Associate Professor Natalie Gerber of the Department of English gave two professional presentations at the 2015 Modern Language Association (MLA)) Convention held Jan. 8 to 11 in Vancouver, Canada.
For the roundtable, "The Future of the History of the English Language: Pedagogical Practices," Dr. Gerber presented innovative strategies she has used to integrate multi- and social media into the classroom.
The presentation grew out of her experiences at Fredonia, designing a HEL course that would engage the interests and meet the needs of a student body deriving from a wide range of majors and language backgrounds.
Gerber’s materials, which are available at the site, demonstrate how to fuse traditional readings in the field with debates and projects that incorporate the use of podcasts, digital editions of dictionaries, and online research projects into language politics and the status of English as a global language.
In her second presentation, for the "What We Talk about When We Talk about Meter" roundtable, Gerber presented a nuanced overview of advances in multiple fields connected to the study of poetic meter. From phenomenology and psycholinguistics to cognitive approaches, and historical poetics, Gerber explained why the most galvanizing issues in contemporary metrics are challenging to introduce in the undergraduate classroom. Eschewing traditional scansion methods, she embraced a creative methodology for teaching meter based on the notice-name-apply techniques found in grammar studies.
