Category Archives: Newsletter Articles

Student Teaching

March 8, 2019 Rachel Hicks

Mariah Miller wrote an article about her experiences student teaching. Read more below to learn what to expect!

Mariah Miller with her team during Halloween

I never thought I’d be someone who would get excited to be awake at 5:30am. Student teaching has done that for me. Every morning I get up, get ready, and head off to teach 7^th grade English Language Arts at Conestoga Valley Middle School. As an English education major, this is the capstone of my entire college career. Everything that I’ve done has led up to this experience. It’s almost surreal to think about, in a sense.

I didn’t always want to be a teacher. I went back and forth between multiple majors for some time. For a semester, I majored in Biology, then switched to undecided, and then went back to English Education. Why did I choose to become a teacher? Mainly, I just want to teach students how to be good people. If I can teach one student how to be a genuinely good person, I’ll know I’ve succeeded. The thing about being an educator is that you are teaching the students so much more than just your subject area entails. You’re there to help them grow not just as as learners, but as productive people in society. Teaching is not an easy job to have, despite what some people think. Here are some of the things I’ve learned so far during my Student Teaching semester:

There is so much more to teaching than you think. You’re constantly thinking, changing plans, and adapting. You have to manage the classroom while simultaneously thinking on your feet. Kids will ask you questions that you did not even think would be on their radar. In order to counteract the everyday spontaneity of being a teacher, over prepare and organize. You can never prepare too many activities, or think of too many ways that students could misunderstand. Put yourself in your students’ shoes. What questions would you have about this activity/assignment if you were this student? Outside of the classroom, keep an agenda and calendar with all of the important assignments/lessons you will have to do. You’ll thank yourself later.
Learning in college classes what teaching is and actually teaching are two entirely different ball games. Of course, the theories and methods are important, but remembering that these are actual individuals with their own unique backgrounds is more important. I can’t stress it enough – get to know your students first and foremost. If you don’t establish rapport with students, it’s almost impossible to get them to want to learn. Your classroom environment is so much stronger when learners know that you care about them and want them to succeed. They’re not afraid to fail when they know you are there to catch them when they do.
You can’t predict what is going to happen on a daily basis. You may have a plan, but that plan may fall flat and you will have to improvise on the spot. Don’t be afraid to try new things, because your mentor will be there to help you! It’s ok for things to not work out because it’s a learning experience. Failure = growth!
Don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you find yourself struggling, ask for help. You have so many people around who want you to succeed.
It’s not as scary as you probably think it is. Throughout your professional bloc, you will pick up on the ins and outs of your school/classroom (using the printer, taking attendance, organizing student work, grading, disciplining, managing the classroom, etc.). When you start your student teaching semester, your first main focus is integrating yourself back into the classroom. Your mentor won’t just throw you to the sharks without any support. You gradually ease into taking over the classroom.

Lastly, I’ve learned to just have fun and enjoy this valuable time of my developing professional career. It may seem like a semester is a long time, but it flies by when you’re the one teaching. Student teaching has made me more excited than ever to have a classroom of my own one day. I’ve never been so sure of a career in my life. As you take the next step into student teaching, remember these words. I promise they will help to guide you and make student teaching one of the best experiences of your life.

-Mariah Miller

Do you have any advice for student teachers or any experiences other students could benefit from about student teaching? If so, contact Rachel Hicks with your story.

Conferences, Newsletter Articles, Publications

Re-Imagining Merlin

February 14, 2019 Rachel Hicks

Professor Leah Hamilton will present a paper on Authorial adaptations at Wayne State University in March. Read about her work below!

Several years ago I was confused by some very strange questions from students about the Arthurian tradition. The students eventually confessed that those questions were inspired by a television show I had never heard of: the BBC’s Merlin. Anyone who teaches literature contends with the many popular book, film, and television adaptations that influence in-class discussions, and it is helpful to know what students are influenced by and watching. So, that very week I set out to watch the first episodes in order to better “unteach” the show’s (apparently) strange presentations of the characters and tales. Instead, the students won me over; years later, I find myself championing the show as a significant adaptation of the Arthurian tradition as I develop a presentation paper about Merlin for Wayne State University’s conference “Telling & Retelling Stories: (Re)imagining Popular Culture,” and write a chapter for editor Susan Austin’s upcoming book, Arthurian Legend in the 20^th & 21^st Centuries.

