Teaching Contemporary Women's Writing - Conference

I'm going to be writing a paper today called ‘Can a bird sing the only song it knows or can it learn a new song?’: Teaching Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’. It's for a conference in Brighton on Teaching Contemporary Women's Writing in the 21st Century. I'm really looking forward to it as it will be my first teaching conference. It'll be so interesting to hear other people's approach to university teaching. I'm particularly interested to see how others are integrating new technology into their teaching. Anyway, I've included my abstract here for you to have a read of. Any thoughts please let me know! Oh, also, if you want to view the youtube clip that I'm going to show part of in my presentation, I've blogged about it at my new blog, Lives Less Ordinary.

‘Can a bird sing the only song it knows or can it learn a new song?’: Teaching Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’
At Stirling University, I teach two first year courses, ‘Author, Reader, Text’ and ‘Text and Context’, both of which predominantly focus on late twentieth-century texts. Many of the contemporary authors I teach are women: from Sarah Kane to Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood to Carol Ann Duffy. However, this paper will focus on ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, which we teach as a gothic reinterpretation of the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. What I hope to illustrate is my technique of encouraging student engagement through extra-textual elements, such as Youtube clips, feature films and traditional oral narratives. I argue that, by using these extra-textual elements, not only can you pique your student’s interest in the text, but also facilitate them to form meaningful critique. During the course of this paper, I will show clips from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, clips from the short film Dysenchanted (available through Youtube), and I will also outline the group work exercise that I assign my students. As a teacher, I see it as my role to encourage students to see texts in new ways, to help them develop their skills as critical readers, and to support them as they gain confidence in presenting their ideas. This paper is an illustration of how I believe I am meeting those objectives, with the hope that it will be of some interest to those committed to similar goals.