Teaching With Magic

Welcome to a very special episode! Here, you'll learn all about learning with language invention. How can we use a cultural love of words, language, and fandom to help our students enjoy learning to read and reading to learn?

This episode's Teacher With Magic is Dr. Luke Shelton! We how magical reading can be for kids as we dive into reception theory, teaching philosophies, and the Lord of the Rings.

Dr. Luke Shelton holds a Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. His dissertation, “Small Hands Do Them Because They Must” focuses on the reception of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by young readers. Currently, Luke serves as the Editor in Chief for Mallorn: A Journal of the Tolkien Society. He is also the creator and co-host of the Tolkien Experience Podcast with Sara J Westvik and Dr Sara Brown. You can find out more about the Tolkien Experience Project, Luke’s Ph.D, and other publications at https://luke-shelton.com/

Today’s magical guest is Jordan Rannells, the technical editor for the Prancing Pony Podcast and the brains behind A Long Expected Soundscape. Jordan’s wizardry with soundscapes provides an immersive audio experience to listen to alongside the Lord of the Rings books. He’s also produced a podcast called The Music of Middle Earth in which he analyzed Howard Shore’s score to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. As for his teaching, Jordan is a professor of Music Industry Arts at Algonquin College in Ontario. He also teaches guitar, piano, and drums.

I first had the pleasure of chatting with Jordan in 2020 after the Prancing Pony Podcast Moot. He and the Friends of Mr Underhill Smial of the Tolkien Society had produced a beautiful soundscape audio project of "The Council of Elrond" and I wanted to learn more about soundscape projects and how to bring that creative energy into the classroom.

You can see a video clip of that interview with Jordan and Chad Bornholdt on my website under "The Magic of Multimedia."

In this conversation, Jordan and I chat about the details that go into a soundscape project, guiding students to think outside the box, and how music, technology, and literature intersect.

If you would like to be involved in Jordan's future Soundscape projects, you can learn more at https://jordanrannells.com/soundscapes, or you can follow the Soundscape on Twitter @LOTRSoundscape

We're flying off into the Star Wars Universe in today's episode: all about Qui-Gon Jinn, the Jedi Master we all know and love. What qualities, attitudes, and actions make Qui-Gon the cool teacher-I mean Jedi Master- that every Padawan wants? How does the Master/Apprentice relationship work in Star Wars, and what can we teachers on Earth learn from Qui-Gon and emulate in our own classrooms?

My cohost today is Dr. Amy H. Sturgis, genre history and fandom studies expert. Amy H. Sturgis holds a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and focuses on the intellectual history of speculative fiction. Sturgis, who teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne University and Signum University, has authored four books, edited/co-edited ten others, and published more than sixty essays, many on topics related to the intersection of science fiction and history. Her most recent works include the newly-published 2023 academic anthologies Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier and Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away, both of which she co-edited, and soon-to-be-published scholarly essays on Dark Academia and the work of Lois McMaster Bujold. She has taught either an undergraduate or graduate class on Star Wars every year since 2015. In addition, she has been interviewed as a genre expert by LIFE Magazine, The Huffington Post, and NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” among other media outlets. Sturgis also contributes the “Looking Back on Genre History” segment to the Hugo Award-winning podcast StarShipSofa.

In this episode, the hosts of the Potterversity podcast, Dr. Katy McDaniel and Emily Strand, join the Teaching With Magic podcast to talk about their own teaching, their favorite fantasy and science fiction texts, and their experiences while exploring the Harry Potter series as aca-fans.

Upcoming Publications

What makes Gandalf a good teacher? In this episode, I use narrative inquiry to take a look at Gandalf's key speeches and actions throughout the text that demonstrate what it means to be a quality teacher.

Welcome to our first Interview Episode! In Teaching With Magic, we're all about learning from other teachers, both in the Primary and Secondary world!

I'm joined by Rebecca Davis, more commonly known in the Tolkien Community as BarliBecca, Queen of Puns. In addition to serving as Barliman for the Prancing Pony Podcast, Rebecca is a first year writing instructor at Murray State College in Tishomingo, Oklahoma and a Ph.D. student at the University of Swansea and University of Central Oklahoma. Along with first-year writing courses, she teaches Introduction to Folklore, Introduction to Literature, English Literature, and Creative Writing. Her research interests include fantasy literature, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, fanfiction, corpus linguistics and digital humanities, fairy tales, and young adult literature.

In this episode, we discuss the wonderful ways in which she engages her students with the overlapping worlds of folklore, J.R.R. Tolkien, and writing at the college level in creative ways. And, of course, we have "pun" along the way. (Sorry)

You can read more of Rebecca's work at https://writerofrohan.com/ and you can follow her on Twitter at @beccahdavis for some more of her fantastic puns!