Teaching Portfolio

Kenneth Sherwood
sherwood_k@utpb.edu

• Teaching Experience and Courses Taught
• Statement of Teaching Philosophy
• Course Synopses (Proposed)

Note: Version including evaluations is available in hard copy upon request.

Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas of the Permian Basin, Fall 2001-present
Instructor, The Bolles School, Spring 1999-Spring 2001.
Lecturer, University of North Florida, Fall 1998
Lecturer, Florida Community College at Jacksonville, Fall 1998
Lecturer, Jacksonville University, Fall 1997
Graduate Teaching Fellow, English, SUNY at Buffalo, 1993-95, 1996-1997
Instructor, Millard Fillmore College, SUNY at Buffalo, Summer 1996
Teacher, New York English and Mathematics Institute, 1991-92

English Composition I
English Composition II
Advanced Writing and Reading: African-American Literature
Advanced Writing and Reading: Multicultural Issues
Advanced Writing and Reading: Popular Culture
Advanced Writing and Reading: Textuality/Media

Literature Courses

Introduction to Short Fiction
Beats and Other American Outsiders
Survey of American Literature
World Literature Survey
Modern American Poetry
Practical Criticism
The English Language: Cultural Theory

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

On the first day of class, I often surprise students by handing out a short story before even reviewing the syllabus. An allegory of uncritical reading, Julio Cortázar's "A Continuity of Parks" dramatizes my overarching pedagogical objective, which is to teach students the practices of critical writing and creative reading. Whether teaching writing or literature, I see my task as modeling and eliciting the activity of textual knowing. Despite my own commitments to poetry and the taste for such works as William Carlos Williams' Paterson or the Mayan Popol Vuh, I am less interested in exposing students to a set body of literature than I am in helping them develop the ability to access literary and non-literary texts which they would otherwise feel were beyond their reach. I believe that before gaining a literary sensibility or attaining cultural literacy, students must first learn how to make meaning of such texts.

Cortázar's highly compressed story portrays an unaware protagonist-reader who becomes captivated by the suspenseful narration of his own impending murder when textual and real worlds converge like a metafictional möbius strip. As students write responses and then discuss their interpretations of the text, they grapple with an initially disorienting tale and respond to the challenge, taking an active role in the learning process. This exercise is the first step in moving students beyond a fast-food consumption approach to reading, showing them how to access even a difficult postmodern text through creative reading and critical writing. In the process of uncovering the layers of meaning in this one-page text, the students rapidly gain a sense of mastery, come to understand the responsibility they must fulfill in English class, and begin to develop an appreciation for the insight that can be derived from literature.

Teaching Cortázar's text is particularly helpful in dealing with students who are not predisposed towards the appreciation of literature or whose prior academic experiences have caused them to develop an entrenched antipathy towards writing. The first-day exercise quickly demonstrates that a difficult text can be read; more importantly, in addressing the relations of fictive and everyday worlds, it proposes to them that the mutually dependant activities of writing/reading are not just academic skills but may bring crucial, new insights about who, how, and where we are in the world.

Course Synopses (Proposed)

General Education

Aims to help students develop the skills of academic writing. Class discussion and essay readings from authors such as Berger, Freire, Pratt, and Anzaldúa in Ways of Reading allow students to reflect on and write about topics including: visual culture, advertising, social and ethnic identity, and the culture of the college classroom. The course includes review of organization, grammar, mechanics, and bibliographic form; but students develop competence in these areas primarily through the practices of revision and editing. A portfolio grading system places emphasis on the process through which one develops strong writing (pre-writing, drafting, revision, and editing). Peer-workshops and one-to-one conferences with the teacher provide further process guidance. Students demonstrate progress as readers, thinkers, and writers through the presentation of a final portfolio of revised work.