Merlin includes many obvious adaptations to the Medieval stories (including casting Merlin, Arthur, and Lancelot as young adults simultaneously), but to me the most striking change is an emphatic erasure of Christianity from the stories. The omission of Christianity complicates the retelling of quite a few tales, perhaps most notably those involving the Holy Grail, and this was particularly intriguing as I waited for the young Lancelot and Guinevere’s flirtation to develop into their famously treasonous relationship. How would the writers of the BBC show redeem these characters and preserve their exemplary status without Christianity?

As I analyze the changes to plot and characterization of the characters, I am examining at the same time the circumstances under which modern audiences are willing (or unwilling!) to forgive heroes for missteps, and how the writers of the BBC’s hit show navigate this issue again and again through the five seasons (series) of Merlin. This is particularly relevant as modern audiences are increasingly vocal and public in their responses to the failures of political leaders, celebrities, and other cultural exemplars. Analysis of popular texts about some of the most beloved heroes of all time and the way in which writers are successful in persuading audiences to forgive their flaws (and at times their grievous missteps) may give some insight not only into the Arthurian tradition, but also into current attitudes regarding remorse, atonement, and redemption.

–Leah Hamilton

Community Engagement, Literary Events, Newsletter Articles, Publications, Special Activities, Student Activities

George Street Press Open Submissions!

February 14, 2019 Rachel Hicks

George Street Press is Millersville University’s literary magazine, open to students and faculty alike. Submissions are open for the Spring 2019 Edition!

This year, the club will be accepting submissions until March 8th. One student/faculty/alumni university member may submit:

3 poems (one poem cannot exceed two pages)
2 pieces of prose (one piece should not exceed 4,000 words)
2 pieces of non-fiction (one piece should not exceed 4,000 words)
3 pieces of flash-fiction (each 500 words or less)
5 pieces of original art (submit in .jpg format)
1 experimental piece (found poems, screen-plays, the strange, genre-bending, and unknown)

To submit, please email GeorgeStreetPressSubmissions@gmail.com with your name, contact info (phone number/email), as well as any notes about your pieces for the editors. All documents must be in .docx or .doc format, and art pieces must be in .jpg format. Once a piece is printed into the magazine, the writer is officially a printed author! This is a perfect opportunity for English Majors to get ahead in the creative world.

About a week before the end of the semester, the George Street Press will host a release party for the Spring 2019 Edition! Stay tuned for more information. Here are some photos from last year’s event:

Contact Kitsey Shehan or Sara Pizzo for more information about club meetings/submission guidelines or visit their Get Involved page. Photo Credit: GSP

Conferences, Literary Events, Newsletter Articles

Literary Festival

December 6, 2018 Rachel Hicks

The Literary Festival in November 2nd was a great success! If you didn’t have a chance to attend, the theme was “The Writing Life” and there were myriad presentations spanning fiction, poetry, nonfiction, publishing, and everything in between. The guest writers and presenters showcased writing as a means of self-exploration and engagement with the world around us.

The winner of the Flash Fiction Contest was Nichole DiGirolamo, a sophomore Psychology major with a minor in Art — congratulations!

Nichole’s piece, “My Mother’s Closet,” is about childhood memories, specifically memories about the items and colors inside her mother’s closet. Nichole explains, “How I miss being a child and seeing the colors and fabrics and not having a care in the world about anything going on. I wrote the piece because of all of the wonderful memories I had in that closet trying on my mothers shoes that are always way too big. Wearing her jackets that fell to the floor and always seeing the artwork she has kept from all those years. She reacts and treats each one like a million dollar piece of art even though it was terrible.”

