Teaching

“Set of Three Panels from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances.” Ivory, c. 1330-50, Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 1978.39. Open access.

Teaching Philosophy

In composition and literature classroom alike, I invite students to engage with the texts we read as cultural forces through their form and structure as well as their content. My teaching experience ranges from composition classes to literature classes covering such topics as medieval literature, Early Modern/Renaissance literature, the first half of the British literature survey, speculative fiction, YA fiction, and game studies. In my classes, no matter the time period, students engage in critical examinations of culture, writing, and literature, as questioning our practices, histories, and texts allows us to gain a greater understanding of them.

A more detailed description of my teaching philosophy can be found here.

Courses Taught

As instructor of record at Purdue University

English 202: Engaging English (1 section)

• Catalogue description: This theme-based course introduces students to the field of English, and provides foundational liberal arts skills. It teaches, for instance, critical and creative thinking, reading, and writing using a variety of genres, texts, and media.

• Course theme: Adaptions and Retellings
• Course description: Literature is no stranger to adaptation. From book to movie, myth to poem, and legend to novel, so much of what we study is adapted or retold from earlier texts. In this class, we will examine some of the methods of adaptation—be it retelling or rewriting—that our discipline has seized upon in its long history. As we investigate these adaptations, we will also build the skills needed to critically think about and analyze them.

English 373: Science Fiction and Fantasy (1 section)

• Catalogue description: Representative works of science fiction and fantasy examined in relation to both mainstream and popular literature. Emphasis is on technique, theme, and form.

• Course theme: Death and the Undying
• Course description: Vampires! Zombies! Liches! Evil AIs! Again and again, science fiction and fantasy return to issues of death and dying. Even when not inventing new and terrifying ways to die (and come back from it), these genres speculate on more than death alone. In this class, we will examine the ways in which speculative fiction uses tropes of the dead, the undead, and the undying to discuss issues very central to those of us who are still alive. We will examine female sexuality demonized into vampirism, queer desire processed through necromancy, the echoes of colonialism both on a spaceship and in a (haunted?) gothic mansion, and how one might come of age in a time of (un)death. While our focus is on death and the undead, these texts will ultimately ask us to examine life and the living.

English 108: Accelerated First Year Composition (2 sections)

• Catalogue description: An accelerated composition course that substitutes for ENGL 10600 for students showing superior writing ability.

• Course theme: Rhetorics of Science and Medicine
• Course description: Now more than ever, it is important to take a critical eye to the scientific information we consume. What is being argued? Who is doing the arguing? What can we read as the truth? In this class, we will learn to examine not only what people are saying but how they are saying it. We will practice and build the tools needed for your toolboxes to interact with the written word both in the academic world and in your life beyond college.

• Course theme: Rhetorics of Narrative
• Course description: From the movies we watch to the games we play to the books we (occasionally) choose to read, everything is a narrative. This class will let us explore what it means to share events in a sequence, and how that can influence how we read and understand the world around us. This semester, our focus is on quests—stories with goals in mind—and how they shape narrative writing and academic prose alike. We’ll practice writing about ourselves and then move into writing for an academic audience in order to have tools in our toolboxes no matter where our personal quests may take us.

English 106Y: First Year Composition (Online) (1 section)

• Catalogue description: Extensive practice in writing clear and effective prose. Instruction in organization, audience, style, and research-based writing.

• Course theme: Academic Writing and Research
• Course description: This section of ENGL 106 focuses on academic writing & research, or, the ways that we communicate in and with scholarly communities and disciplines. Because of our focus on scholarly communities, we’ll not only read from a textbook, but also from a variety of other texts: journal articles, online news articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, reports, data visualizations, and blog posts. You’ll also have the opportunity to practice composing with a variety of media in this course: text, pictures, charts, graphs, infographics, and more. In this course, we’ll explore what it means to compose as a scholar (not just “writing,” but designing, drafting, revising, presenting, creating content, etc.); how to search for and evaluate information, and how to conduct secondary research using library resources and databases as well as popular search engines and media; how to be an ethical researcher and writer; the conventions for communicating with a variety of audiences, including scholarly peers and laypersons; how different technologies and media change the way that we write, communicate, and share information with each other; and how you’ll incorporate writing and media into your future career.

English 106: First Year Composition (2 sections)

• Catalogue description: Extensive practice in writing clear and effective prose. Instruction in organization, audience, style, and research-based writing.

