Randolph-Macon College English Professor Jen Cadwallader contributed a chapter to and is the co-editor of a new collection of essays. Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to Pedagogy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), which Cadwallader co-edited with Laurence Mazzeno, president emeritus of Alvernia University, focuses on teaching Victorian literature in the liberal arts setting.

Innovative Pedagogical Practices
The book gathers together innovative pedagogical practices related to experiential, service, and project-based learning, digital humanities, and interdisciplinary courses.

“This book has grown directly out of my experience teaching at Randolph-Macon,” says Cadwallader. “My co-editor and I wanted to highlight how some of the best teachers in our discipline stress liberal arts values in their classrooms and how we might carry out the mission underlying pedagogical practices at RMC and other liberal arts colleges: by cultivating our students’ empathy, citizenship, moral and aesthetic values, and creative and critical thinking skills.”

A Richer Understanding of Victorian Life
Cadwallader contributed a chapter to the collection, “Adventures in Living Like a Victorian,” based on a course called Rewriting the Victorians, which she taught in 2015.

“The fantastic students in that class willingly tried a series of experiential assignments that had them practice some daily activities the way the Victorians would have,” says Cadwallader, who will teach the course again in spring 2018.  “We had some mishaps—sewing-needle accidents, general disgust with Victorian toothpaste—but overall, the class brought a much richer understanding of Victorian life to our course readings. The poster presentations the class gave on Research Day were thoughtfully nuanced, accomplished pieces—a highlight of my teaching career that I loved chronicling in this chapter.”

Jen Cadwallader
Cadwallader, who joined the RMC faculty in 2009, earned her B.A. from Alfred University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).