Teaching Alcott’s Writings/ Teaching in Alcott’s Writings

deadline for submissions: 
January 25, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Alcott Society/ American Language Association
contact email: 

Teaching Alcott’s Writings/ Teaching in Alcott’s Writings (Deadline Extended)

 ALA 2024/ Chicago

This panel will provide both a forum for papers highlighting new pedagogical approaches to teaching the work of Louisa May Alcott, as well as papers that engage with how Alcott thematizes pedagogy throughout her writing. Thus we welcome contributors who might present upon fresh classroom strategies and assignments (especially those that use new media technologies), creative syllabi, and course reading lists that place Alcott’s life, times, and texts into dialogue with nineteenth-century and/or contemporary concerns including (though not limited to) abolition; the formation of gendered, sexed, and racialized identities; the persistence of income inequality; the precarity of labor under conditions of Gilded-Age capitalism then and now; or the role of pedagogy itself in the construction of (anti-)democratic subjects. What surprising literary/cultural figures might one pair beside Alcott? What role can the digital humanities or podcasting play in teaching the story of Alcott and her times? How can teaching adaptations of Alcott’s work on film, television, audiobooks, etc., provide students with a reception history of Alcott and her writing? As the daughter of a pedagogical reformer, a student at Henry David Thoreau’s school, and a sometime governess and teacher herself, Alcott’s works are themselves saturated with pedagogical concerns. One thinks of Little Woman’s representations of how didactic fiction like Pilgrim’s Progress can shape human character;  Jo’s school for boys at Plumfield as the setting for Little Men; or the role of governesses explored in texts like Work and Behind a Mask. While Bronson Alcott is often remembered for being an innovative pedagogue in his day, how might we read Louisa May Alcott as a powerful theorist of education herself? Anyone who teaches Alcott or thinks about Alcott’s approach to teaching is welcome to submit.

 

Please send one-page abstracts to Joe Conway (jpc0018@uah.edu) and Jaime Lynne Burgess (jamie@jamielynneburgess.com)  by January 25, 2024.