Speaker
Yevgenya Strakovsky (strakovsky@gatech.edu), Georgia Inst. of Tech.
Expertise and Scholarship: Jenny Strakovsky is Assistant Director of Career Education and Graduate Programs at the School of Modern Languages of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also teaches in the German program. She has a Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University. Her research explores concepts of human flourishing in literature, philosophy, and psychology and their applications for higher education. At Georgia Tech, she coordinates career advising, recruitment, and program development of the School’s Master’s degree programs, including the M.S. in Global Media and Cultures and the M.S. in Applied Language and Intercultural Studies. She also runs the Career Design Studio, which includes the course “Career Design for Global Citizenship,” the freshman German immersion program “Global Career Intensive,” and the student project studio “21st Century Humanities.”
Sunday, 12 January 2020, 12:00 PM-1:15 PM
Program Description: The current conversation around professionalization overemphasizes graduate education. Meanwhile undergraduates—the largest portion of our students—are sidelined. This panel discusses the opportunities and
challenges of creating space in the undergraduate humanities curriculum for professional development, career coaching, and mentoring that models the humanistic perspectives and goals of our disciplines.
Session Description:
Over the last decade, career preparation for humanities majors has received much needed attention, and this conversation needs to grow within the profession. However, the current conversation overemphasizes graduate education, particularly alternative-academic (“alt-ac”) or post-academic careers for humanities PhDs. Meanwhile undergraduates—who make up the largest portion of our students—are sidelined. The national conversation about the decline of humanities enrollments regularly cites a false-but-no-less-real perceived lack of professional opportunities for humanities majors as the driving reason for the decrease in majors. Clearly, there is a need for reimagining how to create spaces for intentional conversations and tangible efforts that address the connections between the humanities and professional possibilities. The format of this panel will be five (5), 10-minute presentations followed by discussion (both among the panelists and the audience) of the opportunities and challenges of creating space in the humanities curriculum for professional development, career coaching, and mentoring that models the humanistic perspectives and goals of our disciplines. All of the faculty
panelists are actively infusing professional topics into the undergraduate humanities curriculum through a combination of for-credit courses, formal assignments, and service learning opportunities that directly apply the skills developed in literature and language courses to a range of public and professional uses.
In “Shadowing for Life,” Helene Meyers (Southwestern University) will cover some of the most valuable tools for career seekers: job shadowing and informational interviews. Meyers teaches “Novel English Majors,” a course that is part traditional literary criticism and part career coaching, at a national liberal arts college in Texas. She has written about this course for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it has been discussed in several publications on the humanities and liberal arts, including George Anders’s You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education (2017). After providing a brief overview of the course and the reception it has received from students and parents, she will focus on one of the course assignments: a shadowing/interview report. This assignment not only efficiently provides rich content on diverse career possibilities for English majors but also furthers and explicitly identifies some of the marketable and transferable skills provided by the major: research skills, writing skills, and oral presentation skills.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky (University of Arkansas) teaches job market courses for both undergraduates and graduate students based on her alt-ac experience, and her presentation will focus on “The Professional Functions of Storytelling.” Her courses ask students to use the same critical rigor they apply to the interpretation of texts to think about their educational training and its varied applications. Focusing on how to use a central function of the literature classroom—effective storytelling—on the job market, Szwydky’s approach to these courses helps students articulate the value of the humanities in their personal, public, and professional lives, connecting them to professional skills that will help them land gainful employment. By identifying their strengths, passions, and skills, and discussing them through carefully crafted stories in varied genres—résumés, cover letters, interviews, and networking situations—students are able to make clearer connections between the skills developed in the arts and humanities and their application in various professional contexts.
Next, Holly Jones (University of Alabama-Huntsville) and Julie Naviaux (Slippery Rock University) will discuss their work as departmental Job Placement Advisors for undergraduates. They’ve collaborated to build fruitful relationships with both Career and Alumni Services and their department, hosted document workshops, crafted recruitment materials (handouts and videos) for instructors and advisors, and proposed a 1-credit hour college-wide Career Planning Workshop. Their presentation will overview their struggles and successes (which include Naviaux’s acceptance of a tenure-track job offer at SRU). They will address the administrative hurdles of initiating job placement activities at the departmental level with limited
resources. They will also speak to the value of job placement services for undergraduates, which runs against the common assumption amongst faculty that quantifying the value of students’ educational experiences somehow devalues it. Instead, they advocate for job placement advising as a process that offers a dual valuing of the Humanities: first, as training that enables students to reflect upon and communicate their intrinsic value as humans and citizens and second, as a skill set that prepares them for quality internships and employment.
Svetlana V. Tyutina (California State University-Northridge) will cover service-learning projects in her presentation “Taking Your Students to Court: Service-Learning Projects for Students in Humanities,” focusing on establishing meaningful partnerships with the community through service-learning projects (SLP) while acquiring professional experience directly related to their academic work. The presentation will review main challenges of SLP implementation in Spanish courses (project design, assessment, institutional support), as well as the benefits. Practical examples of SLP implementation at California State University, Northridge, a large public Hispanic-Serving institution, include a region-wide, collaborative service-learning project running a free income tax clinic for low-income families (supported by IRS) and an externship with the LA Superior Court, recognized, along with its coordinator on the court side, Judge Shirley Watkins, by the San Fernando Valley Bar Association with the Administration of Justice Award (2019).
