Resources for Instructors
From Keywords
- We created Keywords for American Cultural Studies with two goals in mind. We wanted to map some of the important problematics that have shaped the fields of American studies and cultural studies, and we wanted to provoke critical reflection on how those problematics and fields ought to be reshaped in the future.
- We created this website to facilitate an active engagement among researchers, students, and the wider public with questions about how knowledge is and ought to be made at the intersections of American studies, cultural studies, and a wide range of disciplinary research conversations and archives.
- We anticipate that some users of this site will begin from the entries that appear in the book, while others will combine terms contained there (sex-nation-race), mix those terms with others that do not appear there (community-participation-ethnography), or work on new terms (labor) and clusters of terms (labor-technology).
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Using Keywords in the Classroom
ePacket of Resources
Consult our ePacket of resources for instructors and working group leads. It includes sample assignments and other resources for instructors, both those who want to use the book and those who want to use the website.
Ten tips for conceptualizing a keyword project
If you’re interested in using a Keyword Collaboratory but need some help conceptualizing how to integrate it into your classroom or working group, we can offer some suggestions.
- Consider writing a new keyword. You might want to read how we proposed writing keywords for each of the contributors in Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Editors' Note
- Think of the audience. Think of your keyword as a keyword for your particular course or classroom or your working group. What are the organizing topics or problematics that are central to your course? You also should think of your keyword as a keyword for the public audience you want to get feedback from and dialogue with online through your collaboratory.
- Focus on the public nature of the collaboratory. Keep in mind that the objective of using our Keyword Collaboratory is to reach a public that you are effectively inviting to collaborate and dialogue with the work generated in your course or working group. We strongly recommend putting on your syllabus that the Collaboratory is a public-oriented assignment that will put student work online and available to an audience that far exceeds the classroom, their peers, and you as their instructor.
- Use the wiki how it works best. Consider how you can incorporate the wiki-based technology into your pedagogy. Wikis work incredibly well for tracking changes in student work over a period of time, whether that’s a week, a month, the quarter or semester, or beyond the term as new students in your successive course offerings build on and develop previous work.
- Use the collaboratory to track work over the duration of the school term. Here are just two suggestions about how you can use the collaboratory to track student work: have your students keep a reading log over the term or have them engage in concept mapping as the keywords or concepts of your course change and develop over the term. You also may find it helpful to have staged tasks that use the collaboratory so students submit their work online in week three, for example, and then return to it in weeks five and eight.
- As with most things, less is more. In using a keyword-based approach to course organization you may find that less is more. The methodological utility of a keyword is in tracking its genealogy. Consequently, a course that adopts this method may require students to become intimate with only a few interrelated keywords. If your course is designed to be more generative of student work, rather than survey-oriented, consider focusing on one keyword or a small cluster of keywords.
- Write through published keywords, rather than starting from scratch. If you’d like your students to work on and revise or challenge a particular keyword essay, start with our edition—or consider using Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary for Culture and Society or Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris’s 2005 collection, New Keywords.
- If your keyword isn't published, consider turning to the OED. The entry of your keyword in the Oxford English Dictionary may also be a good launching-off point for creating assignments for your course. Just as the OED tracks changes in the usage of words across history, your students can likewise trace changes in your keyword throughout the course reading.
- Adapt to the wiki learning curve. Consider offering both in-class and out-of-class activities that will give students familiarity with the editing functions of the wiki.
- Expand your understanding of what keyword-based work may generate as a final product. Consider how you might use the wiki to host non-text based work, such as audio or visual materials.
Sample Syllabi and Assignments
Let us know what works for you
Please report back to us how you've used Keywords or the Keywords Collaboratory in the classroom. We're interested in your success stories, and we will most likely ask to post your pedadagogical insights, strategies, syllabi, or assignments on this website. Contact us or simply click on the "Discussion" tab on this page to talk about teaching Keywords in the classroom. We're also currently hosting a discussion forum on our blog about how to integrate Keywords into course design. Visit the discussion forum to read more about what other instructors are talking about.
