In every course, my pedagogy is centered around empathy. I believe that students learn best when they have the resources — in and out of the classroom — to do so. Yet, so many students come to college without these systems of support. Recognizing that, I emphasize to my students that they are humans first. With flexible office hours and attention to self-care in the classroom, I help students access the resources that help them best learn. We each bring our experiences to the class as we challenge ideas about equity, justice, and cultural value.
Check out how this functions in a selection of my syllabi and assignments below.
Pedagogical Values
Accessibility
Created with guidance from resources including Ann-Marie Womack’s & Tulane University’s Accessible Syllabus and the universal design for learning guidelines, I work to make my classes as diversely accessible as possible. My syllabi often include images of required or suggested texts, alt-text, live links to sources, and my preferred pronouns. I provide plain text versions, too, which more readily run through screen readers or translation software. I simultaneously provide students with versions of the syllabi that are legible by screen readers.
Expanding the Canon
In each of my courses, students reflect upon our course’s selected texts and consider how various ideas shape how we determine whose ideas and voices are worth reading. In literature-based courses, students and I use class discussion and their assignment to question the construction of literary canons and the effects of representation.
Care
I recognize that the work of the course cannot be siloed within the space of the classroom and that the work of the college student inevitably abuts and erupts into students’ personal lives as humans. Embracing pedagogies based in caring and advocacy, I structure classes to encourage student engagement in the course.
Critical Reflection
In my writing classes, I bring the students back to their own work as the site of critique. By examining writing we ourselves have written we are often able to grasp the “moves” we make — and then see how to strengthen them.
Revision
Revision is a key part of my writing courses. Students write at least two drafts of major compositions, but we often revise pieces of them more than that. In this way, the recursive practice of writing becomes a craft we can practice and continually develop.
Student Agency
Writing is intensely personal, and I urge students to see their writing as exercises of their own authority as a thinker and advocate. In class, I model this behavior by valuing students’ work as models for the class — using Google Slides and other digital platforms to host student ideas, questions, and remarks during discussion. This becomes a way of framing the students as themselves sites of knowledge.
Selected Syllabi
To view or download the syllabi, please click the titles below. Many of the below syllabi have versions formatted for screen readers following the first link. If I have not yet uploaded a screen-reader ready version of a syllabus you’d like to examine, please reach out to me using the Contact Page or via email at hayleystefan@gmail.com.
- Disability & Literature, Spring 2023 / Screen-reader Accessible Version
- Touchstones 2A: American Literature (Survey), Fall 2022
- American Immigrant Narratives, Spring 2022 / Screen-reader Accessible Version
- Multi-Ethnic Lit. of the U.S., Spring 2021 / Summer 2022 Screen-reader Accessible Version
- Intro to Literary Study: Reading Bodies & Disability, Spring 2021 / Screen-reader Accessible Version
- Latinx Literature, Fall 2020
- Intro to Literary Study: Imagining Alternatives, Fall 2020
- First-Year Composition, Spring 2019
- Survey of American Literature, Spring 2018
Sample Assignments
Frame & Case Assignment
In this frame & case assignment, first-year writing students use the concepts from our course readings to analyze a text (here, I call it a “site of change” to refer to our focus on social movements, activist organizations, and events).
View or download the prompt by clicking on the title below.
Semester-Long Assignment
This semester-long research project asks first-year writing students to learn about a social issue or movement over the semester before creating their own activist artifact. This longer-than-usual prompt includes a guide for students to interview people in the field, surveys to help direct their research by their own interests, a project proposal outline, and a research log. Past students have created interactive art exhibits, informational websites, educational games, and mock infomercials.
View or download the prompt by clicking on the title below.
Annotation Assignment
This assignment helps second- and third-year English majors strengthen their pre-writing skills and exercise their capacity for generating ideas from a work of literature, using the Hypothes.is browser extension. After practicing annotating as part of homework and in-class activities using the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore’s website, this assignment asked students to extend their skills by more deeply engaging with Emily Dickinson’s or Walt Whitman’s poetry using either the Emily Dickinson Archive or The Walt Whitman Archive. Students practice close reading and contextual analysis, following multiple lines of inquiry — as they might do in a conventional analysis essay — without the pressure to resolve these threads into one.
View or download the prompt by clicking on the title below. This assignment is also featured as one of Hypothesis’s sample annotation assignments here.