Category: pedagogy
Winner of the Beltran Award: Jamie-Lee Josselyn
Last night at the end-of-academic-year “hub party” at the Kelly Writers House I had the pleasure of announcing the winner of the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring—for 2017-18. She is Jamie-Lee Josselyn! Jamie-Lee is an utterly remarkable teacher. On the 0-4 scale used for student evaluations, Jamie-Lee’s courses...
My favorite thing about universities in the spring: mentor/mentee
Mentor and mentee after mentee’s concert. This sort of creative, generative mutuality has just got to be my favorite part of university life. Congratulations to Hannah Judd as she nears the end of a spectacular undergraduate career & to Max Apple, now amazingly 75, for loving teaching so much still...
On Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table”
When I teach my course on representations of the holocaust, I don’t lecture (for what it’s worth, it’s an ethical stance for me—but that’s for another comment sometime) and I rarely if ever record our sessions. As can be imagined—since, as I say, these are discussions, not lectures—the sessions are intense...
“Full House”: new article about Kelly Writers House
Today in the student-written, student-edited weekly magazine, 34th Street, there appeared a nice article about the Kelly Writers House that captures the spirit (and food-centricity) of our writerly haven. It can be found HERE. It begins: “It’s another cold, violently windy day in Philadelphia, but in the kitchen, sun streams through...
Toward a diversity of #MOOCs
Every once in a while I get the urge to resist some of the many vast generalizations about what “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) are and can be. Twitter is a place for this counterarguing. Search by #MOOCs and find a combination of profit-minded hucksterism, single-minded higher-ed utopianism, and critics...
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon,
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. He is currently writing a book on the art & avant-garde of 1960. He has taught a massive open online course, "
Founder/Faculty Director, 