Introduction: How We Teach Today

Introduction: How We Teach Today Tom Ue (bio) The past few years have seen important developments in nineteenth-century studies, including movements both to expand our discipline and to diversify the range of texts that we study and teach. The newly launched Society of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, for example, studies "the world's connectedness between 1750 and 1914." Its journal publishes "essays of transnational, comparative, transimperial, transpacific, and transatlantic significance[,] while also serving as a venue to debate these terms and their corresponding methodologies and epistemologies." The society held its first world congress in Singapore (2023), and planning is underway for future congresses in Kuwait (2025), in Chile (2027), and in Vienna (2029). If, on the one hand, this society provides a forum for reappraising familiar works in terms of broader social, historical, and cultural frameworks and for engaging with less familiar ones, then, on the other, manifestos such as Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong's "Undisciplining Victorian Studies" have encouraged us "to interrogate and challenge our field's marked resistance to centering racial logic" (370). Chatterjee, Christoff, and Wong call for scholarship that "challenge[s] the multiple rigidities, cultural and conceptual, that have kept Victorian studies isolated from other fields" (370), and they argue for our potential to instigate larger social changes by means of scrutinizing and reconfiguring our discipline: "We therefore hope our work exceeds these pages, and imagine that the scholarly questions we ask of our objects of study are also activist ones, carrying with them the potential to reframe more than just a narrow academic orientation" (373). Such developments make it especially timely to consider afresh the Victorian literature classroom. The thirteen contributors to this forum, "How We Teach Today," explore pressing issues, from how Generation Z does (or does not) respond to our go-to course texts in the ways that Millennials did to how we perform activism through our teaching, and from how we promote inclusivity in our classes to how we capitalize on the affordances of digital technology as we juggle in-person, hybrid, and virtual teaching. Stephen Arata and Richard Menke open this forum by attending to shifts in responses to the canon over time. Over two sections, "Then" and "Now," Arata discusses how differently generations of students interpret Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and the importance of reading critically and imaginatively: "Where before I often felt I was trying to awaken students from the spell cast by Wuthering Heights, now I felt I was trying to awaken them from the spell cast by their own moral outrage. Moral outrage feels good (usually), but it can disable critical thought." Menke reveals [End Page 1] how his students gravitate from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and traces the emergence of a Victorian canon that reacts to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dino Felluga, Priyanka Jacob, and Rebecca Nesvet's, Martin Danahay's, and my essays explore different aspects of digital humanities.1 Felluga et al. foregrounds how the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE), uninhibited by the confines of the physical book, can undiscipline Victorian studies. By taking as test cases Jacob's and Nesvet's classes, which are studying Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), the authors illustrate how COVE enables contributors to read deeply and to engage in lively conversations. Danahay focuses on the value of Hypothes.is for enhancing students' close-reading skills, for promoting scaffolding, and ultimately for enhancing community-building in the classroom. Much of what we do as scholars and as teachers involves (re)discovering our period and identifying (dis)continuities between the Victorian period and ours. Accordingly, my own essay returns to Thomas Hughes's novel Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) for its insights into academic integrity and the fundamental questions that it poses about education. I argue for Hughes's relevance for understanding a game changer: the rise of ChatGPT. Greg Zacharias and Rohan Maitzen focus on the first principles of pedagogy. Zacharias distinguishes students from scholars, before turning to Kenneth Burke's idea of the parlour to illustrate how we can train students to...

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