Using blogs in teaching

Making use of a teaching blog is something that I have done since I began teaching in 2008, but with the move to online teaching and learning over the last couple of months, I thought it would be a useful opportunity to write down some of my experiences around this as I prepare for reviving the blog for next semester. In this post I’m going to go through how I do and don’t use it, and some guidelines around practicalities.

The context: I currently use a module blog for my research-led module “Geographies of nation and empire: the Victorian novel 1850-90” which runs as a level 6 and 7 module in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey. The blog was last used in 2018-19 as my module rested while I was on sabbatical last semester. I’ve previously used a blog for level 4 students at the University of Warwick, and am planning to do so again for one of my l4 modules next year.

Firstly, it’s probably helpful to outline what I don’t use the blog for. Anything key to the module – handbooks, assessment guidelines, weekly slides and handouts – are all placed on Surreylearn (our VLE). Nothing essential to the running or assessment of the module features on the blog, preventing confusion about where to look for essential information, and meaning that the blog is not a required component to get through the module.

What I do use it for: supplementary resources, responses, and reading that complements and extends upon the module content. I post about such things as contemporary culture or news items relating to the texts we are studying; reflections  that extend upon discussions we have had in class, particularly those that I can connect up with material on my own research blog; and resources such as digital archives of Victorian studies material. With the latter especially, a blog post can provide illustrative modelling of how to navigate and incorporate digital archives and resources in a way that is more useful than just providing a set of links on the VLE. Throughout the posts, I intend to give students different ways into the material, or modes of linking across several texts through a key theme or topic. I also hope that it will spark interest and inspiration, and support students in developing independent and original approaches to topics.

While the blog is supplementary to the classes, there is a constant dialogue between the two: the blog posts refer back to discussions that we have had in class, and likewise I frequently reference posts or indicate that there will be an upcoming post on a topic during class time. This dialogue is important I think in creating a sense of continuity across the face-to-face and virtual space, something that has become even more essential as we move to hybrid models. I have also, at the request of students, increasingly used it as a space for pre-seminar questions/discussion points that they can prepare in advance.

Some practicalities and parameters: set up clear expectations and guidance on using the blog early on. Communicate clearly with students what the blog will be used for/not (as above), and when content will be posted: I keep to a weekly schedule that follows the structure of the module, and always try to post on the same day/time e.g. directly after class: most of the material is pre-drafted and a few edits can be made if anything has arisen in class. Indeed once you have run a module blog for one year, a lot of the content can be revised for reuse – over the summer I will restrict the settings of current posts so that the module will start again with a blank slate, and then edit and publish posts as we go along. I also make it as easy as possible for students to access content: provide links across the materials e.g. handbooks, VLE; have a “subscribe by email” option to make it easy to be alerted for new material.

As for student input into the blog: comments are open and welcome, although I typically find that students prefer to respond in a face-to-face setting rather than writing on the blog (this may change as we move towards more integrated use of virtual environments and is something I am reflecting upon). Students are also invited to contribute with a 500 word blog post as a formative assessment that can be posted on the blog if they wish (and settings can be altered so that these aren’t publicly viewable beyond the class).

Generally good blogging practice applies here as elsewhere – keeping posts to a manageable length, short paragraphs and sentences, lots of visual images and links, and ensuring that the blog layout (including font, size, colours, and use of media) is in an accessible format. If you are completely new to blogging there are lots of resources online, and I’d recommend Mark Carrigan’s Social Media for Academics (Sage 2020) as an all-round great resource including a chapter on communicating effectively.

I’m sure there’s much more to think about, and I’ll be continuing to do so over coming weeks, but hope that this might be helpful if you are thinking of getting started.

New publication: Mobilities, Literature, Culture

Mobilities, Literature, Culture is published today with Palgrave Macmillan. Edited with Marian Aguiar and Lynne Pearce, my co-editors of the Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture, the edited collection is the 5^th volume in the series.

The collection came out of a conference of the same name held at Lancaster University in April 2017, which proved to be a really inspiring event in establishing the relationship between mobilities studies and literary and cultural studies, and we’re delighted that the book reflects an exciting range of topics and methodological approaches. The book covers themes of mobility and nation, embodied subjectivities, the geopolitics of migration, and mobility futures. We have also written a substantial introduction with an expansive bibliography which we hope will be a useful resource for scholars, especially those who are new to the field. The book can be purchased as an e-book or hardback on the Palgrave website.

We are always happy to receive expressions of interest and proposals for the series, which thus far has publications on the hotel in modern literature, migration and the body, automobiles in French Indochina, and memory and the life course in 20^th-century literature, with more works on topics including aeromobilities and roadside spaces on the way. Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss a potential proposal!

