Last month, as the year—and the decade—wound to a close, we debuted the first guides in our Teach Ecotone series. Our second guide comes to us from Stephanie Carpenter, who has been using Ecotone in her classes since 2017. Her one-month guide to Issue 27, spring/summer 2019, gently yet brilliantly helps students make connections between poems, stories, and essays in the issue, as well as visual art and regular departments. The guide features an ongoing group project engaging with Eric Magrane’s “Various Instructions for the Practice of Poetic Field Research.” Find it—available for free download—at the Teach Ecotone page.
Here’s Stephanie on teaching:
I love teaching with literary magazines like Ecotone because they compel me to do what I ask of my students: read new work, with close attention. Using literary magazines and journals as course texts helps me to decenter my own tastes. Rather than falling back on my tried-and-true (and tired?) teaching favorites, I’m embarking with my students on readings as fresh to me as they are to them. We’re all making discoveries; we’re all part of an unfolding conversation. Engaging with journals connects us to a literary community that might otherwise feel far away from an engineering school in rural northern Michigan.