This spring semester, I had the opportunity to work more closely than I ever had before with one of my English faculty. She taught an asynchronous online course entitled “Speculative Fiction and the Environment,” and I got to have discussions with her about the class as early as October 2021, which really set us up for success. Together we were able to hash out her dream exercise for the class: an annotation project where students would take a short excerpt from each of their four texts and add annotations linking the fiction to newspaper articles contemporary to the writing of the novel or to some other thematically resonant content. I came into this class with a real advantage. Because I’d started talking with the professor so early, I was able to read the texts the class would be working with in advance. The syllabus was only four novels long (well, ultimately two novels and two short story collections), which was a manageable amount to read. This meant that the texts were fresh in my mind as I prepped for each passage annotation exercise. I selected the following resources for each text:
What Worked: Reading all the books on the syllabus was extremely worth it. This wouldn’t be sustainable for a much longer syllabus, and I definitely got lucky that I liked all the books I read. Still, I got to read three books on my backlist (I hadn’t heard of Changing Planes before this class), and I was able to offer more relevant recommendations. What I’d Change: After each of the library lessons (3-5 minute videos), the students in the class completed a quick post-survey where they used one of the recommended resources and found an item that interested them. This was fine, but I’d like to think more about how to structure an assignment like this so that I get a better check on whether they really got the resources.
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