This roundtable asks panelists to reflect on how popular culture can be used in the college writing classroom. How does popular culture help professors teach writing? How does the writing classroom offer an opportunity to teach students about popular culture? How can introducing popular culture help address the unique challenges of the first-year writing classroom?
Because writing is a skills-based rather than a content-based discipline, the content of the class is often for students to work with rather than learn about. This provides unique opportunities to bring in popular culture. In terms of popular culture’s success in the classroom, working with popular culture fosters instant connection and general interest. Likewise, working with previously familiar content can ease the introduction of new skills. However, working with popular culture also facilitates some of the loftiest goals of education: helping our students become better citizens. Showing how the skills taught in the writing classroom — analysis, argument, communication — apply to aspects of our everyday, media-saturated world prepares students to be better consumers and producers of that culture.
Our experienced panelists will talk about how they use popular culture in their teaching of writing and offer suggestions and advice for audience members interested in incorporating it into their own pedagogy. Significant time will be left for conversation with the audience: this roundtable is envisioned more as a conversation among equals rather a presentation by a panel.
About the presentersLeigha McReynolds
Leigha McReynolds has a PhD in English Literature. Her dissertation was on science and the supernatural in 19th Century British Literature, but her current research focus is contemporary science fiction. She has published chapters in Disability in Science Fiction and Dune for the 21st Century, the first edited collections of scholarly work on their respective subjects. In her teaching, Leigha uses science fiction to engage students across disciplines: she is currently an Assistant Clinical Professor for University Honors at UMD. She also teaches literature classes for adults at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. and runs a writing coaching business to help aspiring writers of all kinds achieve their personal and professional goals. She is the chair of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area and VP of Publications for the MAPACA Board which entails being Managing Editor for the organization’s online journal: Response.
Anna Brecke
Anna Brecke is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the New England Institute of Technology and a part-time Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds M.A. degrees in English and Gender/ Cultural Studies from Simmons College, and a PhD in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Rhode Island. Her research areas are Victorian popular fiction, gender and women’s studies, television and new media, and true crime.
Matthew B. Hill
Matthew B. Hill has previously served as a MAPACA Executive Board Member (2014-2019), MAPACA Secretary (2015-2019), and MAPACA Acting President (2019). Currently he serves as the War Studies Area Chair, a position he has held since 2009. He is currently Professor of English in the Department of Humanities at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland. His work investigates the representation of war in literature and popular culture.
Thomas Grochowski
Tom Grochowski has published on topics ranging from Woody Allen, Sex and the City, the Marx Brothers, and web sites devoted to the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Recent publications include articles on Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, and most recently, an auto-ethnographic essay on the Violent Femmes’ debut LP, for the collection Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity:The Adolescentia Project. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at St. Joseph’s University, New York, where he teaches American Literature, film, and media. He is currently on the MAPACA advisory board and serves as Film Studies area co-chair. He earned his PhD from New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies; he also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, two daughters, and a Havanese dog nicknamed “Zuko.”