Professor
With teaching experience in high schools & colleges around the globe, Jessica fosters intellectual engagement & practical understanding through her teaching & course design.Professor
With teaching experience in high schools & colleges around the globe, Jessica fosters intellectual engagement & practical understanding through her teaching & course design.
Jessica’s years as a high school teacher in Hungary and Australia, along with her work with at-risk kids in Los Angeles, meant she could never rest in the assumptions that her classes or subject matter had intrinsic value. Teenagers have a very low tolerance for insincerity and will call out any pretense, lack of conviction, and lack of compassion immediately. To succeed in the high school classroom, Jessica learned to demonstrate the value of the Bible, literature, and language by diving headlong into the hard conversations such subjects raise. She learned to connect old texts to the real questions and experiences of her students. And she’s never forgotten how much we all hate pointless tasks and boring assignments.
Be it in course design or curricular overhaul, Jessica brings this empathetic, practical perspective to her work in the academy.
Work Smarter, Not Harder — Academic Design
Individual classes matter. A lot. But a string of great-but-disconnected classes leading to a disciplinary liberal arts degree doesn’t maximize the potential of higher education. The onus is on the academy to make the value of what we do explicit to the world. We have to take the liberal arts and turn them outward because the world actually needs the habits of mind fostered by the liberal arts, such as:
- Empathizing with others
- Defining the core problems we face
- Challenging the assumptions that limit innovation
- Creating new ideas and new solutions
- Presenting new paths to the wider world, not just in writing but in myriad forms of design
(And if this sounds like design thinking…it is. We’ve just been doing it in the liberal arts for millennia.)
To this end, Jessica’s worked on a number of curricular projects, including:
- Redesigning majors for institutional efficiency and learning that leads to real world skills
- Integrating traditional majors to streamline education and create new majors within the liberal arts that target 21st century job opportunities
- Developing new General Education packages that cultivate essential competencies, practical abilities, and multidisciplinary intellectual engagement
- Constructing online class experiences that capture the best elements of small-group discussion while capitalizing on the flexibility and scalability of asynchronous instruction
Learning Together — The Class Experience
Smart thinking about curricular design creates the context for innovative classes. With the dynamic and unpredictable curiosity of a student, Jessica revels in every class she gets to teach.
Jessica’s course topics include:
- The Bible and Theology
- British Literature
- Australian Literature
- Women’s Studies
- Environmental Literature
- Writing and Media Literacy
Featured Class | The Bible and The Novel
Have you ever read the Bible? Like, really read it?
Too often texts fall silent because we think we know the story. Or because we find the barriers of time, place, and culture insurmountable. In this course, we considered how contemporary, prize-winning novelists riff on the biblical text, and how their literary renditions might help the rich narrative depths of the Bible come back to life.
In this course, students were encouraged to develop their own or small group solutions to the problem of the Bible being “boring.” One student developed LEGO sets to help kids better engage with the materiality and imaginative space of the Bible. One student developed a webpage reviewing Children’s Bibles to help parents become aware of how sanitizing the text for children also sucks the life from the stories. And a couple students reclaimed Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah for all the women championed in the Bible but silenced by popular appropriations of the text.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced some of the The Bible and The Novel classes online, and those conversations are available for you to explore on my website…
Featured Class | Environmental Literature
Being “at home” or “in place” is about understanding the human person as part of a web of ecological relationships comprised not just by family and friends, but by the human’s relationship to the plants, animals, soil, and waterways of a given watershed. Within these networks humans have a unique role to play—to voice to the identity of the world, not as an act of authority but as an act of partnership with our fellow creatures in the ecological web.
In this course students read works from the long tradition of environmental literature, but they were charged with only one, whole class project for the term: solve the problem of the St. Joe River using writing. And because this was a real class oriented toward the real world the budget for the project was…$0 (or whatever we were willing to chip in as a class). To succeed, students had to learn about the St. Joe River in order to empathize with the ecological community and the region’s history. They had to define the core problem facing the river and challenge assumptions that shaped life in the Upper Midwest. They had to design solutions and bring those to the public.
Their solution? Joey the Spotted Turtle!
Joey’s creation and ultimate adoption by a fortune 500 company became the main talking point for many students in that class as they gained acceptance to law school, competitive Master’s programs, medical school, and “dream jobs” in media and design industries.
