According to the faculty handbook, promotion to full professor is based on demonstration of teaching excellence and impact beyond the university. When I came to ACU in 1999 as an instructor finishing the last chapters of a dissertation, I was surrounded by colleagues that valued excellence in teaching as well as generous former professors turned peers who had already shaped much of what I aspired to in the classroom. Chris Willerton, Nancy Shankle, and Darryl Tippens had modeled a profession I followed them into that combined a love of the great writers of the past with a restless curiosity seeking out new ways to connect their subjects firmly to the present.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve found the Language and Literature department to be a source of great professional support to fellow faculty developing along a wide range of career paths. I’ve been blessed to work under Bill Walton, Nancy Shankle, and Cole Bennett as chairs who have supported my development of new approaches to teaching and learning as well as leadership skills I didn’t know I had, even when those directions didn’t simplify their own administrative responsibilities. I’ll share just a few of the directions that have shaped my work since becoming an associate professor.

ENGL 221 Online – In the Language and Literature department I continue to oversee an online version of Major British Writers I developed in the spring of 2004. That next year the course was recognized in a course design competition hosted by Blackboard. Since that time, I have trained a dozen colleagues and graduate students to teach the curriculum and have managed teaching schedules and regular content updates to the course delivered at different times in Blackboard, WordPress, and OpenClass. Over the last decade, we have taught 60 sections of the course in the 6-week summer format, with a total enrollment of more than a thousand students. I have taught versions of the class myself as fully-online sections, in study abroad contexts, and in a hybrid format during long semesters that blends online and face-to-face assignments.

Media Literacy Projects – While working on the first version of ENGL 221 Online in the Adams Center, I had to develop basic skills in audio editing and web publishing that encouraged further experimentation when ACU was added to iTunes U in 2007. I’ve already shared the experience of having students record This I Believe essays on a single classroom iPod with microphone. These initial efforts encouraged student podcast assignments in general education courses as well as upper-level literature surveys, and my commitment to teaching with media in my own courses before promoting media fluency across campus hasn’t changed. In the last year I’ve had Film & Belief students produce DVD Extras assignments, ENGL 221 students introduce their peers to a dozen key texts widely familiar to the Enlightenment but forgotten today, and incoming freshmen produce their first media project through digital storytelling.

Digital Storytelling – In 2011 through my role in the Learning Studio, we brought in Joe Lambert and the Center for Digital Storytelling from Berkeley to help jumpstart faculty workshops in media production. Over a three-day period participants write and revise original scripts, collect, scan or record digital assets, and then learn to edit their final media project. I have long forced myself to produce an example of any media project I assign to student, so I was eager to let faculty see the potential of teaching with media by seeing themselves as producers of media. In August we had the CDS back on campus for a Facilitator Training event and were able to train Al Haley, Jennifer Shewmaker, James Langford, Susan Lewis, Nathan Driskell, and me to lead future workshops on our own. Since then we’ve offered workshops in digital storytelling through first-person narrative, scholarly storytelling that seeks to connect media literacy with advanced research, and even two workshops I’ve lead in Germany with ACU Study Abroad students reflecting on their own perspective as a foreigner abroad.

I’ll also share several examples when my work as a teacher at ACU has been recognized beyond our campus.

This I Believe interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition – In 2009, several years after we began working with ACU students writing their own This I Believe essays in freshman composition, and after Cole Bennett and I produced the national curriculum for teaching with This I Believe, I was asked to join host Lynn Neary on air for a discussion of the value of this type of essay for student writers developing a sense of their own voice. The program coincided with the final episode of the program and an essay by novelist Amy Tan.

Apple Distinguished Educator – In 2011, I was named an Apple Distinguished Educator for work with mobile media in my own classes as well as in shaping a vision for teaching with media across a campus. I attended a week-long training workshop at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State that summer where I worked with faculty from Higher Ed and K-12 and Apple engineers to develop content and strategies for innovative teaching.

EDUCAUSE Institute – Though I mentioned the EDUCAUSE Learning Technology Leadership Institute appointment above, I should mention that when I joined the team of 5 others on LTL I was the only one with a regular teaching role alongside my position in educational technology. This role as translator and consensus-builder between decision makers in very different parts of the university is perhaps one of the more important and challenging topics we tackle during the institute.

