Talk:Resources for Instructors

From Keywords

Open for Comments

Feel free to post comments about the materials and suggestions we've assembled under 'Resources for Instructors.' What, in particular, about the edited collection or the website has helped you in course planning? Are there other resources you would find useful?

You may also be interested in a discussion forum on teaching Keywords for American Cultural Studies that we're currently hosting on the Keywords Blog.

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"unofficial" keyword histories

For those of you who are teaching Keywords for American Cultural Studies, I thought I'd share a classroom experience. A student of mine used an interesting, impromptu alternative method for researching a keyword: she typed "border" into youtube.com. The idea of searching a visual public domain such as youtube struck my interest. The theoretical implications are fascinating. Pedagogically, I was also was struck by how intuitively my student saw what returned in the search results as a cultural archive that could be read and analyzed. As opposed to the OED which offers an "official" account that students are asked to more or less substantiate and test against the readings, "unofficial" sites such as youtube and urbandictionary.com might be another point of departure for constructing keyword-based projects. It definitely gave me something to think about!
Deborah Kimmey, University of Washington
Dkimmey 02:11, 28 January 2008 (EST)