This week my American Literature classes wrapped up podcasting for the semester. I could have talked for hours about several of the questions raised during their podcast presentations. Four students pretended to be the four daughters of The Joy Luck Club. They “spilled the tea” on all the gossip in the novel. Another podcast team took a more serious slant, working through ideas about the American Dream.
Their creativity amazes me. Students who are seemingly shy during a regular class often come to life when given a platform and a microphone. It’s a treat to see how talented and interesting each and every student happens to be. They wouldn’t be at Baylor in the first place if they weren’t terrific, but when it’s podcast time, I really get to see their talents shine bright.
My students have been doing podcasts for my classes since Fall 2019, so we’ve been working through the process for six years now. We’ve recorded in the library’s podcast studios, on my laptop with a nano microphone, on cell phones, and Zoom recordings. We’ve edited, not edited, recorded live in the classroom, and recorded individually from home.
And I upload their recordings into Canvas, our learning management system. I enjoy relistening to the podcasts on my drives back home to Fort Worth from Waco. But what has been a private conversation, available only to students enrolled in my classes, might be an opportunity to share with the world what we manage to bring together throughout the course of a semester, in a literature class, at Baylor University. But I haven’t taken that step.
Knowing what I now know about my students and all the exceptional content they’ve created, I realize we, the Washington Irving Society, needs to get more audio content out there about our guy.
When I checked the stats recently on this WordPress page, I learned the most popular blog I’ve posted lately happens to be the Washington Irving playlist my students put together. I told them today in our Irving class. They seemed pleased.
But this fact, combined with all my students’ podcasting efforts, makes me see how important audio can and should be for our Irving efforts.
Ironically, at this very moment, as I’m typing this blog, I can’t concentrate because of the noise coming from outside my office door. The vacuum cleaner has been going for awhile now, as the cleaning staff works on my floor. After looking around online for royalty-free podcast music to launch the intro to a potential podcast, I’m tempted to record vacuum sounds.
And on that note, I’ll close this blog. But please know, I honestly do want to get a podcast or two or three or four out there soon. Perhaps I could record a set of four over the Christmas break.
Last week, I blogged about ChatGPT’s advice for 31 ways of teaching “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in the K-12 classroom, so this week, I’m adding the university setting to the conversation.
The categories changed somewhat, after I tweaked the prompt to focus solely on the university classroom. ChatGPT now suggests the following breakdown for teaching “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”:
• Literary Analysis Approaches • Historical and Cultural Context • Interdisciplinary Methods • Comparative and Media Approaches • Classroom Activities and Projects
And here’s a reminder of the K-12 categories:
• Reading Comprehension and Analysis • Creative Activities • Literary and Historical Connections • Critical Thinking and Writing
Historical connections are listed for all learners, but cultural context was added for the university classroom. Cultural context for the story could include Dutch history, the Connecticut Yankee on stage, post-Revolutionary America, and more. Discussing Royal Tyler’s Jonathan in The Contrast (1787) probably wouldn’t work well in an elementary classroom, yet I can still imagine showing images of Connecticut Yankees to students of all ages.
Cultural context could still be relevant for younger students. But I get it. Reading Comprehension, a category set aside only for younger learners, would be more important than guiding students through the early American stage.
Lessons suggested for the university classroom, which I find particularly interesting, include:
LITERARY ANALYSIS APPROACHES
• Narrative Voice and Unreliable Narration: Discuss the frame narrative and how Diedrich Knickerbocker’s voice affects interpretation.
• Symbolism and Allegory: Explore the Headless Horseman as a symbol of the past, American identity, or suppressed fears.
• Genre Study/Gothic and American Romanticism: Place the tale in the context of early American Gothic literature and Romanticism.
• Satire and Humor: Examine Irving’s use of irony, exaggeration, and social satire—especially about education and religion.
HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
• Puritanism and Superstition: Explore lingering religious influences and community beliefs in the supernatural.
• The American Frontier and Wilderness: Use landscape to discuss nature as a source of fear, imagination, and identity.
INTERDISCIPLINARY METHODS
• Ecocriticism: Analyze the role of nature, landscape, and environment in shaping emotion and meaning.
COMPARATIVE AND MEDIA APPROACHES
• Cross-Cultural Ghost Stories: Compare with ghost tales from other cultures or time periods (e.g., Japanese yūrei stories).
• Myth-Making in American Culture: Discuss the legend as part of America’s myth-making and creation of national folklore.
CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES AND PROJECTS
• Creative Writing/Alternate Ending: Ask students to write a different conclusion or a modern retelling of the tale.
• Map the Geography of Sleepy Hollow: Use historical maps and imagination to create visual layouts of the story’s setting.
• Multimedia Project/Audio Drama: Students produce a podcast version with sound effects, voice acting, and narration.
• Field Trip or Virtual Tour: Visit Sleepy Hollow, NY (virtually or in person), exploring Irving’s historical context and the landscape.
A field trip to Sleepy Hollow sounds like the very best idea, especially if I could take my entire class from Texas. Any wealthy donors want to make an end-of-year contribution to a most deserving 501-C3? One day, perhaps, I can take a crew to New York for the fall, the best time to go. In the meanwhile, a virtual tour of Sleepy Hollow sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.
The Multimedia Project/Audio Drama reminds me of what I already do with my classes. Students work in groups to put together podcasts, but I don’t make them perform the text. They simply chat about Irving or whatever we’re studying. However, I could see myself adjusting this assignment for future semesters. Professors are often concerned about whether students have done the reading. If they perform the text, then there’s no doubting whether they’ve read it.
For the Creative Writing/Alternative Ending suggestion, I already gave a nod to rewriting the end of “Sleepy Hollow” for K-12, but it’s repeated here for college students. I shall definitely give this a whirl in the spring. We’ve already read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in all of my classes for this semester.
Cross-Cultural Ghost Stories could be worthwhile, and the suggestion of including Japanese stories fascinates me. I’m always looking for ways to merge Washington Irving with Asian-American Literature, which I’ve started teaching recently, and ghost stories would be another way of doing so.
The American Frontier, Ecocriticism, and Mapping Sleepy Hollow stand out to me since, earlier this afternoon, my Washington Irving class read and discussed “The Adventure of the German Student,” which appears in Tales of a Traveller (1824). From the very beginning of the story, Irving paints the Paris scene, as he sets up Tarry Town in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Instead of “the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson,” we get “a stormy night, in the tempestuous times of the French Revolution” along with “loud claps of thunder,” reminiscent of “Rip Van Winkle.”
By the way, this is what I’ve been listening to while writing this blog, in case you were wondering:
I took the advice of my blog from last week, to consider music/playlists as I’m teaching Irving’s texts. For some reason, guitar music always reminds me of Washington Irving, perhaps because of his stay at the Alhambra and my listening to many a Spanish guitar while visiting Granada and southern Spain.
With dogs barking outside my office window, the cleaning staff vacuuming outside my door, and with my office still sitting at 80 degrees, I needed noise-canceling headphones, strong Starbucks coffee, and instrumental guitar music to help me say something in a blog before 11:59 p.m. on this Washington Irving Wednesday. Hopefully, a thing or two I’ve shared will be useful to you.
My students have compiled playlists of their own, in response to one of my midterm exam questions, and I’ll share their suggestions for next week’s blog. The music selections, which remind them of Washington Irving, made me smile, and I think you’ll enjoy their suggestions, too. Until next week.
Washington Irving Society 