TEACHING AND ACADEMIC POSITIONS

Director, AT&T Learning Studio      2011–present

Associate Professor of English      2007–present

Director, Digital Media Center      2009–2011

Researcher in Residence, Adams Center      2008–2009

Assistant Professor, ACU   1999–2007

COURSES TAUGHT since 2007

ENGL 112: Composition and Literature

ENGL 221: Major British Writers I

ENGL 377: Drama (British Drama and Drama after Shakespeare)

ENGL 472: Film and Belief

ENGL 495: Eighteenth-Century British Literature

ENGL 497: Modern Existentialist Drama, Beckett & Hitchcock

ENGL 595: Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Graduate)

ENGL 612: Restoration Comedy

CORE 110: Cornerstone, Honors

HCOL 441: Satire, from the Dunciad to The Daily Show, Honors Colloquium

HCOL 411: Alfred Hitchcock, Cruel and Unusual Cinema, Honors Colloquium

HCOL 401: Short Film Production

221 Online Summer

ENGL 240: Summer Academy, Film & Faith

UNIV 140: Summer Academy, Media Literacy (w/ Jennifer Shewmaker)

UNIV 140: Summer Academy, Digital Media

PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING, excerpt from 2007 T&P Portfolio

The life of the mind is a life of continued seeking, asking, and knocking. The life of critical enquiry, as that of any moral training, is a life of attending to the self and its relation to the larger world, not content simply to confirm or deny, but to “test and approve” every thought or action. This kind of teaching—shaping the lives of students as well as our own—can hardly be boring. These kinds of conversations—seeking the wellsprings of truth, tensions between worldviews, the broken lights of the eternal in the everyday—can only be described as vital and transformative.

Yes, but what does that look like in the classroom? On a daily basis, in courses as wide-ranging as upper-level seminars and sophomore surveys, first-year composition and freshman seminar, I seek to raise genuine questions as often as I return to familiar territory, to challenge myself to teach new texts alongside authors that reward regular rereading. I try to avoid even the whiff of boredom in myself which translates so easily into intellectual apathy, instead seeking to frame old stories, ideas, or questions in new ways in the classroom or in alternative environments through distance education or study abroad. The results are not always what I anticipated. My career thus far has taken several unexpected twists and turns, but I seek to honor Paul’s injunction to offer my teaching as a fragrant offering to God, the author of all wisdom and truth.

Looking back, this still feels like a fair assessment of the impulses that continue to energize my teaching. At my best, I hope to infect students with my own enthusiasm for the subjects I teach and continuing to find living and breathing connections between the past and the present.

That said, it’s a bold claim from any teacher that this approach to teaching “can hardly be boring.” Christina Rossetti calls back to me on many a dry afternoon, “One may lead a horse to water, / Twenty cannot make him drink,” so most often my goal in teaching poetry, drama, or film is to create the conditions for learning though student engagement is always a choice I don’t get to make.

FAITH AND LEARNING, excerpt from 2007 T&P Portfolio

The English Department at ACU shares a common commitment to preparing thoughtful, mature graduates for Christian service and leadership throughout the world. Spiritual maturity doesn’t develop overnight but is nurtured through serious and sustained study of texts sometimes sympathetic to the Christian worldview and sometimes opposed to it. We believe that genuine maturity is formed often by struggling with the issues raised by texts and reflecting on the significance they hold for ourselves and our world. Just as Jacob wrestled with God and was blessed, we believe the questions students encounter during their time at ACU may be as important as the answers in shaping their future faith and character. This course seeks to raise challenging questions that lead students to read carefully, think critically, and communicate clearly.

This is a statement that has appeared in my syllabi for almost a decade. It kicks off the semester by connecting the challenging work of the course or their degree with their own journey of spiritual formation. One of the things I love about getting to work in the English department at ACU is the great cloud of witnesses who have shaped my own faith and teaching. The halls of Chambers have been a place of support and encouragement to engage questions wholeheartedly and perhaps wholemindedly.

Over the last seven years of teaching, general education courses involving extensive reading and writing have continued to be a place to challenge students to look critically at their beliefs. As I detailed my approach to teaching composition and literature previously in my T&P Portfolio, I’ll focus on two courses I’ve worked with more recently that have allowed opportunities to help students wrestle with questions that matter.

Cornerstone – I have taught Cornerstone since its first semester on campus. It’s a unique course that partners a teacher with an upper division student to pastor a small flock of incoming students through their first semester at ACU. I’ve enjoyed hearing from my colleagues in Cullen as they introduce freshmen to their academic disciplines and going back to the classroom on Wednesdays and Fridays to help students practice thinking like a scientist or a humanist. Perhaps the most spiritually rewarding part of teaching the course is encountering voices like Rachel Held Evans or Firoozeh Dumas through secondary readings each semester. For example, in Evolving in Monkey Town, Evans shares her own story of finding her faith as she attended a Christian college, studied apologetics, struggled with the inequities in the world—in short, raises the very questions many of my students are just beginning to articulate. The opportunity Cornerstone has afforded to step out of the world of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain regularly and connect with what my students are thinking about faith and culture has been energizing.

Film & Belief – The English department for many years offered a class called Literature of Belief that introduced students to a range of spiritual texts from Augustine to Pascal in the hopes of deepening and enriching their own journeys of faith. Several years ago Al Haley developed a parallel course called Film & Belief he hoped would do something similar for students devouring media culture without the tools to discern or weigh the messages they were ingesting. I’ve taught the course regularly for 6 years and am pleased by how students develop the tools to interpret cinematic language in more complex ways but also the worldviews so much a part of these messages. Students complete Mise en Scene assignments where they share a shot-by-shot analysis of a single scene from a film we’ve screened. More recently students have shared this same paper assignment in a DVD Extras format where they create a video that incorporates their own analysis over-dubbed on stills or moving images of the scene itself. This process allows each student to slow the film down and look at its component parts more carefully and critically.

