Teachin' Books Jessica McDonald

On the agenda today is true masterpiece of reality television, Below Deck: Mediterranean! Specifically: Season 6 Episode 16, "Sleepless in Croatia," which I've happily taught a few times now in my first-year cultural studies courses. 

Topics today include: surveying the realities of the superyachting industry, teaching emotional and affective labour, and cringing hard at the talent show the guests forcibly instruct the crew to put on. Come talk tv with me!
Arlie Hochschild's interview in The Atlantic@âpihtawikosisân on Twitter / Chelsea Vowel's website / her tweet on "believing" the firesUrban Indigenous Collective and a link to donate to their workFollow Teachin' Books on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod or get in touch at teachinbookspod@gmail.com.  I'd love to hear from you about this or any other episode in the back catalogue!

Please do share the podcast with someone who might like it, and rate and review in your podcasting app. Reviews especially help get the word out about the pod!

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands. 
 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

Heeeey y'all: Teachin' Books is back to production after a longer-than-expected hiatus, and today I'm talkin' about REST.  

More specifically: how an enforced rest-by-injury shaped my teaching practices in the last six months, including newly grappling with the "pace" of sound teaching and confronting the ableist dimensions of teaching and learning. I also share a bit about my Labour, Justice, and the Cultural Lives of Working People class, including a labour inventory exercise that I'm thinking about turning into a...  rest inventory?! 

Hit play on the episode to hear more, then get in touch with me to tell me your thoughts and practices around ~rest~ in teaching and learning! 
Tricia Hersey's The Nap Ministry  (& her 2022 book, Rest is Resistance)Audre Lorde's A Burst of Light and Other Essays  / The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (ed. Roxane Gay, & which Hersey includes in "The Nap Ministry Library" from Rest is Resistance)Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You BackIndigenous Climate Action (ICA) & their statement "Equitable Action Needed for Indigenous Communities Impacted by Alberta and Saskatchewan Wildfires"Central Urban Métis Federation Inc. (CUMFI)'s call for donations of suppliesOfficial East Prairie Métis Settlement Fire Relief donation fundOfficial Fox Lake Fire Evacuees donation fundCanadian Red Cross 2023 Alberta Fires AppealFollow Teachin' Books on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod or get in touch at teachinbookspod@gmail.com.  I'd love to hear from you about this or any other episode in the back catalogue!

And it would be so lovely if you shared the podcast with someone you think might like it, and rate and review in your podcasting app. Reviews especially help get the word out about the pod!

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands. 
 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

Today's episode involves our first ever comic on Teachin' Books! I'm excited to share with you  how I teach Kate Beaton's webcomic Ducks, which you should definitely read right now, if you haven't already.

Topics of the episode include: confronting environmental and social justice through literature, i.e. through visual and textual analysis; teaching within and around public narratives about Fort McMurray; reading text alongside paratext; and celebrating the effectiveness of a discussion forum prompt that was actually successful (!!). Listen in and tell me what you think!
Kate Beaton's Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands / original five-part series / Hark! A VagrantAritha van Herk's "There’s more to Fort McMurray than oil sands – It’s a real community"Anti-Racism on the Prairies: A Workbook for Canadian Settlers (with thanks, again, to SURJ #yxe for sharing this Call for Contributions)If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to teachinbookspod@gmail.com or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.
The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at teachinbookspod@gmail.com.  Please share the pod with someone you think might like it, and rate and review if you have the option to in your podcasting app! :)
 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

On today's episode, I'm chattin' with the fabulous Namrata Mitra, who is an Associate Professor at Iona College in the Department of English. Her research areas are feminist philosophy, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. 