 

 

 

Registration open: Generating New Perspectives on ‘Mobility’

Generating New Perspectives on ‘Mobility’: Problems and Paradoxes of Interdisciplinary Practice

10^th July 2019

Drysdale building, City University of London

How do concepts and practices of mobility and mobilities ‘travel’ across the disciplines of humanities and social sciences? What language(s) do academics, students, practitioners use when discussing such wide-ranging ideas in their everyday work and social worlds? And to what extent are we discussing the same things when we use the term ‘mobility’?

These questions, and others, are the focus of the symposium, which aims to foster a critically-informed and vigorous cross-fertilization of the dynamic concept of ‘mobility’ as it works within and across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Through discussing what conceptual, practical, and theoretical work ‘mobility’ does within the academy, cultural sector, and policy we will address how the concept is put to work or stretched beyond its usefulness.

Full programme and further details of registration, including bursaries, can be found here: https://www.city.ac.uk/events/2019/july/generating-new-perspectives-on-mobility-problems-and-paradoxes-of-interdisciplinary-practice

Registration open: CENTENNIAL REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND THE ARTS

CENTENNIAL REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND THE ARTS Local : National : Transnational

An international, multi-disciplinary public conference
University of Surrey, UK, 29–30 June 2018

Keynote Speakers:

• Irene Cockroft, author of Women in the Arts & Crafts and Suffrage Movements at the Dawn of the 20th Century
• Elizabeth Crawford, author of The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland

 

The 2018 centenary of the Representation of the People Act (6 February 1918), which granted the vote to many women in the UK, yields an ideal opportunity for sustained critical reflection on women’s suffrage. This conference seeks to explore the artistic activities nurtured within the movement, their range and legacy, as well as the relationships between politics and art. In striving for an inclusive, transnational reach, it will at the same time seek to move beyond traditional emphases on white middle-class feminism and explore the intersections between the regional, national, and global contexts for women’s suffrage with specific respect to the arts.

Registration is now open and a provisional program available on the conference website:

https://suffragecentennial.wordpress.com/

A limited number of bursaries for students is available to facilitate attendance at this event – please see the website for details of how to apply.

You can also follow us on Twitter @Surrey_suffrage and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SurreySuffrageCentennial/

 

VPFA Conference – Special topic panel on “Transport”

Abraham Solomon, “First Class, the meeting; and at first meeting loved” (1854)

I’m pleased to be hosting a “special topic panel” at this year’s Victorian Popular Fiction Association conference “Travel, Translation and Communication“, taking place in London on 19th-21st July. The theme of my panel is “Transport”, and the 2-hour session will allow for a longer in-depth discussion of the papers and their relationship to the field at present.

Full details of the CFP are on the VPFA website, and anyone interested in the special topic is also welcome to get in touch with me directly.

New publication: special issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies

The special issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies, featuring winning and shortlisted entries from the 2016 Feminist and Women’s Studies Association’s Annual Student Essay Competition, is now published. The issue is co-edited by me and Laura Clancy, and this was the last round of the competition that I worked on before moving to my current role of Chair of the FWSA. Once again, it was a pleasure to work on the competition and it’s wonderful to see these entries published.

This year’s competition is now open, with a deadline of 5th May: full details on the website.

Registration open: Mobilities, Literature, Culture Conference

Registration is now open for the Mobilities, Literature, Culture conference taking place on 21-22 April at Lancaster University, Centre for Mobilities Research.

The conference is the inaugural event of Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture, and highlights include:

Plenary speakers

Marian Aguiar (English, Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Kat Jungnickel (Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Film screening and Q&A with Director Andrew Kötting

Roundtable on “New Directions in Mobilities Studies” featuring

Nick Dunn (Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster   University),
Ruth Livesey (English, Royal Holloway, University of London),
Pete Merriman (Geography, Aberystwyth University)

More about the conference is available on the website, and  registration is here.

The conference is organised by Marian Aguiar (Carnegie Mellon University), Bruce Bennett (Lancaster University), Charlotte Mathieson (University of Surrey) & Lynne Pearce (Lancaster University).

Upcoming talk: Researching our Futures, Newcastle University, 16th March

I am looking forward to speaking at the Researching our Futures, a student-led careers conference taking place at Newcastle University on 16th March 2017. The topic of my talk is “Digitising our futures: early career professionalization in the digital sphere“, and I’ll be talking about using online and social media as an early career researcher in relation to issues of professionalization, identity and career development.

New review: Victorians Decoded Exhibition at Guildhall Art Gallery

I reviewed the exhibition “Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy” at Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London, for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online. I very much enjoyed the exhibition and it runs for a few more days, so do catch it if you can.

