This roundtable will focus on best practices for teaching students about the Middle Ages. Participants will review the unique challenges instructors face in introducing students to the medieval world and will then contemplate how to use these challenges to their advantage in order to entice students to engage with what the students often view as remote, alien, and insignificant. The roundtable also will look at whether today’s hyper-connected world offers new ways of enticing students to study this distant past. Finally, participants will share successful lesson plans that they have used to engender student engagement.
About the presentersDiana Vecchio
Diana Vecchio is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Widener University in Chester, PA. Her primary area of research is knightly codes in Arthurian literature.
Annalisa Castaldo
Associate Professor at Widener University, specializing in Shakespeare and other Early Modern Literature. I also have an M.Ed in Human Sexuality from Widener.
Mary Behrman
Mary Behrman received her PhD in English from Emory University in 2004, where she wrote her dissertation, “Chaucer, Gower and the Vox Populi: Interpretation and the Common Profit in The Canterbury Tales and Confessio Amantis,” under the direction of John Bugge. She has had articles published in journals including The Chaucer Review and The Henry James Review. One of her essays, “The Waiting Game: Medieval Allusions and the Lethal Nature of Passivitiy in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” appeared in the Winter 2010 volume of Studies in the Novel and stemmed from an essay first presented at MAPACA’s 2008 conference in Niagara Falls. Currently, Ms. Behrman teaches English courses at Kennesaw State University and serves as MAPACA’s president and the Co-Chair of the Medieval/Renaissance Area.