STUDENT EVALUATIONS

In an attempt to offer a fair cross-section of a typical semester, I’d offer the following results from the two classes I taught in Spring 2013. Both courses were required—ENGL 221: Major British Writers as part of general education requirements and ENGL 377: Modern Drama for English majors. I’ve selected representative comments that suggest the very best and worst students sitting in the same classes shared in their final evaluations. I’m pleased that my overall numbers when working with English majors are high, but still happy with the numbers from ENGL 221 given it is often an unwanted Gen Ed requirement.

ENGL 221: Major British Writers I

Dr. Dickson is a great teacher, one of the best I’ve had here and I always enjoy being in his class. I recommended him for the Honors teacher of the year thing because I really think he is amazing at what he does and very enthusiastic about it as well which really makes the class and the subject fun.

Thank you for your encouragement, Dr. Dickson. You can’t know how valuable it’s been this semester.

Though I claim myself to be more than fairly knowledgeable on the English language and continually express good useage of grammar (which, admitadly, is rare in the age of text messaging), I have never enjoyed reading much. This class did not help me to enjoy reading anymore; to the contrary, it made it seem oppressive.

I appreciated the range of material we covered in this course. The classroom had a relaxed atmosphere with time for discussion and commentary. The class was one of the harder ones I have taken, but the work never seemed overwhelming.

Not lecture the entire class time. All that did was make me want to fall asleep. Engage students in learning, and don’t move as fast with the material. This isn’t the only class I am taking and I don’t have time to read that many pages in a short amount of time when I have work in other classes as well.

ENGL 377: Modern Drama

I feel like the assignments were not explained very well. The podcast I definitely knew what his expectations were, but the final presentation was a complete mystery.

Dr. Dickson’s down to Earth, group teaching style of authoritative discussion was really good, and his willingness to talk when the class had nothing to say made sure class didn’t get bogged down like it can at times with that teaching style. He was always prepared and on top of things, but, on the uncommon occasion that he didn’t know, he was willing to admit it and ask if anyone at the table had input, which I really respect, especially in someone who has a Dr.

This was a field in which he knew what he was talking about and had some experiences on the plays. He has seen the plays in person.

I think we should had had more smaller assignments such as responses, and short quizzes. This would create more grades to help students do better in the class.

Clone Kyle Dickson. Also, Steve Weathers.

COURSE DEVELOPMENT

HON 401:  Short Film Production, Fall 2013 – worked with Honors College to deliver a colloquium in filmmaking where students developed short subject documentaries in a 5-week period with final projects focused on CitySquare, the Paramount, and campus personalities.

SUMMER ACADEMY:  Media Literacy, Summer 2013 – developed and co-taught course with Jennifer Shewmaker for high school students that explored media through careful analysis and production.

CORE 110:  Honors Cornerstone, Fall 2012 – worked with Honors College to implement iPad pilot in Cornerstone, including iBooks Author faculty training for syllabi and handouts.

SUMMER ACADEMY:  Digital Media / Film & Faith, Summer 2012  – taught two classes for high school students to develop skills in media literacy and production.

CORE 110:  Honors Cornerstone, Fall 2011 – worked with Stephen Johnson to adapt digital storytelling assignment to Cornerstone project completed in 2 sections.  Also provided support and consulting for sections of Psychology and Math as part of pilot.

ENGL 221:  Major British Writers, Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 – adapted content on course blog to new OpenClass learning environment as part of pilot with Pearson eCollege. Met with their software designers throughout the year with mobile and media recommendations.

HCOL 111 – Hitchcock Colloquium, Fall 2011 – adapted upper-level drama course into colloquium where students screened major films, discussed auteur criticism, and produced a Remix podcast that demonstrated an awareness of genre themes by producing a trailer changing the style of one of Hitchcock’s films.

Cornerstone, Fall 2010 – taught section of course and worked with Greg Straughn and Kristina Campos to develop Cornerstone Portal blogs and podcast content for spotlight speakers.

ENGL 472 Film & Belief, Fall 2010 – updated film list since first taught class in 2008 to better introduce cinematic language and technique and cover more international films.

ENGL 497 Modern Drama, Spring 2010 – when department needed a 20th century survey for majors, developed seminar pairing dramatic contributions of Samuel Beckett and Alfred Hitchcock to British stage drama and film in the 20th century.

HCOL 441 – Satire Colloquium, Fall 2009 – adapted colloquium last taught on Blackboard in 2006 for delivery through ACU Blogs, including YouTube media and original satire project turned into podcasts.

 

 —> Scholarship