Millennial Textuality Homer, Gutenberg, Gates

Considers how changing media technologies effect the status of voice, text, and image, with an emphasis on establishing a historical and theoretical context that allows students to write analytically on their own media-saturated environment. The course begins with an examination of oral culture and the advent of the book through Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. Subsequent readings include: Thoreau's Walden, Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, Berger's Ways of Seeing, Barthes' Mythologies, and Brook's Resisting the Virtual Life. The pairing of challenging texts with self-reflective writing serves to introduce students into the elaborated codes of institutional discourse, enhancing their critical thinking, writing, and reading faculties, at the same time encouraging the habit of inquiry upon which a liberal arts education must be grounded.

Leads students to think critically about American history, culture, literary tradition and identity through selected readings from the colonial period to the postmodern era. A summary list of issues discussed in relation to the constitution of an American tradition would include: the shaping of the Nation as a community of the "elect" and its implications; the formation and growth of an American (Individual and National) identity, and what it means for the relations between the individual and community; the promise of "America" tested by shifting notions of success and essential American-ness; and the shaping of America by ideas about domesticity and wilderness, the virgin land, dominion, and frontier spirit as well as demands for Democratic enfranchisement. We develop an understanding of these issues by concentrating on such canonic texts as: Walden, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening, The Great Gatsby, and The Invisible Man. But in order to approach the tradition critically, we also acknowledge contemporary challenges to the canon (particularly in terms of gender and ethnicity) by exploring the decentering implications of additional readings from non-canonic texts such as: feminist confessional poetry, blues lyrics, Native American oral poetry, Beat writing, and dystopian science fiction.

Focusing on the work of major modernist poets and prose writers, this course considers texts that reflect such cultural and historical issues as the trauma of the Great War, industrialization and urbanization, the acceleration of time, and formal experiment with language. Beginning with Ezra Pound, who was interested in the 'writing itself' and its relation to culture, we read such poets as Williams, Eliot, Frost, Moore, Loy, H.D., Stevens, Hughes, and Zukofsky. Gertrude Stein's revolution of prose style establishes the rubric for our readings of texts by fiction writers including: Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Barnes, Fitzgerald, and Ellison.

Examines how the varied efforts of Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson to invent a usable past lead each to produce texts which are nearly unreconcilable within the period genre conventions of lyric and narrative poem, novel, essay, or autobiography. We consider in turn the meditative, "self"-constructive primer Walden; the cetological compendium of Moby Dick, with its factory ship and monomaniac; the evolving organic projection of the mythic self, Leaves of Grass; and the contra-positive interiority of the hand-sewn, autograph fascicles that constitute Dickinson's oeuvre. We seek to understand how all four texts bear variously the inscriptions of their nineteenth-century cultural context the ethos of individualism, rise of industrial capitalism, manifest destiny and how each contests or complies with such dominant influences through the poetics of its construction as much as the authorial persona each performs.

A broad introduction to a panoply of postmodern poetries sharing a common opposition to the formalism, ironic distance, and canon espoused by the New Criticism. Beginning with the emergence of the New American poetry (1950s), we identify three "avant-garde" fronts extending from 1950 to the present: poetries marked by the reemergence of an organic, personal, bardic "voice" (Beat, Deep Image, performance); those involved in the continuation of William Carlos Williams' project in the vernacular, oral, performative domains (Black Mountain, Ethnopoetics); and those characterized by the adoption of writerly, constructivist, materialist poetics (New York School, Language poetry). We map how shifting orientations toward "voice" and text continually reflect and revise a Whitmanian poetics of presence culminating in the contrast between contemporary performance poetry (firmly ensconced in a personal voice and communal social context) and Language poetry (determined to supplant voice with textuality). Capitalizing on the available resources, the course integrates appropriate audio recordings, video, and new media; this helps reveal how the tensions between popular accessibility and formal innovation play out in performance contexts. Students complete research projects on individual poets to be compiled into a critical resource published on the World Wide Web.