In “Career Education for the Global 21st Century,” Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Jenny Strakovsky (Georgia Institute of Technology) will describe an interdisciplinary course offered to both undergraduates and graduate students. The course, “Career Design for Global Citizenship,” responds to the changing world of work and aims to help students take narrative ownership of their career trajectory. Taking the professional world as a network of cultural communities, the course trains students to leverage cross-cultural communication to explore career pathways. The course also emphasizes the importance of meaning-making in personal growth, challenging students to position themselves as agents in a global society. Students learn the role of humanities expertise in a variety of professional sectors, from media and communication to international business, engineering, and the tech sector. The presentation will also touch on how the course is evolving to serve Georgia Tech’s new M.S. in Global Media and Cultures, which prepares students to leverage cultural expertise to launch careers in business, media, and non-profit.
Organizer
Lissette Lopez Szwydky (lissette@uark.edu), U of Arkansas
Speakers and Bios
Helene Meyers (meyersh@southwestern.edu), Southwestern U
Expertise and Scholarship: Helene Meyers is Professor of English and McManis University Chair at SouthwesternUniversity; she is currently serving as chair of the English department there. Committed to traditional academic and public scholarship, she is the author most recently of Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness and has bylines in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, Ms. Magazine Blog, Lilith, and Tablet. Her book-in-progress is on Jewish American movies.
Speaker
Lissette Lopez Szwydky (lissette@uark.edu), U of Arkansas
Expertise and Scholarship: Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas where she teaches and publishes in the areas of nineteenth-century literature, gender studies, adaptation studies, and professional development for liberal arts majors. After completing her PhD, she spent four years in an alt-ac, administrative role in higher education before returning to the academic track in 2013. She is heavily involved in public-facing projects and co-directs an NEH summer institute for K-12 educators on the topic of literary adaptation and arts integration (June 2018 and June 2020). Her book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century is forthcoming in 2020.
Speaker
Holly Jones (holly.jones@uah.edu), University of Alabama-Huntsville
Expertise and Scholarship: Holly Jones is Associate Professor English at The University of Alabama in Huntsville where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Placement and teaches Ethnic and Minority American Literature. Her research engages issues of citizenship, race, and technology and has been published in American Literature; The Bilingual Review; LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Peace Review; and Ilha Desterro.
Speaker
Julie Naviaux (julie.naviaux@uah.edu), Slippery Rock University
Expertise and Scholarship: Julie Naviaux is Assistant Professor of English at at Slippery Rock University. Before that, she was a Lecturer at The University of Alabama in Huntsville where she serves as Undergraduate Job Placement Advisor. Her research focus is in African American literature and performance studies, and her work has appeared in College Language Association Journal, African American Review’s E-Projects, and as a contributor to the edited collection Code Meshing as World English.
Speaker
Svetlana Tyutina (svetatyutina@yahoo.com), California State U, Northridge
Expertise and Scholarship: Svetlana V. Tyutina is an Assistant Professor of Spanish, coordinator of the Spanish Graduate Program, and Director of Student Engagement and Service Learning at the Office of Community Engagement at California State University, Northridge. Her research interests include Hispanic Orientalism and high impact practices in teaching languages and literatures. She writes and presents on these topics and is currently working on an international service-learning project to benefit the ASL and Mexican Sign Language communities. The outcome of this project, a bilingual Spanish-English edition of Guillermo Gonzalez’s Stories of Silence, will be published in 2019. Dr. Tyutina has founded an internship project in collaboration with VITA, free income tax clinic, and an externship with the LA Superior Court.
Speaker
Anna Westerstahl Stenport (aws@gatech.edu), Georgia Inst. of Tech.
Expertise and Scholarship: As Chair of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology, Professor Anna Westerstahl Stenport leads a dynamic group of seventy tenure-stream faculty, lecturers, and staff in the unit’s multi-varied research foci, academic and curricular priorities, numerous study abroad programs in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Holding a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley (2004), Dr. Stenport’s expertise includes transnational cinema and media, modern literature and drama, and visual and cultural studies. Her teaching includes courses in Global Cinema (“Green Screen: Environments in World Cinema”), Introduction to Global Media and Cultures, and Career Education for the Global 21st Century. Dr. Stenport serves as the inaugural co-Director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, a consortium with Georgia State University.
Speaker
Yevgenya Strakovsky (strakovsky@gatech.edu), Georgia Inst. of Tech.
Expertise and Scholarship: Jenny Strakovsky is Assistant Director of Career Education and Graduate Programs at the School of Modern Languages of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also teaches in the German program. She has a Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University. Her research explores concepts of human flourishing in literature, philosophy, and psychology and their applications for higher education. At Georgia Tech, she coordinates career advising, recruitment, and program development of the School’s Master’s degree programs, including the M.S. in Global Media and Cultures and the M.S. in Applied Language and Intercultural Studies. She also runs the Career Design Studio, which includes the course “Career Design for Global Citizenship,” the freshman German immersion program “Global Career Intensive,” and the student project studio “21st Century Humanities.”