Teaching | Dr. Shannon Finck

ENGL 1103: Labor Pamphlets

The first assignment in ENGL 1103: Labor Histories & the Future of Work asked students to practice using the Southern Labor Archives to find examples of labor pamphlets and zines, produced by workers and unions in their efforts to organize their peers and colleagues, raise awareness about their laboring conditions, and reform their industries and…

EPIC Wicked Problems Project

Check out this interdisciplinary initiative from GSU’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education (CETLOE): Wicked Problems

ENGL 1102: Writing Climate Futures

Course Description In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh claims that the climate crisis is not only an environmental or geopolitical problem; it is also “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” This course begins there, not with climate science or with policy, but with climate writing, both fiction and non,…

HON 1103: Labor Histories & the Future of Work

Course Description As new college students, you begin your educational journeys in a climate of uncertainty about the future of labor. You set schedules, choose majors, and prepare to enter the workforce in the wake of pandemic rhetoric about “essential and inessential workers” and against a backdrop of news and magazine headlines about the rise…

HON 3280: Service-Learning Blog

Read HON 3280 students’ accounts of their service-learning journeys and see some of their public-facing projects here: https://sites.gsu.edu/hon3280/ This blog is an ongoing and evolving record of the course, so there will be even more to see here soon!

Short Films on Environmental Literacy (ENGL 1101, Georgia State University, Spring 2023)

These short films by Isaac Breiding and Zion Brown demonstrate students’ award-winning efforts at describing the difficulty of feeling especially connected to the natural world in urban settings (and given the pace of contemporary life as college students) as well as what they might be missing out on by not prioritizing those connections. Both of…

HON 3280: Honors Service-Learning Seminar in Urban Ecology and Environmental Conservation

Course Description Atlanta has been called “a city in a forest” for its urban canopy and surrounding woodlands, but is it a sustainable city? It is not, for instance, an “A-list city,” according to the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project). A recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cites a new plastic plant, airport fuel spills, and…

Sample Student Podcasts (ENGL 1101, Georgia State University, Fall 2022)

In this class, we discussed episodes of audio podcasts (Broken Ground, Living Planet, Who Cares Wins, & Breaking Green Ceilings) that each took on a small piece of the immense and intricate puzzle presented by global climate change. Our exemplary compositions used several rhetorical approaches by presenting both problems and potential solutions/mitigations with guest experts and co-hosts (building…

Digital Anthropo-Zine Archive (ENGL 1102 & 1103, Georgia State University)

The following examples represent student-made zines–micro-publications that are often written with a specific community in mind, produced in small print runs or digitally, and distributed locally by hand, by link, or by QR code. Students started by studying the contemporary history of zines, which have been produced to communicate fresh or radical ideas to a given population,…

ENGL/WGSS 3995: Intersectional Feminisms

Course Description In this course, we will explore a variety of feminist approaches to the study of language, literature, and culture, prioritizing inclusive and intersectional perspectives and analyzing the ways such thinking shapes modern and contemporary texts. Examining a mix of critical, literary, and pop cultural works (some “high” and “low” theory) from a diverse…