Teachin' Books

On 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 The Atlantic
• @âpihtawikosisân on Twitter / Chelsea Vowel's website / her tweet on "believing" the fires
• Urban Indigenous Collective and a link to donate to their work

Follow Teachin' Books on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod or get in touch at [email protected].  I'd love to hear from you about this or any other episode in the back catalogue!

Please do share the podcast with someone who might like it, and rate and review in your podcasting app. Reviews especially help get the word out about the pod!

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands. 

 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

Heeeey 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 thinking about turning into a...  rest inventory?! 

Hit play on the episode to hear more, then get in touch with me to tell me your thoughts and practices around ~rest~ in teaching and learning! 

• Tricia Hersey's The Nap Ministry  (& her 2022 book, Rest is Resistance)
• Audre Lorde's A Burst of Light and Other Essays  / The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (ed. Roxane Gay, & which Hersey includes in "The Nap Ministry Library" from Rest is Resistance)
• Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You Back
• Indigenous Climate Action (ICA) & their statement "Equitable Action Needed for Indigenous Communities Impacted by Alberta and Saskatchewan Wildfires"
• Central Urban Métis Federation Inc. (CUMFI)'s call for donations of supplies
• Official East Prairie Métis Settlement Fire Relief donation fund
• Official Fox Lake Fire Evacuees donation fund
• Canadian Red Cross 2023 Alberta Fires Appeal

Follow Teachin' Books on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod or get in touch at [email protected].  I'd love to hear from you about this or any other episode in the back catalogue!

And it would be so lovely if you shared the podcast with someone you think might like it, and rate and review in your podcasting app. Reviews especially help get the word out about the pod!

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands. 

 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

Today'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 forum prompt that was actually successful (!!). Listen in and tell me what you think!

• Kate Beaton's Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands / original five-part series / Hark! A Vagrant
• Aritha van Herk's "There’s more to Fort McMurray than oil sands – It’s a real community"
• Anti-Racism on the Prairies: A Workbook for Canadian Settlers (with thanks, again, to SURJ #yxe for sharing this Call for Contributions)

If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to [email protected] or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected].  Please share the pod with someone you think might like it, and rate and review if you have the option to in your podcasting app! :)

 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

On 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, plus its possibilities and limitations; learning outcomes/objectives and the questions they raise; the matter of WHAT vs HOW we read in a postcolonial lit context; and more!

• Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom (eds. Ada J. Jaarsma and Kit Dobson) includes Namrata's piece "Practising How We Read What We Read." Find out more about the book in my review of it in Engaged Scholar Journal.
• Jody Mason's "Make Them Up and Ignore Them"? Learning Outcomes and Literary Studies in Canada
• Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) / SURJ YXE Facebook and Instagram (with many thanks to Jessica DeWitt for bringing my attention to the work of SURJ YXE)

If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to [email protected] or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected].  Please share the pod with someone you think might like it, and rate and review if you have the option to in your podcasting app! :)

 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

Wow, 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 deductions (extensions only!); negotiating synchronous vs. asynchronous teaching; coming back to teaching as a podcaster; and more! Listen in and tell me what your experiences with teaching in 2022 have been :)

• Jesse Stommel on attendance policies, pulling from his contributions to "The Attendance Conundrum"
• Zoe Todd on not having attendance policies
• My past and ongoing thinking re: attendance and participation has also been informed by the public work of Kaitlin Blanchard and sarah madoka currie
• Gratitude to Skydancer Louise Bernice Halfe and Tenille Campbell for the spicy poems that made us laugh and get playful in my second-year ENG class
• Brandi Morin on how "'Freedom' protests are white supremacy in all its glory"
• Cornerstone: Housing for Women

If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to [email protected] or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected].  Please share the pod with someone you think might like it!

 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

In 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 creative capacities we build in Humanities classrooms? Hit play to find out more!

• "Teaching North American Petrocultures in Germany: Experiments in Collaborative Pedagogy," co-written by Brent, Moritz, and Rachel.
• Check out Brent's collection of "loanwords to live with," An Ecotopian Lexicon,  co-edited with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, as well as the teaching guide Matthew and Brent created for the book / Brent also recently published Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of U.S. Decline
• Moritz is Assistant Professor and Chair of North American literature and critical future studies at Dresden University of Technology in Germany working on the transformative capacities of speculative fiction and art to help us grapple with the climate crisis and promote social change / Find more about his work here
• Find Rachel at her website and on Twitter / Check out her recent work in a chapter entitled "Contested and Emergent Futures: Film and Energy Regimes of the Newfoundland Offshore" in Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures,  a collaboratively-authored StoryMap called "Energy Amphitheatre: St. John's Harbour" (with Fiona Police and Danine Farquharson), and in the article "From Labrador to Leipzig: Film and Infrastructures along the Fur Trail."
• How to Survive the End of the World podcast
• Elizabeth Miller's interactive documentary The Shore Line / Plus, an educator's guide to the project, on "speculative futures," written by Rachel
• Indigenous Climate Action website / Indigenous Climate Action Youth Wellness Honorarium and Toolkit

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected]. 

