[Commlist] CFP: Teaching and Popular Culture

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will be having its 
annual conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire this year 
<https://nepca.blog/conference/>.  And I'm looking for interesting and 
unique proposals around teaching and popular culture.

This area focuses on how to teach popular culture, which may include 
sharing unique approaches to:

  * Teaching courses focused specifically on “popular culture”
  * Teaching courses on an area within popular culture (e.g. courses
    that focus on the content and cultural aspects–not necessarily the
    “how-to” aspects of comics, video games, horror, Harry Potter,
    baseball, The Beatles, etc).
  * Teaching mainstream courses using popular culture (e.g. baseball
    statistics for explaining, statistics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer for
    explaining political theory, Star Trek for exploring biology).

/This particular area is focused more on sharing successful and 
interesting teaching practices for other scholars and educators to learn 
or borrow from/.

Hopefully, this description clarifies that I tend to look at the 
Teaching Popular Culture area as a bit different than the other areas 
which are research focused.  I see this area more along the lines of 
providing some professional development, feedback, and 
reflection around how we employ popular culture in the classroom.  I 
feel like this is an often under-attended element of popular culture 
studies: how we meaningfully engage with it with our students.

In the last few years, this area has picked up a lot more participants 
both presenting and in attendance as all of us are interested in 
applying our scholarship and research of popular culture into learning 
opportunities for our students.

Therefore, I'm quite interested in hearing from people and encourage 
anyone who may teach a popular culture focused course or use popular 
culture in interesting and useful ways to put in a proposal.  Here are a 
few of the formats that I'm interested in seeing and/or participating 
in.  If you have questions or thoughts about these, please don't 
hesitate to contact me: (lance.eaton /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(lance.eaton /at/ gmail.com)>.

The following are some ideas about how you might think about proposals.


      Round-Table of Popular Culture and Teaching

Those who teach a popular-culture-focused course (specifically about 
popular culture or thematically structured around popular culture) can 
discuss some of the challenges, benefits, and experiences in teaching 
such a course.  I imagine this format entailing a list of questions that 
the participants can go through followed up with questions by 
attendees.  I would also think we could capture the comments and produce 
some kind of interesting resource for the NEPCA website.


      Panel on Teaching

If you and other faculty teach a similar topic, area of popular culture, 
or have different strategies and approaches that you want to illustrate, 
a proposed full panel about teaching on popular culture is of great 
interest.


      Panel on Teaching Popular Culture Online

I'll throw my hat into the ring with this one.  I'm really interested in 
working with and presenting with other faculty who have or regularly 
teach popular culture (or focus in some ways on popular culture) in an 
online environment.  I think there is a lot to discuss and explore with 
regards to this topic and would encourage anyone else in this vein to 
reach out to me.


      Panel of Students

In the last few years, we've seen some really great panels that include 
students and their experiences in learning and studying about popular 
culture.  I think this is a great area for collaboration between faculty 
and students and if you have an idea, you should definitely consider 
submitting.


      Individual Presentations on Strategies, Approaches, Resources

Honestly, if you've got something related to teaching and popular 
culture, please submit a proposal.  Every year that I've done this, we 
get some really fantastic presentations on a range of great topics 
relating to teaching and popular culture.  If you're stuck on the fence 
or need someone to brainstorm and flesh out your proposal a bit more, 
feel free to reach out to me and we'll see what we can come up with.

Some of our previous presentations have included titles such as:

  * Compare and Contrast in Sakai Lessons
  * Teaching Hip-Hop: Boosting Student Agency
  * Wanna Play? Creative Strategies for Teaching Pop Culture
  * Teaching Sociology through TV: An Update
  * Teaching Professional Ethics through Superhero Comic Books
  * Course Design in the Age of Trump
  * "Heroes and Superheroes: Pop Lit and Writing Studies
  * Challenges of Media Representation in the Media Classroom

So if you are interested, please check out *the conference page 
<https://nepca.blog/conference/>* before going and filling out *the 
proposal form <https://goo.gl/forms/QdMp1Ov9bUKYTSin1>*.  If you're 
interested in putting in a proposal that isn't Teaching and Popular 
Culture, then *check out the other areas* 
<https://nepca.blog/short-summary-of-nepca-areas/>to determine which is 
the right area to submit.

The deadline for applications is June 1, 2019. Proposals must be 
submitted to an online Google Form that can be found on *NEPCA's Website 
<https://nepca.blog/conference/>. *This page also includes a link to 
area chairs who can assist with any questions you have about your proposal.


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