Nevarez, Lisa A., ed. The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead.
Holmes, Trevor
Nevarez, Lisa A., ed. The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead. Foreword by Sam George. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 247 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-7864-7554-4. $40.00.
One of my favorite events at the University of Waterloo is our "Open Classroom" series, through which award-winning teachers invite colleagues to observe them in action, with time booked immediately after for a discussion of techniques, materials, and in-the-moment decisions. Making pedagogy visible in this way is all too rare; oddly, teaching in higher education seems one of the most private public activities. Reading The Vampire Goes to College, I felt excited and renewed in much the same way as when I attend an Open Classroom. Although this was not universally true across the volume, the gems in each section justify purchasing the book. On balance, the collection offers practical advice and useful resources to teachers and scholars of vampire studies. Few contributors offer new theoretical positions about representations of vampires and their literary or cultural significance, but certainly almost all provide practical suggestions that could also apply to other sorts of genre fiction.
The book's twenty original essays are spread across five thematically organized parts. Part I, "Teaching the Historical Vampire," sets out the problematics of teaching and learning with vampire texts and paratexts along with suggestions for how to think about vampires historically and considers vampire cultural production in the twenty-first century. Part II explores "Teaching the Diverse Vampire"; Part III, "Writing the Vampire," focuses on writing instruction; Part IV addresses "Teaching the Textual Vampire"; and Part V includes strategies for "Engaging the Student." Several of the essays actually cross these themes; most could have easily fallen under the "diversity" or "engagement" headings without any difficulty, but in general the divisions make sense. Contributors, who hold a range of appointments and have diverse educational and career backgrounds, describe their courses at US institutions of all types. Rather limited international exposure comes from Canada, Poland, and England.
First and foremost, The Vampire Goes to College is a means of opening up contributors' classrooms (face-to-face, blended, or online) to the rest of us. To the extent that fantastical content helps people teach about writing, diversity, and meaning-making, it is of little importance which popular culture fabric functions as the backdrop. On the one hand, some essays use the vampire as a viable pretext for engaging learners, meeting them where they are--or at least are assumed to be--today. Top examples of this more generalizable tactical approach are Neena Cinquino's "Vampire Literature: The Missing Component in Writing for the Sciences" (which also suggests non-vampire Gothic texts as other options) and Murray Leeder's "A Tale of Three Draculas: Teaching Evolution and Genre Conventions," which gestures toward pressing other texts and genres into similar service, such as Frankenstein for horror or Billy the Kid for Westerns.
On the other hand, vampire literature has some specific strengths for certain kinds of questioning and studying, particularly understandings of otherness and self and the borders of identity. Good cases for the necessary specificity of vampire tropes for teaching certain concepts also appear in some of the most theoretically interesting essays, and when they combine with practical classroom strategies, the collection is at its strongest. Examples include "Outside/In: Using Vampires to Explore Diversity and Alienation in a College Classroom," in which Melissa Anyiwo helps students to draw analogies between literary characters and contemporary popular culture in considering race, and "'Cherokee, Creole, and Mormon, Oh My!': A Look at Vampire and Religious Representations for the Literature Classroom," in which Alisha M. Chambers sets up a course that contrasts known and lesser-known texts to open up identity thematics for students via autoethnography and adaptation assignments (though it seems to be a hypothetical course rather than one with concrete evidence of having worked).
Independent of their approach to vampire thematics, for a collection about teaching, essays that provide details about course context, assessments, and evidence that the experiments worked are most convincing and most immediately transferable. The richness of the teaching materials included make the book of tremendous value to other instructors. Some highlights: Amy Hodges, in "Stories That Sparkle in Sunlight: Using Twilight to Teach Writing," describes three assignments for different audiences and a final, authentic symposium. One could easily adapt Heidi Crawford's comparison tables for "Folklore" and "Story and Character" in her "'But why do they have fangs?': The Cultural History of the Vampire as a Teaching Strategy in the Literature Classroom." Essay guidelines are immediately applicable in Anne Daugherty and Jerri L. Miller's "Luring Online Students with the Power of the Vampire" (in spite of the potentially creepy title), as well as in Leeder's aforementioned contribution, as are the "thinksheets" in Lisa Lampert-Weissig's "Taking Dracula's Pulse: Historicizing the Vampire."
