Teachin' Books
37 episodes - English - Latest episode: 11 months ago -A podcast all about the ways people teach, learn, and work with literature -- aaaand all sorts of other cultural bits and bobs, like video games, theatrical performances, Dungeons and Dragons, and more! Host Jessica McDonald talks about teachin' books in undergraduate classrooms, and she interviews folks to learn more about what cool work is happening in other other teaching and learning contexts.
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Episodes
2.11 Teaching Reality TV / Below Deck: Mediterranean
June 07, 2023 03:00 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MBOn the agenda today is true masterpiece of reality television, Below Deck: Mediterranean! Specifically: Season 6 Episode 16, "Sleepless in Croatia," which I've happily taught a few times now in my first-year cultural studies courses. Topics today include: surveying the realities of the superyachting industry, teaching emotional and affective labour, and cringing hard at the talent show the guests forcibly instruct the crew to put on. Come talk tv with me! Arlie Hochschild's interview in T...
2.10 Time for Rest
May 23, 2023 23:00 - 30 minutes - 21 MBHeeeey y'all: Teachin' Books is back to production after a longer-than-expected hiatus, and today I'm talkin' about REST. More specifically: how an enforced rest-by-injury shaped my teaching practices in the last six months, including newly grappling with the "pace" of sound teaching and confronting the ableist dimensions of teaching and learning. I also share a bit about my Labour, Justice, and the Cultural Lives of Working People class, including a labour inventory exercise that I'm thi...
2.9 Kate Beaton's Ducks
March 15, 2022 16:00 - 28 minutes - 19.7 MBToday's episode involves our first ever comic on Teachin' Books! I'm excited to share with you how I teach Kate Beaton's webcomic Ducks, which you should definitely read right now, if you haven't already. Topics of the episode include: confronting environmental and social justice through literature, i.e. through visual and textual analysis; teaching within and around public narratives about Fort McMurray; reading text alongside paratext; and celebrating the effectiveness of a discussion fo...
2.8 Interview with Namrata Mitra / Teaching Postcolonial Literatures
February 22, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour - 48 MBOn today's episode, I'm chattin' with the fabulous Namrata Mitra, who is an Associate Professor at Iona College in the Department of English. Her research areas are feminist philosophy, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. We talk about Namrata's Postcolonial Literatures courses, and we discuss a wide range of teaching-related topics, such as: how students' material conditions shape their learning, and in turn should shape our teaching; uncertainty as pedagogical method and practice, pl...
2.7 Changin' Times
February 02, 2022 03:00 - 28 minutes - 19.7 MBWow, things have chaaaanged and are still a-changin'! Teachin' and learnin' things, that is. On this first solo episode of 2022, I talk about how I've come face-to-face, in the last few weeks of full-time teaching, with how teaching and learning has changed in the year and a half+ that I was away from teaching for my full-time postdoctoral fellowship. Topics include: uncertainty and flexibility; questioning attendance and participation practices; deciding not to assign any late deduction...
2.6 Interview with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Moritz Ingwersen, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski / Teaching about Oil through Arts, Film, and Literature
January 11, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour - 47.3 MBIn this first episode of 2022 (!!!), I'm delighted to be joined by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Moritz Ingwersen, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski, co-instructors of a course on "North American Petrocultures," taught collaboratively and online through TU Dresden in Germany. The core of this episode: How do you talk about oil in a Humanities classroom? What can studying arts and literature teach us about oil, energy, and environmental justice? How can we imagine different futures through the skills and c...
Holiday special! - Feeling My Way through Walmart
December 21, 2021 16:00 - 46 minutes - 32.2 MBThis year's Holiday Special episode (whoop whoooop!) is an audio essay I produced for the Future Horizons summer project series. The series was organized by the fabulous Sarah Roger and Paul Barrett, and my essay was produced with generous support and feedback from Myra Bloom. The audio essay is "Feeling My Way through Walmart," and it spans my experiences from growing up in a Walmart, to my time working in retail, navigating the company in present day, and researching Walmart and other cha...