We talk about Namrata's Postcolonial Literatures courses, and we discuss a wide range of teaching-related topics, such as: how students' material conditions shape their learning, and in turn should shape our teaching; uncertainty as pedagogical method and practice, plus its possibilities and limitations; learning outcomes/objectives and the questions they raise; the matter of WHAT vs HOW we read in a postcolonial lit context; and more!
Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom (eds. Ada J. Jaarsma and Kit Dobson) includes Namrata's piece "Practising How We Read What We Read." Find out more about the book in my review of it in Engaged Scholar Journal.Jody Mason's "Make Them Up and Ignore Them"? Learning Outcomes and Literary Studies in CanadaShowing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) / SURJ YXE Facebook and Instagram (with many thanks to Jessica DeWitt for bringing my attention to the work of SURJ YXE)If you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to teachinbookspod@gmail.com or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.
The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at teachinbookspod@gmail.com.  Please share the pod with someone you think might like it, and rate and review if you have the option to in your podcasting app! :)
 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

Wow, things have chaaaanged and are still a-changin'! Teachin' and learnin' things, that is. 

On this first solo episode of 2022, I talk about how I've come face-to-face, in the last few weeks of full-time teaching, with how teaching and learning has changed in the year and a half+ that I was away from teaching for my full-time postdoctoral fellowship. 

Topics include: uncertainty and flexibility; questioning attendance and participation practices; deciding not to assign any late deductions (extensions only!); negotiating synchronous vs. asynchronous teaching; coming back to teaching as a podcaster; and more! Listen in and tell me what your experiences with teaching in 2022 have been :)
Jesse Stommel on attendance policies, pulling from his contributions to "The Attendance Conundrum"Zoe Todd on not having attendance policiesMy past and ongoing thinking re: attendance and participation has also been informed by the public work of Kaitlin Blanchard and sarah madoka currieGratitude to Skydancer Louise Bernice Halfe and Tenille Campbell for the spicy poems that made us laugh and get playful in my second-year ENG classBrandi Morin on how "'Freedom' protests are white supremacy in all its glory"Cornerstone: Housing for WomenIf you're interested in getting your hands on a Teachin' Books tidbits zine as part of my ongoing fundraiser to ensure I can keep providing honoraria for students and precariously or under-employed folks who come chat on the podcast, e-transfer to teachinbookspod@gmail.com or paypal.me/jambermcd or just drop me a line wherever you can find me :) The zines are pay-what-you-can, and I'll need your mailing address to get the zine to you.
The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at teachinbookspod@gmail.com.  Please share the pod with someone you think might like it!
 **The transcript for this episode, once available , will be here.**

In this first episode of 2022 (!!!),  I'm delighted to be joined by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Moritz Ingwersen, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski, co-instructors of a course on "North American Petrocultures," taught collaboratively and online through TU Dresden in Germany. 

The core of this episode: How do you talk about oil in a Humanities classroom? What can studying arts and literature teach us about oil, energy, and environmental justice? How can we imagine different futures through the skills and creative capacities we build in Humanities classrooms? Hit play to find out more!
"Teaching North American Petrocultures in Germany: Experiments in Collaborative Pedagogy," co-written by Brent, Moritz, and Rachel.Check out Brent's collection of "loanwords to live with," An Ecotopian Lexicon,  co-edited with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, as well as the teaching guide Matthew and Brent created for the book / Brent also recently published Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of U.S. DeclineMoritz is Assistant Professor and Chair of North American literature and critical future studies at Dresden University of Technology in Germany working on the transformative capacities of speculative fiction and art to help us grapple with the climate crisis and promote social change / Find more about his work hereFind Rachel at her website and on Twitter / Check out her recent work in a chapter entitled "Contested and Emergent Futures: Film and Energy Regimes of the Newfoundland Offshore" in Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures,  a collaboratively-authored StoryMap called "Energy Amphitheatre: St. John's Harbour" (with Fiona Police and Danine Farquharson), and in the article "From Labrador to Leipzig: Film and Infrastructures along the Fur Trail."How to Survive the End of the World podcastElizabeth Miller's interactive documentary The Shore Line / Plus, an educator's guide to the project, on "speculative futures," written by RachelIndigenous Climate Action website / Indigenous Climate Action Youth Wellness Honorarium and ToolkitThe podcast music is by Dyalla Swain and the graphics are by @muskrathands.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at teachinbookspod@gmail.com. 
 **The transcript for this episode, once available, will be here.*