Innovative Teaching

This spring, Dr. Caroline Young’s ENGL 3851S class, Writing for Social Justice, teamed up with the Special Collections Library.  Their shared goal:  to research and produce special collections archive kits to make artifact-based inquiry accessible at Whitworth Women’s Facility in Hartwell, Georgia.  As a class, the students selected 11 women activists across Georgia’s history.  Representing women such as Mary Musgrove, Lillian Smith, and Bennie McKinley, the kits contain curated representations of primary sources from the Special Collections Library.  At semester’s end, the students organized a pop-up artifact exhibit at the SCL.  The kits will be used this fall in the Critical Thinking and Writing course at Whitworth, and Dr. Young looks forward to her future UGA students working with the reflections and writing produced by the Whitworth students this fall. A few of Dr. Young’s students reflected on their experience of the course, on view here.  Enjoy!

Dr. Lindsey Harding is thrilled to share ENGL 4837's captivating

 collection of student-created digital narratives that push storytelling boundaries through innovation and imagination. This semester's showcase invites you into wildly creative worlds: encounter alien experiments, follow a grief-stricken god wandering the internet, discover caffeine's origin story, witness medical marvels, and explore weeks of diverse hobbies—from puzzles to knitting. Each creator brings their unique vision to the challenge of "AMAZE US," resulting in an eclectic array of compelling digital experiences. The featured works represent carefully crafted projects with distinctive themes, approaches, and technological platforms chosen for their narratives. Altogether, these stories demonstrate both creative ambition and technical execution. See how UGA undergraduate students are transforming traditional narratives through digital innovation, creating media experiences that are intriguing, compelling, fun, and fresh. Enjoy!

In October 2024, Genevieve Guzmán’s ENGL 4800W: Intermediate Fiction Writing class visited the on-campus galleries of the UGA Museum of Natural History. The group got a tour of the exhibit and a behind-the-scenes look at the bird research collection, then stayed on site to draft a thematic story. Their prompt was to write either a quest story with museum objects or an outdoor survival scenario set in the region. Owls were their preferred subject, but they also wrote about alligator attacks in a flood, greedy pirate captains who succumb to skin-burrowing butterfly larvae, exotic animal marketplaces, rock climbing accidents with animal companions, people-eating Venus fly traps, doom preppers, predatory megafauna brought back from extinction, and species-jumping viruses. The students agreed this “Georgia Short” was their favorite craft exercise of the semester. You can read two of these flash stories by Jackson Reilly and Annabella Opipari on the museum website.