 **The transcript for this episode, once available, will be here.*

This 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 chain stores and sites of retail and travel. The audio essay features clips from an interview with my mom (hi mom!) and stories from my family and childhood, which I thought made it an especially appropriate piece to share with you during this holiday season. <3 I hope you enjoy!

Thank you, Sarah and Paul, for giving me the go-ahead to share this essay on Teachin' Books! And to everyone who may be listening in real time: I hope you have a restful holiday season and can find some moments of joy at the end of another difficult year.

• The Future Horizons: A John Douglas Taylor Conference website has more information about the summer project series and links to all the projects (check them out!!)
• Original webpage for "Feeling My Way through Walmart": including transcript, references, and acknowledgements

If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to [email protected] or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected].  Please share the pod with someone you think might like it!

 **The transcript for this episode, once available on the Teachin' Books site, will be here, but you can also find the transcript on the original audio essay page here.**

I'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 prison programming; the Inspired Minds philosophy, which includes welcoming diversions, informal chat, and laughter; responding to texts through the senses, licking tables (!!), and more. Listen above or on most podcasting apps!

• Gregory Scofield's poem "Heart Food" comes from his collection I Knew Two Métis  Women
• "'Against Improvement,' Toward Relations: Meditations on a Prison Writing Program" by Nancy Van Styvendale 
• Karrie refers to the poem "âcimowina" by Marilyn Dumont in A Really Good Brown Girl
• Sherry Farrell-Racette's faculty page, including citations for her work on memory, objects, and more
• Richard Wagamese's Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations
• "Prisons are built on our backs" by Cory Charles Cardinal
• The Prison Abolition Issue of briarpatch magazine
• Inmates 4 Humane Conditions / Beyond Prison Walls Canada / noprisons.ca

If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to [email protected] or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected].  Please share the pod with those you think might like it!

*Today's episode art comes to you from the inside of my makeshift podcast-recording blanket fort. Welcome!

 **The transcript for this episode, once available, will be here.**

Today'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 we get into: turning Instagram into an activist tool; collaborative editing, learning, and peer-to-peer mentorship models; teaching with/and social media; securing funding for awesome feminist research-creation projects like Shana's; centring rest and care for ourselves and each other as a core part of research and teaching projects; and so much more. Listen and enjoy!

• As Shana mentions, Feminist Think Tank is thinking about opening themselves up as a curatorial collaborative space that will invite and host guest posts. Reach out to them via DM on their account if you're interested.
• Chesapeake Digital Humanities Consortium: Social Justice and Online Activism
• Not Influencers, But Amplifiers: @aesthetic.resistance as Feminist IG Hack (co-written by Shana MacDonald and  Brianna I. Wiens, who we mention in the episode)
• Materializing Data: New Research Methods for Feminist Digital Humanities (co-written by Brianna Wiens, Stan Ruecker, Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Milena Radzikowska, and Shana MacDonald)
• Living whose best life? An intersectional feminist interrogation of postfeminist #solidarity in #selfcare (co-written by Briana Wiens and Shana MacDonald)
• @theindigenousnarchist / @indigenousfeminisms / @decolonizemyself / @theindigenousfoundation

If you didn't hear my announcement from previous episodes: We have MERCH! If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to [email protected] or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected].  

It's super helpful to me if you share the pod with a friend, rate it, review it, tell your folks tell your family tell your neighbours your cats and anyone who will listen!

 **The transcript for this episode, once available, will be here.**

If 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 me know how *you* teach, or read, this poem. I'm curious to know!

• Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
• English 1G03: Emily Dickinson With Magda Zapędowska and Eugenia Zurowski
• Bill Bartley's faculty page
• Niigaan Sinclair's Twitter / faculty page
• I Pass the Talking Stick to You: Sharing, Reading, Teaching Residential School Stories conference
• For more on how the frames we bring into our teaching influence the learning that happens there, see Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom (eds. Ada Jaarsma and Kit Dobson), and especially the essay by soon-to-be podcast guest Namrata Mitra, whose contribution opens with a question similar to the point made by Niigaan Sinclair: "What is at stake in the first text you assign in an English literature course?" (103).
• Episode pic is of my own damn undergrad paper, in which I correctly spelled Dickinson's last name exactly 0 times. Growth!

If you didn't hear my announcement from the last episode: We have MERCH! If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to [email protected] or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at [email protected].  In this kick-off to Season Two, I'd so appreciate if you'd share the pod with a friend, rate it, review it, tell your folks tell your family tell your neighbours and anyone who will listen!

 **The transcript for this episode, once available, will be here.**