Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

Science Fiction as Semi-Experimental Teaching Practice

I don’t know if what I did today in my ENC 1101 class (intro to college argument) could be called properly experimental, but it was certainly science fictional.  I’ve been doing a lot of playing around with education as of late, in part because I find the traditional educational forms rather dull as models for […]

Classtime: Your Genre Recommendations

Originally posted on Google+, but equally relevant here: Need recommendations from you all. I’m teaching a course called Writing About Postcolonialism and Genre Fiction and I want to couple the postco genre text with a short, representative example of the literary tradition in a particular genre. So, I’m asking you for your recommendations and opinions. […]

Teaching Science Fiction: The Definition

Today was one of the more surprising days in the American Literature course I am teaching this summer.  What surprised me wasn’t their responses to the assigned reading (the first 68 pages of Haldeman’s The Forever War, one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time); rather, I was surprised at how they defined […]