An excerpt from her story:

A drawing made by a girl of a house on the hill. It was made with oil pastels, greens, blues, yellows fill the page. The house small but full of windows and doors so there’s a never ending amount of light to enter the home. A bush outside the shape of a cat with a tail longer than a mile it had what looked to be roses growing on it. There’s a walk way with bright pineapple colored stepping stones and in between each stone was smaller lemon colored stones. The sides of the house rough made out of bricks and cement. In the front yard a family, I tall tan man with a mustache the size of the titanic, eyes greener than limes and scribbles on his arms to mimic tattoos. A woman short with blonde hair above her ears with beautiful greenish blue eyes and a girl with long brown hair and straight across bangs giant eyes like pools of chocolate.

This is Nichole’s favorite part of the piece because of the sentimental value: “The picture is me and my family and all the colors and the details used to describe the picture was exactly how it Is described. I drew the photo when I was about 6-7 and remember every moment of making it.” To write the piece of fiction, Nichole describes that she “sat in my mom’s closet and just took a look around at the height level I would be when I was younger. I closed my eyes and touched things and smelled things to get a better sense of my surroundings and to give better detail. I looked at things that had the most meaning, like the shoes and the money. The money showed the trips we took as a family and showed how many memories we had on those trips.”

Here are some photos from the festival on November 2nd:

Panel Discussion – “The Writing Life” From left to right: Barb Strasko, Mitchell Sommers, Matt Kabik, Alex Brubaker, Phil Benoit

Event Organizers: Jeff Boyer and William Archibald

Poet Le Hinton (on left) with Matt Kabik

Former Lancaster Poet Laureate Barb Strasko

Thanks to:

Festival Chair William Archibald and Assistant Chair Jeff Boyer for their work organizing the event
Curtis Smith, Le Hinton, Jenny Hill, Michele Santamaria, Mitchell Sommers, Barb Strasko, Alex Brubaker, Megan Phillips, Phillip Benoit, Jamie Beth Cohen, Jen Hirt, Laura English, Timothy Mayers, Katarzyna Jakubiak, and Michael Deibert for agreeing to present
Graduate Assistant Andie Petrillo for creating the WordPress site and assisting with general planning
Rachel Hicks for creating advertising

Conferences, Newsletter Articles

English Majors Primed to Take on the Digital World

December 6, 2018 Rachel Hicks

In Dr. Pfannenstiel’s ENGL 318 Web Writing course, Kyle Steffish wrote an essay from the International Policy Conference about English majors in the digital world.

How do you engage with media? This was the big question behind Millersville University’s 11th Annual International Policy Conference held last month. It’s certainly a big question; but one the English Department and its students are primed to tackle.

The second session on the first day of the conference was presented by the English department’s Dr. A. Nicole Pfannenstiel. The session asked visitors to consider topics like technological empowerment and digital citizenship.

Placed around Lehr Room in Gordinier Hall were stations where session visitors could participate in interactive tech demonstrations. One demonstration allowed visitors to play The Stanley Parable, a video game with heavy existential overtones, questioning free will and the illusion of choice.

Visitors were asked to think about their time playing The Stanley Parable – to think of themselves as an audience and how they interacted with the game, the aim being to decide if the player was making their own decisions or if the game was making decisions for them through an algorithm. In other words: how much control do we have when interacting with digital media and how much are we influenced?

While the individuals who visited the session were certainly engaged, it was clear ideas like digital citizenship and empowerment were not questions many people pondered while twiddling on their social media, posting to their blog, or shopping on Amazon.

We live in a digital world. A world where leaving our house and realizing we forgot our phone causes panicked patting of pockets and a cold sweat. Most people engage with technology and act as digital citizens every day – including, of course, Millersville’s English students and English professors.

Yet, as writers, as rhetoricians, as composition instructors both present and future, are we engaging enough with these ideas and questions?

How do we engage with media?

Does technology empower us or entrap us?

What is digital citizenship?

And maybe the most important question of all: are students prepared for an ever increasing digital world?

Millersville’s English program is an excellent place to try to answer these questions and, better yet, empower students as digital citizens.