A course for aspiring undergraduate writers, it heeds Robert Kelly's assertion that "poets have no hobbies / they eat everything." This workshop course helps student writers move towards the adoption of a conscious aesthetic program through exposure to a buffet of contemporary American and international poetries. Students become increasingly deliberate and articulate about their own formal and stylistic choices, learning to read their own, their classmates', and their contemporaries' writing. Class activities include conventional peer-workshops, formal exercises (imitations, collaborations), and spoken-word performances designed to transition students from the phase of innocent self-expression to increasingly self-conscious artistry. Students self-publish a group project based on a common theme or formal approach. Individually, they complete a portfolio of revised poems, a writing journal, and a personal mini-anthology of poetry.

Surveys developments in visual, performance, oral, video, and hypermedia poetry since the 1960s. This course aims to broaden the asethetic perspective of active student writers by exposing them to a range of alternative writing practices. Students become familiar with concrete poetry, sound poetry, Happenings, the "poetry slam," poetry video, and the uses of Storyspace and the Web for performance-publication. We make use of media resources such as Bob Holman's The United States of Poetry video series, the Little Magazine CD-ROM, and internet sites like the UBU web and the Electronic Poetry Center. Students are encouraged to extend the limits of their own writing practices in emulation of the innovative writers studied. All stage a group performance, learn basic video production, and contribute to a web collaboration. The course will culminate in the exhibition of individuals' creative projects.

Offers practice and guidance in the writing of creative or "literary" non-fiction. The course operates primarily as a writing workshop, where discussion and critique of on-going student work shares the table with readings from The Best American Essays 1999 and relevant models selected by students. Students read model essays, then work to develop their own prose in terms of rhetorical form (emphasis on narration and description) and style (syntax, tone, diction, rhythm). Drawing material from daily journals, students compose eight essays and submit a portfolio of three revisions at the end of the semester. At least one piece should demonstrate sufficient sophistication of voice and sense of audience to be approved by class editorial vote for inclusion in a final publication. Along with the journal and portfolio, students respond to classmates' work responsibly and thoughtfully, as members of an editorial group that encourages exploration, risk-taking, and inquiry.

Considers the theoretical questions around the construction of African American cultural identity through literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Special attention is paid to understanding how various writers position their work in relation to the oral vernacular blues, work songs, spirituals, sermons, and toasts. What strategies do poets and prose writers adopt for the representation of dialect speech? What implications do these choices have for black and white audiences? Does the vernacular serve as a resource to be transposed? How does theorizing African American literature as founded on the vernacular risk "hypostasiz[ing] a particular cultural identity?" Works discussed may include audio recordings and texts by Dunbar, McKay, Hurston, Toomer, Brown, Hughes, Tolson, Ellison, Morrison, Nourbese Philip, Baraka, Harper, Brathwaite, and Mackey.

Examines Native American literature in order to develop students' appreciation of Native cultural history. Make it Old acquaints students with the forms and functions of traditional (song, story, oratory) and modern (autobiography, lyric poetry, novel) genres. Throughout the semester we explore how contemporary texts from the Native American Renaissance (1969-present) sustain, appropriate, or refigure traditional oral art and tribal world-view. We consider how the values of tradition and continuity, implicit in oral art and reenacted in contemporary "homing" narratives, such as Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony or James Welch's Fools Crow, shape Native American literature; we seek to understand the means by which marginalized ethnic groups maintain and even recreate cultural identity as a strategy of resistance. This leads us to see Native American literature as proposing an implicit counter-paradigm to the familiar progress-oriented concepts of the frontier, the "American Adam," and authorship that are epitomized by the twentieth-century credo "make it new."

Investigates issues of language and social identity in contemporary writing emerging from various socio-cultural traditions that employs unconventional language forms and innovative approaches to genre. Taking its framework from theorist Edouard Glissant's essay, "Free and Forced Poetics," it explores the way marginality (social, economic, political, or cultural) is reflected in language, making literature both a window upon the social situation and an opportunity for challenging it. We focus on those writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, Simon Ortiz, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Severo Sarduy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Cecilia Vicuña who work self-consciously with the forms of language to register themes of exile, migration, nation, and displacement. As students strive to understand the dynamics of literary production that contests dominant language practices and literary tradition, we test Glissant's theorization that if writing is to challenge hegemonic forces, it must do so through form as much as content. Its cross-cultural approach allows this course to emphasize the ideological and formal dimensions of the work, problematize discrete cultural categories, and resist the multicultural tendency to essentialize the position of the other within a marginalized sub-discipline.

