Students create public impact projects in English Senior Seminar

Students in English and Creative Writing Senior Seminar just wrapped up a series of public humanities projects that aim to benefit the Cornell College community and the world outside of campus.

The class hopes the Cornell community and the public watch, read, and listen to the new content that they’ve worked around the block to create.

During the Block 1 class, students spent their days preparing for their first jobs after graduation or working on their graduate school applications. This year’s class also put their skills, interests, and knowledge to work to produce a public humanities project for the wider community.

“A project like this not only reflects the diversity of skills Cornell students learn during their undergraduate career, but it also demonstrates how they can turn their classroom experience into meaningful, professional work,” said Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Katie Sagal.

Students studied best practices for public and digital humanities projects and created the following projects:

• “Exposing Your High School Reading List” is a podcast dedicated to unpacking and improving the high school English curricula in the United States.
• “Dead Lesbian Syndrome” is a podcast on the history of tropes and representation in regard to sapphic (lesbian/bisexual) characters in fiction, particularly in television and literature.
• “Let People Speak!” is a documentary that discusses the importance of empathy and language diversity, focusing on Midwestern towns with a predominantly English-speaking population.
• Voices Unheard in YA Lit is a website tracing the history and evolution of inclusivity of underrepresented voices within young adult literature.

Elise Kalin and Greta Henderson worked on the team that is producing “Exposing Your High School Reading List.” Their series of mini podcasts can be found on Spotify or via their website. 

“Our goal is to start a conversation about accessibility and diversity in high school classrooms,” Kalin said. 

The team worked throughout Block 1 to first, select a topic, and then gather information and create the podcasts. They used Cornell’s Academic Technology studio to record the episodes of their podcast. 

“We believe that everyone has something meaningful to add to this conversation, and we want to get the message across to our listeners that reading doesn’t have to be forever defined for them by frustrating experiences they had reading ‘The Scarlet Letter’ or any other classic book from high school,” Henderson said.

Sagal says the goal of these projects is for Cornell students to get actively involved in public outreach and share their literary knowledge with others. 

“They were given a big task to produce a professional quality media project aimed at a general audience in just the space of a block, but Cornell students are up for the challenge,” Sagal said. “Still, they surprised me with the level of sophistication and active outreach they’ve done. Some have launched social media campaigns to publicize their projects, others have been interviewing community members all across eastern Iowa. And they’re projects with real public impact, too.”

The class hopes the Cornell community and the public watch, read, and listen to the new content that they’ve worked around the block to create.