English classes like the recently introduced Web Writing (ENGL 318) offer a place to start for engaging students with and preparing them for a digital world. Classes like Web Writing encourage students to think about rhetoric and composition in ways they rarely do. Rhetorical thinking – like purpose, audience, and kairos – is shifted from the purely academic space to the digital space – a space where rhetorical thinking is especially critical. This space is quickly becoming ever important to all levels of our society. Having the tools to understand and create compelling content within this space is a necessity.

As English majors graduate and enter careers, it becomes clear the landscape has changed. There is a need for writers savvy with Search Engine Optimization, with social media platforms, and with creating multimodal content for websites and blogs.

Take a walk through any career fair and you’ll quickly see copy and content writers are in high demand. More so, regardless of career, you’ll see the importance for the skills needed for digital readiness – skills that are already being taught right here in Millersville’s English department.

We are on the frontier of the digital age. It is clear technology shapes how we write and how we think of writing. Yet this is still also new. It is exciting. We are trail blazers, explorers, carrying rhetoric and composition forward. Though classes like Web Writing are a great beginning, it is only the start.

Events like the International Policy Conference show we are only just scratching the surface of how we think about and engage with media, how we can empower ourselves through it, and how we can become digital citizens prepared for a digital world.

I believe the English department is the best place to push this frontier forward. The English program not only needs classes like Web Writing, but classes that emphasize digital rhetoric, skills, and citizenship.

–Kyle Steffish

Grad Students, Newsletter Articles, Publications

myOwnBody.docx by Maria Rovito

December 6, 2018 Rachel Hicks

Congratulations to Maria Rovito for publishing a book of her poems! If you have been recently published, contact Rachel Hicks with your story.

myOwnBody.docx, a collection of conceptual, cyber, and experimental poems, looks at the ways in which bodies are rendered and manipulated on screen, on the Internet, and in real life. Reading on the page as lines of code, chat room messages, and transcriptions, Rovito’s work aims to explore and reinvent the question of the body and human involvement in machinery and technology, shifting the borders between human and non-human.

Maria was profiled on the blog because a few of her poems featured in this collection were published on websites and in magazines. Check out her experiences as a grad student and a writer here.

You can find her book on Amazon.

Newsletter Articles, Publications

M.J. Zeller — The Edelion: Deliverance

December 6, 2018 Rachel Hicks

Within the past year, Millersville alum Matt Zeller published a novel he began working on during his time at MU entitled The Edelion: Deliverance. This is the first book in a series of four.

From the back flap:

The underworld of society is not for the faint of heart. Nobles spit on you, the city watch beats you, and the general public treats you like a disease. To live in this cold and dark life, one must fight for survival every day. Many turn to theft by means of cruelty and murder, but there are some that approach this career through cunning, guile, and skill. It is through this lifestyle that we find a young boy known only as Harth, striving to make a life for himself and gain fame and fortune under the infamous banner of the Thieves Guild.

Upon passing the first test, Harth is instructed to find his way to the City of Thieves; however, he discovers a world far more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. Along his journey to the City of Thieves, evil creatures and minions of a long-forgotten power lurk in the shadows, tracking his movements for reasons unknown to him. It all seems coincidental to Harth, but the fluctuations of a sleeping magic within him suggest otherwise. Harth is left frightened and confused as his injuries pile up and his courage wanes, but the not-so-random people he meets along the way keep him pushing forward. Despite all the near-death situations, Harth finds his way to the City of Thieves to secure his place among the most infamous thieves in the world. But are his adventures complete? His goals met? Or have they only just begun now that a once-slumbering evil creeps back into the land, hungry for destruction?

Matt worked closely with Dr. Tim Miller on the early drafts of the novel when he was an undergraduate student. We are so very proud of the publications that emerge from the creativity of Millersville students.

Millersville students get published! If you’ve recently found yourself a published author, let us know by contacting Rachel Hicks with your story.

