Author Archives: Laura Westengard

Collaborative Feminist Manifesto and Final Research Project

Prof. Megan Behrent

Below are two assignments that I use when teaching ENG 2150: introduction to Women Writers. While they were created for a particular course they can be adapted for other literature courses, particularly the final research project. 

Collaborative Feminist Manifesto for the 21st Century Project

In preparation for this project, we read a selection of political writing by women to introduce students to the “waves” of feminism, while also interrogating the genre of women’s manifestoes, open letters and statements of principles as a genre worthy of study and analysis.

Below are some of the texts I included in the syllabus:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of  Sentiments and Resolutions,” from the Seneca Falls Convention (1848)

Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851). Note: for this text, we read the speech attributed to Truth, while also reading alternative versions of the speech to explore its historical accuracy, and discuss the political implications of these renditions of Truth’s speech.

Redstockings Manifesto (1969)

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)

Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave”

Open Letter from the Allianza Nacional de Campesinas to Hollywood actors & other performers speaking out against sexual assault

After reading examples from the 19th century to today, students were asked to work in groups to come up with their own manifesto, statement of principles or open letter using any form they wanted. Students were asked to determine priorities and principles collaboratively before coming up with a plan to complete the rest of the activity digitally to create a group document. Students posted their work to the class to receive comments and revised their documents on this basis.

See assignment here.

Download (DOCX, 132KB)

Final Research Paper of Project 

For this assignment, in addition to the option to write a more traditional literary research paper, students have the option of creating their own syllabus for a gender studies class, or engaging in a creative project (a play, a memoir, a short story, etc.) which engages with texts and themes of the course. While some of the options here are specific to the class, I adapt this assignment for most literature classes.

See assignment here.

Download (DOCX, 20KB)

ENG 2180 “Virtual Textbook”

Prof. Laura Westengard

I am sharing a course site that I developed as a  “virtual textbook” for an Open Educational Resources version of the class ENG 2180: Studies in Identity and Orientation. Feel free to visit the site to see how it is designed for all-electronic, zero cost access to literature course materials. Also, it is open and available for anyone to use as a textbook for ENG 2180!

Click on the icon below to visit the site…

Poetry Video Response Assignment

Prof. Leigh Gold

The following low stakes assignment was shared by Leigh Gold and designed for ENG 2003: Introduction to Literature, Poetry

Watch the following two videos posted by The Morgan Library and Museum:

Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy

After you watch each video, please write down one idea or piece of information that you found most crucial or interesting to know or learn about the poet. (Please be sure to do this with each video)

Choose one quote (lines or line) from ONE Whitman poem and ONE Dickinson poem that we read. Explain what you believe the meaning is of the line or lines that you selected.

Please describe how the idea or biographical information that you learned from the videos helps you to understand the quotations by Dickinson and Whitman. Are there connections that you can make between the videos and poems? How?

Please then explain how discovering more information about each poet helped you to interpret the line or lines that you chose.

Teaching Literature

This is a support page for those teaching literature courses at City Tech. The Literature Curriculum Committee has begun the task of gathering and creating videos, assignments, and other materials to help you in the classroom and will continue to build the site as the semester progresses.

The two main resource pages are Assignments and Activities and Syllabus Templates. For the purpose of supporting the COVID-19 related transition to distance learning, the Assignments and Activities page will be most useful.

This resource is far from complete, but we hope to make the site increasingly robust as time goes on. If you have any questions or would like to contribute your own assignments/activities/resources to help build the page, you can email Laura Westengard (lwestengard@citytech.cuny.edu) or Lucas Kwong (lkwong@citytech.cuny.edu).