The most engaging essays tell a good story, link course goals and learning outcomes very clearly to activities and assessments, and find ways to account for actual learning that occurred. For example, in her "Fangs in the Cornfields: Teaching Vampire Literature to Nontraditional Students in the Composition Classroom," Vicky Gilpin's perspective as a teacher both in high schools and in a college reminds us that there can be a continuum of interest in the lessons that vampires can offer, but also that student readiness (and even parent readiness) for controversy may vary. Her essay's exhortation to teach from one's passion is well taken, and could in fact stand in for an implicit value of the book as a whole.
I appreciate people who share teaching failures, or rather, our mixed successes. Hence, I was quite taken with the rubric experience described by Seri Luangphinith, who in "Unknowable and Immeasurable: Queer Studies, Assessment and the Ever-Resistant Vampire" manages to unite queer theory, assessment, and vampire representation around localized Hawaiian histories of alterity. She includes examples of student work to support the assertions that it worked. Although the outcomes of the course were met or surpassed, the attempt to apply a standardized diversity rubric tool itself was heavily criticized by the students, which turned out to be, unsurprisingly, a function of their increased criticality around the concept of diversity as the term progressed (7475). To my mind, this scholarly approach to vampire thematics, cultural histories, and evidence-based active pedagogies makes this one of the best of the essays. In addition to Luangphinith's piece, Rita Turner's "In the Cultural Shadows: Insights from a Media and Cultural Studies Course" is methodologically strong both in terms of vampire studies and pedagogy; hers is the only entry that thematizes actual student responses to the learning as evidence of effectiveness.
Read through from the beginning, the collection as a whole suffers rhetorically from a strangely defensive repetitiveness. Many of the essays begin with the assertion that Twilight fans are particularly predisposed to the topic, and/ or that the vampire literature or Gothic course needs defending but is coming into its own, with the result that I wondered whether the authors didn't realize that the very fact they were being published suggests something about the maturity of the subfield. The editor might have had a heavier hand in eliminating the repetition of the same two points and, rather, relied on her own "Introduction," Sam George's "Foreword," and Sue Weaver Schopfs "'Legitimizing' Vampire Fiction as an Area of Literary Study" to set up the justifications. This would have permitted everyone else simply to leap directly into their conceptual frameworks, descriptions of practice, and (one hopes) results.
A small but significant distraction for me, especially given the mandate of some of the courses to teach writing at foundational levels, is some contributors' grammar and style. I was keenly aware at too many points along the journey that a proofreader was either absent or asleep at the wheel. Several of the essays abuse prepositions. Of, for, to seem in some instances to follow the rushed, millennial idiom of the day that knows not the provenance of its own semantic operations. Too, though perhaps this is a pet peeve of mine, one contributor uses "relatable" in characteristically grating ways thrice over two pages. Given that some of the most distracting examples of this are from writing instructors, doubt is inevitably cast on the content, in spite of the otherwise interesting descriptions of practice.
In light of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) literature that emerged as far back as the 1990s, I could also imagine ways in which most of the authors might have taken a more systematic approach to inquiring about the effectiveness of their described practices. In such an interdisciplinary set of essays, those mentioned above who provide clear evidence to bear out their claims do so following unstated and diverse methodologies. This is not unexpected, but it raises for me the question of what might make for a more rigorous collection on teaching within an interdisciplinary, popular culture, and writing-intensive frame. In the very few cases where there is little to learn, the teaching stakes are not well laid out and the evidence mostly absent (generally because the ideas were not field-tested in actual courses yet). For example, Michael Wolski's "National Literature to RPGs: Vampires in the Polish Classroom" taught me a great deal about why Polish folklore and some canonical Polish drama ought to be studied as part of vampirical literary history; however, the course design advice that is part of the collection's mandate seems tacked on here in a set of directives that seem not to have been tested in actual postsecondary classrooms, although the Role-Playing Game (RPG) method seems to have been successfully used by a high school teacher colleague. This has the unfortunate effect of seeming like an essay included for international breadth rather than rigorous pedagogical theory. Such problems are, thankfully, rare.
A note on organization: As a book to open up when needing inspiration or seeking particular advice, a helpful addition would have been a second index organized by teaching / learning bottlenecks that were solved, or learning goals that were met, by various authors in helpful ways, to accompany the traditional content index.
Instinctively, we might assume that The Vampire goes to College will become quickly dated as Twilight's popularity fades. I recall the moment some years ago in my own course in which Buffy references began to fall flat, laughter faded even during viewings of episode clips, and my informal poll found that fewer than five percent of my students had seen any episodes independently. We can, however, see this collection as a flexible design map applicable not only to historical gothic and fantastic concepts but also to whichever new obsessions popular culture hands us with each new generation of fans.