2.5 Interview with Karrie Auger and Nancy Van Styvendale / Inspired Minds: All Nations Creative Writing Program and Gregory Scofield's "Heart Food"
December 07, 2021 19:00 - 56 minutes - 38.6 MBI'm so pleased to share today's interview with you, featuring Karrie Auger and Nancy Van Styvendale, all about the Inspired Minds: All Nations Creative Writing Program, which is facilitated in prisons in Saskatchewan and Alberta. In addition to talking about how they've approached Gregory Scofield's poem "Heart Food" in Inspired Minds classes, Karrie and Nancy get into: relationship as the core of Inspired Minds and their facilitation of creative writing classes; the material conditions of ...
2.4 Interview with Shana MacDonald / Feminist Think Tank and Instagram Research, Activism, and Education
November 16, 2021 16:00 - 58 minutes - 40 MBToday's episode is all about the ways we teach, learn, and work with... Instagraaaaaaaaam! I'm so excited to share with you this conversation I had with Shana MacDonald, who is an Associate Professor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo and the current President of the Film Studies Association of Canada. On today's episode, Shana talks about her funded, collaborative, interdisciplinary research-creation project Feminist Think Tank, @aesthetic.resistance on Instagram, and w...
2.3 Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
November 03, 2021 02:00 - 31 minutes - 21.5 MBIf you enjoy thinking, learning, and hearing about the nuts and bolts of classroom practice, this one's for you! In today's episode, I talk about three methods / exercises / approaches I've used to teach Emily Dickinson's poem "A narrow Fellow in the Grass." And I get downright detailed, y'all: close-reading, concept-mapping, riddle poems, assembling textual evidence, and practicing poem annotation. And: hear my breadmaker bangin' up a storm in the background -- whoops! Listen in and let...
2.2 Interview with Megan Solberg and Ian Moy / Part Two of Giggles and Screams, AKA: A Conversation with Veteran Teaching Assistants
October 19, 2021 16:00 - 58 minutes - 40.2 MBListen in to part TWO of my conversation with expert TAs and all-around excellent humans Megan Solberg and Ian Moy, Ph.D. candidates in English at the University of Saskatchewan who have lots of wisdom to share about navigating the unique context of team-teaching environments. In this second and final part of our conversation, we cover: student-TA dynamics, including setting boundaries and handling challenging situations; dealing with difficult or controversial course content as a TA; and ...
2.1 Interview with Megan Solberg and Ian Moy / Giggles and Screams, AKA: A Conversation with Veteran Teaching Assistants
October 05, 2021 16:00 - 1 hour - 44.3 MBTeachin' Books is back for Season Twoooooo, and I'm excited, y'all! ...especially because this first episode is part of a special two-part series to kick off Season Two, and it features a couple of my dearest friends, Megan Solberg and Ian Moy, Ph.D. candidates at the University of Saskatchewan who have a combined variety of experiences as Teaching Assistants. In Part One of this two-parter on Teaching Assistantships, we talk about: protecting your mental health as a TA; working in good wa...
1.23 Failure in/and Teaching
June 22, 2021 15:00 - 35 minutes - 24.6 MBToday I'm talkin' FAILURE. With contributions from friends, colleagues, listeners who shared their stories and thoughts about failure, as well as my own experiences and ideas, this episode gets into: the "meta" experience of failing to read enough about failure to do an episode on it; learning in theory versus learning through practice; sharing failures with students as "parting gifts," as icebreakers, as a lesson in self-reflexivity, as a practice of vulnerability, of transparency, or jus...
1.22 Louise Halfe - Sky Dancer's Blue Marrow and "Body Politics"
June 09, 2021 03:00 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MBOn today's solo episode of Teachin' Books, I'm talking about the work of acclaimed poet Louise Bernice Halfe, whose Cree name is Sky Dancer. In particular, I'm talking about an excerpt from Blue Marrow and a short poem called "Body Politics" from Bear Bones & Feathers. For the former: I get into the topic of prairie poetry, prairie literature, and prairie identity, complicated as these formations are, and for the latter, I discuss gender, "womanhood," and "real" versus "artificial" bodies....
