This call is inspired by the versatile, prescient and even protean prose of Dr. Swift's most well-known work, Gulliver's Travels (1726). If Gulliver had a "tenure home," it would definitely be in the department of English; however, because of its relevance to so many disciplinary fields (economics, history, philosophy, to name the most obvious) Gulliver's Travels is finding itself in an increasingly interdisciplinary range of college courses. We're seeking a variety of pedagogy-oriented submissions that give insight into the ways Gulliver's Travels is taught in higher education.
Here are some possible issues that the collection might explore:
• methods of teaching we employ, with a particular emphasis on using Gulliver's Travels as a prompt to pedagogic experimentation
• selections or extracts from the novel that we teach and the purposes they serve from discipline to discipline
• disciplinary possibilities and limitations of the text
• using Gulliver's Travels to teach formal disciplinary requirements such as the use of evidence, the nature of genre, the skills of close reading, writing style modeling, etc.
• varied student responses to the Travels across stages of learning (from first-year undergraduate courses to graduate seminars)
• reaction of students across different educational contexts and institutional settings such as the community college, the four-year "commuter campus," the liberal arts college, etc.
• engagement of the student's social identity in reading and responding to the book
• interactions that Gulliver's Travels generates in the classroom: the moral, political, social, and aesthetic concerns it raises
The publication venue for "Traveling with Gulliver" is the Long 18th Century Teaching Tools page of the Studies in the Novel website. The range of potential contributions is wide (i.e. sample syllabi, in-class exercises, essay assignments, course reading bibliographies, or short reflective essays). We're interested in collecting a variety of content as long as it focuses on the practical issues of teaching Gulliver in your discipline. Below you will find the general submission guidelines for Studies in the Novel Teaching Tools.
Send content submissions to Joel Sodano (jsodano@albany.edu) and Michael Brown (m.brown@abdn.ac.uk) by Friday 24 March (Subject line: Traveling with Gulliver).
From studiesinthenovel.org:
We invite the submission of sample course syllabi, assignments, and short reflections on a "teachable moment"—a passage, a conflict, a scene, a pattern of meaning, or a character—from a novel. Submissions should be sent to one of the Affiliate Website Editors listed below. Short, 500-word narrative descriptions could focus on any one of the following:
• The significance of an individual novel or novelist for teaching a particular area of literary studies
• Your own experience teaching this novel, and the challenges and opportunities it raises
• Pedagogical issues surrounding the teaching of this text
• Specific activities or exercises, discussion questions, or innovative projects
• A list of bibliographic resources for teaching this novel
• Links to multimedia or other supplementary documents useful for teaching the novel
• Afterthoughts or reflections connecting the teaching of this text to broader social engagement or scholarly inquiry