Poetry (Re)Searching: The Twentieth-Century Long Poem

Engages central issues of avant-garde Modernism and challenges students to come to grips with writing that involves both search and research. Its spirit derives from the polemical maxims of two American modernists: "Poetry is news that STAYS news" and "it is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die everyday for lack of what is found there." In carrying out the implications of such statements, Pound and Williams produced some of the most heavily informed and informative poetry in the language and, in so doing, developed compositional methods like collage, seriality, and field composition. This course introduces students of modern poetry to works operating on a larger scale than that of the discrete, personal lyric. It explores that species of American long poem which, turning away from the expansive, bardic model of Whitman's "Song of Myself," attempts to create an encyclopedic synthesis of culture. Reading from among such central long poems as Eliot's Wasteland, Pound's The Cantos, H.D.'s Trilogy, Williams' Paterson, Zukofsky's "A", Tolson's Harlem Gallery, and Olson's Maximus Poems, we consider the formal strategies through which the poets shore their fragments and the explosion in the kinds of information local history, Eastern philosophy, American politics, Mayan cosmology, Egyptian mythology, Baroque music, troubador song, modern science, everyday ephemera, economics admitted into the poetic domain. Emulating these poems' suffision with diverse knowledges, students delve deeply into domains of their own choice to produce a final research essay.

Focuses on the self-consciously innovative writing of such major modernist poets as Stein, H.D, Loy, Moore, and Niedecker and the identification of a contemporary tradition following them. We look at these five poets as the forerunners to an emerging counter-tradition of postmodern poets among them Guest, Fraser, Waldrop, Weiner, Hejinian, Notley, Howe, Scalapino, Harryman, Myles, and Mullen who increasingly adopt the experimental language games formerly associated with a masculine avant garde. We consider such questions as: Does a feminist, experimental poetics exist? How do women innovators approach tradition and the anxiety of influence? How do they refigure the masculinist stance of the "avant-garde"? How are innovative poetics conducive to a feminist exploration of themes such as mastery, silence, and the body? Students practice some of the formal strategies characteristic of this writing in their own reader-responses as a way of deepening their appreciation for the non-transparent use of language in critical as well as creative writing.

Allows students to engage the interdisciplinary issues of current concern to ethnographers, folklorists, and Native American scholars. Beginning with broad reading in traditional oral poetry indigenous to the Americas, the first half of the course explores assumptions about modern civilization and primitive culture in order to foreground and problematize Social-Darwinist conceptions of progress. We look at the early prominence of "Indian Song" imitations and translation in such modernist venues as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1917) and the first literary anthology, Path on the Rainbow (1918), interrogating the purpose and effects of recontextualizing cultural performances as literary artifacts. Then we self-reflexively explore our own relationships to the twentieth-century desire for a return-to-the-primitive, viewing films such as Little Big Man, Dances With Wolves, and Smoke Signals in order to see what the tendency toward mythification expresses about contemporary life and how it is reflected in scholarship. Having established that the primitive is a complicated projection of their Englightenment heritage, students are prepared to consider specific cultural forms and practices such as: song, story, oratory, and ritual. They work with the central Ethnopoetics concern the gap between cultural performance and written text and embark on projects re-presenting select oral performances (translating, transcribing, and analyzing), thereby constructing new and creative translations that reflect their appreciation of the form, content, and cultural context of Native American literature. This independent research engages them first-hand with the difficulties of coming to know Other cultures; it helps them grapple with the valuable yet problematic roles institutional discourses play in gathering, transcribing, translating, presenting, and interpreting other cultures in assimilable terms. Concluding with a consideration of creative rather than scholarly "appropriation," we touch upon contemporary, native and non-native poets such as Ray Young Bear, Cecilia Vicuña, Jerome Rothenberg, Anne Waldman, and Gary Snyder who explore indigenous and oral traditions.