1.21 Interview with Lucy Hinnie / Teaching Shakespeare: Comedy and History
May 18, 2021 15:00 - 1 hour - 44.6 MBWe're back to teachin' Shakespeeeeeare today! This episode features an interview with my lovely friend and brilliant human Dr. Lucy Hinnie! Lucy is currently Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library, and is completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Saskatchewan. In the course of our convo about the second-year Shakespeare: Comedy and History class that Lucy taught in 2020, we get into: how to demystify Shakespeare for those who are intimidated by his work; attending...
1.20 Interview with Khodi Dill / Spoken Word Poetry and “Grey,” Picture Books, and Education
May 04, 2021 13:00 - 1 hour - 48.1 MBTeachin' Books is back with an exciting interview with Khodi Dill, who is author of the picture book Welcome to the Cypher (available for pre-order now!) and a Bahamian-Canadian writer, spoken word artist, and anti-racist educator living and working on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon. Check it out, y'all! :) Khodi and I chat about spoken word poetry (& its role in education and social justice); his poem "Grey" and how I've taught it in my undergraduate English classes; the publication of "...
1.19 End-of-Term Tips
April 13, 2021 18:00 - 29 minutes - 20.5 MBHow do you wrap up the term in a good way? What do you do in the final days of class, whether remote or in-person? What atmosphere do you try to create? This episode includes thoughts in response to those questions, featuring fantastic tips by Ashley Gagnon-Shaw, Jocelyne Vogt, and Catherine Nygren, as well as some ideas of my own. :) Hope you enjoy! Listen to Jocelyne's episode of Teachin' Books, on Harold Cardinal's "A Canadian What the Hell It's All About," and Catherine's episode on T...
1.18 Interview with Wendy Roy / On Researching, Writing, and Publishing The Next Instalment
March 30, 2021 15:00 - 1 hour - 43.1 MBHeeey y'all! On today's episode of Teachin' Books, we're talking about something a bit different: research, writing, and publishing as forms of teaching and learning. The episode features part of the book launch for The Next Instalment: Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche, written by Dr. Wendy Roy, Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Saskatchewan. In the launch recording, Wendy reads from the book and answers ques...
1.17 Listener Q&A / Catch-Up Episode!
March 23, 2021 15:00 - 22 minutes - 15.6 MBToday's episode is a bit of a catch-up / breather: I'm answering a few listener questions and emails and, along the way, returning to some of the podcast's ongoing topics of interest. Topics like... statue activism, book clubs (I ask: why do some last and some don't?), recording the podcast, teaching challenging texts, and the often energizing circumstance of teaching students who think English is a whole bunch of bullshit. I hope you enjoy! Check out Tonya Davidson's work on statues. Than...
1.16 Interview with Jordan Bolay / Dungeons and Dragons
March 16, 2021 15:00 - 1 hour - 44.6 MBIt's heeeeeere! I'm so excited to share this Teachin' Books episode on Dungeons and Dragons, featuring Dr. Jordan Bolay, who is an instructor of English at Pearson College UWC. Even if you're not a DnD player, I think you'll like our chat! We get into: DnD as an experiential learning practice, and as a text to be studied in literature classes (plus, as a language-learning tool); games and play in the classroom; and roleplay as a method to teach issues around ethics, empathy, and ecological ...
1.15 Robert Montgomery's Public Poetry Installations
March 09, 2021 15:00 - 31 minutes - 21.5 MBOn today's episode, I'm talking about the public poetry installations of London-based poet and artist Robert Montgomery. I use Montgomery's work in my first-year undergrad poetry class to consider important dimensions of and questions brought up by public poetry, such as: how these poems blur the line between "art" and "the real world"; how materiality and physical position shapes meaning; where poetry belongs and who has access to it; what kind of art or poetry is "permitted" in public sp...
1.14 Interview with Rebekah Ludolph / Hiromi Goto's The Kappa Child
March 02, 2021 15:00 - 1 hour - 48.2 MBHeeeeey y'all! We're back to talkin' about book clubs today as Ph.D. candidate Rebekah Ludolph shares her experience reading Hiromi Goto's novel The Kappa Child (2001) in a book club that encourages the goal of reading to learn. At the same time, Rebekah complicates the idea of reading for "social change" and draws from her doctoral research to discuss the nuances, limitations, and possibilities in the act of reading. Other topics of the episode include: types of readers and reading strate...
