The department hosted a two Pizza and Presentations events. The students featured at the events took part in summer research projects. The event showcased their work and persuaded students to attend and be inspired to participate in this opportunity in the future. Michelle Hesse and Madi Csejka were the presenters at the second event.
Michelle Hesse's project was called “Teaching National Trauma on a Global Scale: How the United States Compares to England and Germany". Michelle studied the way these countries teach their natural trauma. She studied how Germany teaches about The Holocaust, how England teaches about their enslavement and colonizing other countries, and how the United States teaches about our history of slavery. She compared how each country teaches it and to what level, which country does the best job not hiding and dismissing their national trauma.
Michelle traveled to several places in these countries she was studying. In England, she went to The Museum of Liverpool and The international Slavery Museum. In Germany, she went to Dachau, the concentration camp. Then she went to places in the United States, such as Monroeville, Alabama, The Legacy Museum, the Civil Rights Trail, and the National Museum of African American history and Culture.
Through Michelle's travels she noted how each of these placees displays their information. She noted what audiences they were trying to attract. She used this data to form a comparison on how these countries present and teach their national trauma.
Michelle is an aspiring teacher. This study is important to her because through this research she has done, she can become a teacher in the U.S. that appropriately and accurately teaches about the national trauma we have endured.
Madi Csejka also presented a summer research project. This was Madi's second research project it was inspired by her first. Which was teaching American Poetry in the classroom. This project focued more on teaching non-prose in the classroom. It was called “Teaching Non-Prose Texts in the English Classroom”. Madi noticed that not a lot of students get much introduction to non-prose texts, so she set out to ask all the English Teachers in Connecticut what texts they use in their curriculum.
Madi collected the data she received from the teachers and tried to hypothesize reasons why many teachers do not teach with non-prose texts. She came up with a lesson plan as part of this project that included poems she felt were good to teach in school, and then came up with lessons to implement them in the classroom. Madi felt as though a lot of teacher's do not teach poetry because students fear it, so also as part of her lesson plan she tried to consider ways to make studying poetry less daunting.
Michelle and Madi, both, spent many hours working on these research projects and it definitely showed. It was really interesting to hear each of their reports. Both were very different but equally interesting. Many of the English majors are aspiring teachers and learning from peers is a great way to get inspired.
Do not forget to check out the fellowships deadlines. These fellowships are hard work and time consuming, but look amazing on resumes, and the students who did them learned so much from the experience and research!