New research: Sunburn and tanning in Victorian medicine and culture

A new year brings a new project focus, although this one – on sunburn and tanning in Victorian medicine and culture – isn’t exactly new; it has been developing over the last few years, and has already generated a couple of publications, a number of talks, and some funding applications. The research process to date has been very piecemeal however, fitting around multiple jobs, cross-country moves and other publication priorities; but now that I am settled in a job and have wrapped up some other projects, this can take centre-stage as the next big project that I’ll be working on in coming years. It therefore felt about time that I (finally) write about the project here.

The project’s genesis was a footnote in my PhD thesis, where I noted that the suntanned traveller is a common trope in the Victorian novel, and that he typically appears as a positive figure: the benevolent imperialist (Peter Jennings in Gaskell’s Cranford), the doctor-saviour (Woodcourt in Dickens’s Bleak House), the marriageable sailor (Captain Kirke in Collins’s No Name). While these are often fleeting, incidental references, there seemed to be something interesting going on in the way in which suntanning was being used with these characters; suntanning was clearly being used to signify something, although it wasn’t immediately apparent exactly what. My attempts at interpretation were somewhat slippery, moving across and between different possible meanings; and these suntanned figures, almost all of them white British gentlemen travellers, seemed to push at the borders of so many expectations and concerns around Victorian bodily norms – race, masculinity, class, health.

I wrote this up into an article and then a section of my book on global journeys, and as I researched the subject I began to collect (and then, amass) a wealth of references to sunburn and tanning across the literary and cultural sphere. Suntanned figures are everywhere in Victorian writing, from dashing bronzed gentlemen travellers to lightly browned ladies in the Lakes, reddened jolly sailors to ruddy, hale farmers. Not only are they everywhere, but these references generate many, often conflicting, meanings, not just about suntanning but also more broadly about health, identity, status, and nationhood.

This project started then from trying to situate the suntanned traveller’s body and understand what he (and sometimes she) might mean. It has grown into a broader enquiry into understanding sunburn and tanning across the medical and cultural sphere, centring around the question: what did the Victorians think about when they thought about sunburn and tanning? What did suntanning mean to them, and why?

The commonly held assumption is that the Victorians thought about sunburn and tanning either negatively, or not at all; that sunburn was a marker of the labouring body – in the fields, at sea, or at war – and that it was only in the early twentieth century, with the advancement of scientific understanding about suntanning and health, that the tan became aesthetically appealing. My work moves existing research back by a period of 70 years or so to reveal a more nuanced picture about the history of suntanning in the Victorian period, one which has much to tell us about the Victorians’ attitudes to bodies and health, and about the ongoing cultural fascination with tanning today.

Looking at the period from around 1820 to 1890, I’m focusing on three areas of enquiry:

• How was sunburn and tanning understood in Victorian science and medicine? Where did it fit in Victorian scientific enquiry – who was studying it, how and why?
• How were sunburnt and tanned bodies ‘read’ in Victorian culture; what might this tell us both about what suntanning was coming to signify, and more broadly about Victorian ideas of the body?
• How did knowledge move across the scientific and cultural spheres: how did advances in medical knowledge inform cultural perspectives on sunburn and tanning, and how was scientific enquiry into tanning shaped by cultural attitudes?

The range of literature the project encompasses is broad, to say the least. In science and medicine I am looking at literature in biomedicine and photomedicine which reveals early advances in understanding the constitution of the skin and the composition of UV light, and the field of tropical medicine which examines the impact of climate on health. My literary and cultural research includes the appearance of suntanned figures in fictional and non-fictional writing, from novels, poems and plays to rural and travel literature, examining these in relation to discourses of race, gender, class and health.

The fluidity across medical and cultural spheres takes shape in the (loosely termed) field of public health literature, from advice books and guides aimed at travellers and colonial settlers, to pamphlets and advertisements for new products to treat sunburnt skin – products like Rowland’s Kalydor, advertisements for which appear frequently in the pages of literary periodicals (this one is found in the adverts accompanying Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, for example):

Advertisement for “Rowland’s Kalydor”, found in the advertisement pages of many Victorian periodicals

As things currently stand I’ve done a lot of work in identifying sources for further research and in mapping out the conceptual framework of the project; the next stage is to undertake further archival research on the primary literature to build up a more detailed and nuanced understanding of these bigger questions. Thanks to a pump-priming funding award from Surrey’s Faculty of Arts I’m able to start on some library trips this month, in preparation for further grant applications this year. Once this is underway I’ll also start to work on the next publication outputs, revisit the monograph plans, and begin presenting on the research again – something which has generated a lot of useful feedback so far – as well as working on the opportunities for public engagement generated by this research, which speaks to some contemporary issues around cultural attitudes towards tanning today. Suggestions for further reading are very much welcome and I’d be grateful for any other leads that readers that might have.