• Course theme: Digital Rhetorics
• Course description: “Digital rhetorics” is really just a fancy way of saying that we’ll be discussing writing about and/or with technology. Over the course of the semester, we’ll talk about different media and how we communicate differently across them, about the types of audiences we reach with different technology, and about our own personal experiences with developing a competency in some sort of digital way. You will ultimately research and present on some sort of technology in your major field. We live in a plugged-in world—we should embrace it!

As instructor of record at Western Michigan University

Medieval 1450: Heroes and Villains of the Middle Ages (2 sections)

• Catalogue description: Heroes and Villains of the Middle Ages is a reading intensive, interdisciplinary course designed to introduce beginning students to the medieval roots of the individual, social, and institutional ideals and values of modern Western culture as they are expressed and exemplified in the images of medieval heroes and their counterparts.

As teaching assistant at Purdue University

English 218: Figures of Myth and Legend 2: Heroes and Villains: Arthurian Literature

• Catalogue description: This class offers in-depth explorations of the larger-than-life leaders (on the side of good, and sometimes evil, too) who have become models for how we think of heroism, charisma, and what it means to seek and wield power over others. From the chivalric Knights of the Round Table to the frightening energy of the Viking comitatus bands, it will show that no models of mythic leadership come without their complications–or admirable qualities

English 219: Figures of Myth and Legend 3: Magic and Marvels: Tolkien on Page and Screen

• Catalogue description: This course surveys stories of elves, fairies, wizards, witches, etc., and explores the allure of all things marvelous, strange, and magical. It considers how language itself constitutes a kind of magic; examines magic as technology and vice versa, since, as Arthur C. Clarke famously declared: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; and seeks to understand how people across history have used stories of magic to reinforce (mystify) or upend (defamiliarize) the status quo.

Evidence of Teaching Excellence

Evaluations scored on a 5 point Likert-type scale.

Full evaluations available upon request.

	Spring 2022 ENGL 202: Engaging English	Fall 2021 ENGL 373: Science Fiction and Fantasy
The course is well organized.	4.8	5.0
The assignments aid me in achieving the class objectives.	4.8	4.83
The instructor communicates clearly.	4.8	4.92
The instructor effectively answers students’ questions.	4.85	5.0
The instructor seems to care about my learning in this course.	4.85	5.0
The instructor makes time to help students.	4.85	4.92
The instructor is fair in evaluating my performance in the course.	4.85	5.0
The instructor created an inclusive learning environment.	4.85	5.0
My instructor shows respect for diverse groups of people.	5.0	4.92
One real strength of this course is the classroom discussion.	4.95	5.0

Selected student comments:

“[. . .] I could not have asked for a better English professor. She taught well and was very approachable.”

“Coming to college, I was very nervous about taking an English course because I have always struggled with it, but I am happy to have had an instructor that taught us how to formulate multiple different types of papers, as well as let us be ourselves and creative with our work.”

“One of the best professors I have had so far. The class is an inclusive environment and Professor Myers is well knowledgeable and passionate in everything she teaches! Everyone feels very comfortable in the learning environment.”

“Maggie is an amazing instructor, even the best I have had so far. She is very approachable and truly cares about her students as individuals. She allows students to be a human first, and a student second. She loves her job and her students, and it really shows. I believe that she will be an amazing professor one day and I look forward to what the future holds for her.”

“This has been one of the most enjoyable classes in this pandemic era of education. This is the most diverse collection of books I have had the privilege of reading, analyzing, and discussing. Two of the most unforgettable books– ‘Mexican Gothic’ and ‘Gideon the Ninth’ have sincerely shaped my writing experience; the amount of joy and fascination in seeing myself reflected in these characters for the first time in twenty years. One of the things that Maggie does well is not probing students for discussion; she allows people to think and only adds further context to discussion questions or similar questions to the original question that then incite discussion. As someone who struggles with forming spontaneous thoughts and struggles therefore, with class participation, this has encouraged me to participate more without pressure. Struggling with anxiety, professors can be difficult to approach, but Maggie has been a wonderful resource in school matters as well as furthering my reading in topics brought up in class, which has also shaped me as a writer in trying to further understand human behavior and motivations in literature. Teaching is something she is clearly passionate about, as well as the subject matter, and is able to explain theory in class in an unpretentious way that helps others understand. This class will stay with me for a very long time.”