Conferences, Newsletter Articles, Special Activities

Powerful Media Use at the International Policy Conference

November 28, 2018 Rachel Hicks

Leah Hoffman participated in the International Policy Conference held on October 24th and 25th at MU. Check out her experience below!

The International Policy Conference, focusing on the Power of Media, was held on October 24 and 25. One of the sessions focused on interacting with other languages and cultures in a digital space. Along with two other students, I examined the possibility for misinterpretation of other languages when engaging online and the practices that will hopefully lend themselves to more successful communication across languages.

The first aspect to our presentation focused on idiomatic phrases and their use in language. I brought some Spanish idiomatic phrases and asked students to use an online translator to learn the literal meaning of the phrase. We then contrasted the literal and idiomatic phrases. For example, “ser pan comido” literally translates as “to be eaten bread,” but it is more closely aligned to the American idiomatic phrase “to be a piece of cake.” I asked students to consider how a lack of cultural understanding or going solely off a literal translation could make communication more difficult, or even impossible. This began a discussion of user responsibility to have personal or cultural knowledge when interacting with other languages online, or at the very least user understanding that some meanings may literally get lost in translation.

We then spoke about the use of proverbs and sayings and their ability to convey the morals of a society. There is a Japanese proverb that literally translates to “Let the cute journey.” This may not make sense to a nonnative, but the meaning behind the proverb is not dissimilar to the American proverb meaning “spare the rod, spoil the child”. Again, this demonstrates the need for deeper cultural understanding, an understanding that cannot simply be garnered through an online translator.

To conclude our session, we introduced a quote from Nigerian author Chinua Achebe who suggested that “proverbs are like the palm oil with which words are eaten.” We asked students to consider how proverbs and idiomatic phrases allow us to communicate more clearly. We noted their importance in expressing abstract thoughts or making concepts and ideas more digestible. Students were challenged to think of modern or digital examples that serve the same purpose across different modes of communication. They were invited to participate in an ongoing conversation by adding their own thoughts and realizations to the poster with sticky notes, which were available for other students with the purpose of seeing how their peers were engaging with the content. Students made suggestions of examples in digital communication, such as the use of emojis to clarify text messages or the unifying or clarifying roles of memes of gifs which contain their own brand of meaning that can transcend communication barriers.

Overall, the goal of the session was to make students more cognizant of aspects of language that may not always be received when engaging in online communication. This called to attention practices that they may employ in digital communication to clarify their own intentions and messages. Overall, the students came away with a new perspective on their roles as digital citizens and a deeper understanding of intercultural interactions online in an age where the entire world is connected.

–Leah Hoffman

Newsletter Articles, Resources

Reading Our World: Masculinity

November 16, 2018 Rachel Hicks

ENGL 242: Reading Our World is one of the core classes of the English major that is almost comparable to an advanced book club. Each section of Reading Our World focuses on a different theme explored through a section of texts on that theme. Critical lenses are applied across the field of English Studies to explore different perspectives by learning methods for critiquing texts.

Of the many sections of ENGL 242 offered next semester, one of the newest to look out for is Reading Our World: Masculinity.

Toxic masculinity is a buzzword in 2018, but the concept certainly isn’t new. In academic circles, the preferred term is hegemonic masculinity. Simply put, this term refers to any practice that attempts to justify male dominance over women and “weaker” types of men. We see this not only in the male/female binary, but also in the straight/gay and alpha/beta binaries. These biases are deeply ingrained, even in our language. Honorific language is used to describe highly “masculine” traits, whereas pejoratives are used for most characteristics deemed “feminine,” especially when referring to less “masculine” men.

This course will examine Western literature through the lens of various masculinities in an effort to unveil the toxic ideology that contributes to social ills, including domestic violence, rape culture, gay-bashing, and the abuse of power, among others. Ultimately, students will leave this course able to recognize the ideology of hegemonic masculinity when they encounter it in music, film, television, and literature so that they can begin to dismantle it.

Details:

Wednesday from 6-9pm at the Ware Center
Counts as a G1 and a W
If you have already taken ENGL 242, you can take it again for elective credit

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