1.13 Janelle Monáe's "Pynk" and Vivek Shraya's "Part-time Woman"
February 23, 2021 15:00 - 30 minutes - 21.1 MBI've been really excited to share this episode with you: today, I talk about teachin' Janelle Monáe's song/music video "Pynk" in combination with Vivek Shraya's song/music video "Part-time Woman"! This is always a fun combo to teach. In this episode: teaching students methods of reading the visual dimensions of texts (moving from identification to meaning to significance), facilitating discussions about the visual vocabularies of these music videos, and negotiating ideas of "womanhood" thr...
1.12 Interview with Taylor Brown / Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian
February 02, 2021 13:00 - 1 hour - 41.9 MBOn today's episode of Teachin' Books, undergraduate student Taylor Brown shares her experiences working as a tour guide while she was also reading and thinking through Thomas King's 2012 non-fiction work The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Topics from our chat include: being subversive despite/versus the constraints and norms of a profession; navigating Canada's history and geography as a settler tour guide in a position of authority; and the realit...
1.11 Jes Baker's Landwhale
January 26, 2021 13:00 - 34 minutes - 23.6 MBJanuary sucks and I am here to talk about why! :D If you need a more positive tagline than that, I can't help you. In this episode, I talk about teachin' Jes Baker's memoir Landwhale: On Turning Insults into Nicknames, Why Body Image is Hard, and How Diets Can Kiss My Ass. Topics of interest include: memoir, rhetorical appeals (logos, ethos, pathos), "health" and "wellness" (heavy scare quotes), body politics, and fat activism. Plus, I talk about a self-reflection assignment I use when I t...
1.10 Interview with Tara Chambers / Andre Alexis's Fifteen Dogs
January 19, 2021 13:00 - 1 hour - 41.4 MBTeachin' Books is baaaaack! It appears it's a new, but still garbage, year -- yay?! On today's episode, I chat with my friend Tara Chambers about a novel we both teach in undergraduate classes: Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis. Tara talks about teachin' this novel in a class themed around the question "What is humanity?" or "What does it mean to be human?", and I chat about teachin' it in a class that deconstructs "nature vs. culture." Also of note: Tara's discussion of the novel in relatio...
Holiday special!
December 26, 2020 21:00 - 45 minutes - 31.3 MBI'm back from hiatus to share with you this sweet and joy-filled Holiday special episode, which I recorded with my mom Kathy and my cousin Whitney! We planned to just "shoot the shit," as they say, about topics like books and reading, family and parenting, and the holidays. And shoot the shit we did, indeed! :D Listen in if you'd like to hear us share some warm memories, reflect on "raising a reader," and talk about books & family bonding, authorship & identity, Harry Potter, Little House ...
1.9 Interview with Jocelyne Vogt / Harold Cardinal's "A Canadian What the Hell It's All About"
December 15, 2020 12:00 - 44 minutes - 30.4 MBIt's the last official episode of 2020! As I mention in this episode and the last, I'm taking a break from producing the podcast, and I'll be back in January 2021. On this episode, I'm chatting with Jocelyne Vogt about teaching Harold Cardinal's essay "A Canadian What the Hell It's All About" in her high school English Language Arts classes in the Francophone school system in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Our conversation includes: how curricular requirements and standards (e.g. text lists...
1.8 Douglas Coupland's JPod
December 08, 2020 15:00 - 34 minutes - 23.5 MBNearing the one-year anniversary -- if such a term applies -- of my dissertation defence, I am taking this opportunity to mark the occasion by chatting about an author I've spent around a decade of my life studying: Douglas Coupland. In this episode, I talk about teachin' Coupland's novel JPod (2006) in a third-year Canadian literature course. Of note, from the episode: feeling unprepared but doing things anyway; forms of reading and how they're validated in teaching and learning spaces (w...
1.7 Interview with Anita Smith / William Shakespeare's & Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan's As You Like It
December 01, 2020 13:00 - 58 minutes - 40 MBWe’re talkin’ Shakespeare today! In this episode, I chat with theatre artist Anita Smith about her production of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It for Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan’s 2019 season. We talk about the parallels between directing and teaching, about why she chose Alice in Wonderland as a "hook" for the show, about directing As You Like It in the era of Trump, and about how the practicalities of labour and bodies inform what we can do in theatre and education (spoiler ale...
1.6 Interview with Catherine Nygren / The Stanley Parable
November 24, 2020 13:00 - 1 hour - 44.5 MBY'all. Today we're teachin' VIDEO GAAAMES and I'm so excited! I'm not really a big gamer, but I loved chatting with Catherine Nygren about the ways she incorporates The Stanley Parable into her intro to literature classes. To download The Stanley Parable, or to access a free demo and/or watch the trailer, find it on Steam. You can find out more about the game on its Wikipedia page, but of course beware of spoilers if you plan to venture into the game “unspoiled” first. 😊 Check out the han...
1.5 Instapoetry
November 17, 2020 19:00 - 31 minutes - 22 MBHeyyy all! I’m talkin’ about Instapoetry in today’s episode of Teachin’ Books. In particular, I share three short exercises I use to teach Instapoetry, two of which (in response to a listener request (!!!)) were designed for online teaching environments. I also chat a bit about the debates that surround Instapoetry and why the question “what counts as poetry?” matters. If you’re not familiar with Instapoetry, see work by Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav, Atticus, and Amanda Lovelace, who are mentione...
1.4 Interview with Alice Munro Book Club members / Alice Munro's Dear Life
November 10, 2020 12:00 - 1 hour - 43.7 MBIn this episode of Teachin’ Books, I talk to a few members from the lovely Alice Munro book club I’ve been participating in this year: Sarah Roger, Taylor Graham, Tracy Ware, Sandra Hoenle, and Bob Thacker. We chat about Alice Munro’s short story collection Dear Life and, in general, about the experience of ~being in a book club~ (particularly during the pandemic) and how book clubs intersect with teaching and learning. Stories! Feelings! The realities of book-clubbing via Zoom! This episo...
1.3 Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
November 03, 2020 14:00 - 33 minutes - 22.8 MBIn this episode of Teachin’ Books, I talk to... myself!... about teaching Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. Get the novel through your library or local bookstore. In Saskatoon, I like Turning the Tide and McNally Robinson. There's also the film adaptation. Check out Dorothy Ellen Palmer's work as a disability activist and writer. Listen and subscribe to Métis in Space, an awesome podcast by Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel that joins decolonial cultural criticism with sf. The po...
1.2 Interview with Joanne Leow / David Chariandy's Brother
October 27, 2020 15:00 - 58 minutes - 40.5 MBIn this episode of Teachin’ Books, host Jessica McDonald talks to Dr. Joanne Leow, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, about teaching David Chariandy's novel Brother. Find out more about David Chariandy’s novel Brother. You can find Karina Vernon’s edited anthology The Black Prairie Archives at Wilfrid Laurier University Press. And you can find her U Winnipeg English talk “Changing the Prairie Story: Reading Black & Black-Indigenous Writers in the Prairie Arch...
1.1 Interview with Jade McDougall / Marilyn Dumont's "Letter to Sir John A Macdonald"
October 20, 2020 16:00 - 38 minutes - 26.3 MBIn this first official / full-length episode of Teachin’ Books, host Jessica McDonald talks to Ph.D. candidate and instructor Jade McDougall about teaching Marilyn Dumont’s “Letter to Sir John A Macdonald.” So, today we’re teachin’ POEMS, y’all. Find more about Jade here. Find Marilyn Dumont’s poem “Letter to Sir John A Macdonald” at Muskrat Magazine. More information about Idle No More’s National Week of Action (Oct 19-Oct 23 2020) in solidarity with Mi’kmaq fishers and Mi’kmaq treaty...
0.0 Trailer / Intro & Intentions
October 13, 2020 22:00 - 16 minutes - 11.3 MBWelcome to Teachin' Books! In this first episode / minisode / trailer (who can decide?), host Jessica McDonald chats about her intentions for the podcast and about what you can expect in future episodes. See more about Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom, edited by Ada S. Jaarsma and Kit Dobson. See more about Hannah McGregor’s work on podcasting as a community- and relationship- building practice, or as “collaborative co-creation." See Mathieu Aubin’s pi...