Course Info

What are the stories we tell about America's favorite dead blonde? Despite her untimely passing sixty years ago, Marilyn Monroe's enigmatic presence endures in American popular culture. Her life has been fictionalized and mythologized, just as the circumstances surrounding her death have become conspiracy theory fodder. Search her name on Amazon and see the extent to which her image is endlessly commodified, from kitchen gear to jigsaw puzzles and everything in between. In this course, we will analyze a variety of media (including excerpts from competing biographies, podcasts, critical essays, and film reviews, as well as her own interviews and performances) to interrogate how and why Marilyn Monroe has dominated our cultural imagination. In doing so, we will examine how she has shaped our understandings of femininity, celebrity, and the body in mid-century America and beyond.

After teaching the first iteration of this inquiry-based composition course in Spring 2023, I overhauled the curricular scaffold in order to create a new digital composition course. The major difference is that the new course (taught in Fall 2023 & Spring 2024) is focused explicitly on digital projects, literacy, and creativity. Throughout the semester, students work individually and collaboratively in an active learning environment to create digital projects using Adobe Creative Cloud that allow us to tell our own stories about the star. Students produce images, infographics, scrolling essays, podcasts, explainer videos, and portfolios.

Unlike standard composition courses with two dozen or fewer students, certain sections of ENG-W171 are designated as following the "ALPs" or active learning pods model. I serve as the faculty lead and curriculum designer, and I am joined by 1-3 graduate student co-instructors to facilitate a 48- or 96-student section of the course.

Course Info

Course: ENG-W171

(Projects in Digital Literacy & Composition)

Course Type:

First-Year Writing

Cap: 23, 48, or 96

students

Taught Fall 2023 &

Spring 2024

IUB English

Click here to learn more about ENG-W171 at IUB English, a new version of composition at IUB developed by Miranda Rodak and first piloted in fall 2022 by Justin Hodgson.

Grad Mentorship

Click here to read my essay published in the CCCC 2024 Conference Companion about my approach to graduate student mentorship in this course. Coming Soon!

Digital Gardening

As part of my preparation for this new digital projects course, I became a Digital Gardener Faculty Fellow during the spring 2023 semester. The Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows (DGFF) program is a semester-long faculty development program that admits 35 faculty from across all IU campuses and works to integrate digital literacy, digital creativity, and digital learning into the curriculum. DGFF helps create experts, support students, promote digital literacy, and build community.

Click here to learn more about my experience as a DGFF.

CDI & Adobe Education

Participating in the Foundational Course Development Institute facilitated by IUB's Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning was the start of a summer filled with excellent professional & pedagogical development.

Click here to learn more about the various institutes I participated in this summer as I designed the bones of this course.

Start of Semester Recap

Click here to read the Fall 2023 recap, documenting the first weeks of the semester.

Click here to see the Digital Skills Crescendo that I created to facilitate converstions about the transferrability of the skills students learn in ENG-W171. It also serves as a visual of the curricular trajectory.

“Throughout this semester, the general question of Marilyn Monroe pushed my boundaries to thinking more critically as well. Perceiving people is something everyone does daily, whether it is consciously or unconsciously... Learning more about Marilyn Monroe, I was able to assess how others think, and how people disregard her as a human being and instead see her as this icon who just lives on screen... Looking back at the beginning of the semester, I had zero experience with this technology, and I didn’t think about digging deeper into who Marilyn Monroe was and what her short life can tell us about her. Now, I feel capable of using technology to create impactful messages and projects while also being a more sympathetic human, and wanting to know more about someone before forming my thoughts about them.”

“Learning about how we perceive and interact with celebrity culture was significant... We researched how negative public perceptions specifically impacted Monroe and her ability to be seen as more than a sexual object. I focused my research on bringing back a denied humanity to Monroe’s perception with a feminist lens. The objectification of Monroe was endorsed heavily through the period’s largely patriarchal lens–but what is unfortunate for Monroe is that this continues to deny her the rest she should get after being laid to rest... This course and its easily shareable projects makes this information accessible to larger audiences and contributes to widening the understanding of Monroe.”

“Through the podcast and remediation video projects, I have learned to analyze issues for their broader societal implications and mastered the art of creating persuasive multimedia content. This skill set is crucial as it equips me to effectively raise awareness and advocate for meaningful changes in a world increasingly dominated by digital communication. By understanding how to construct compelling narratives and engage diverse audiences, I am prepared to contribute positively to societal discourse, influence public opinion, and foster action on critical issues that affect our community and beyond.”

“Creating multimodal work intersects with creating accessible work. As I progress through my Music Education degree, we talk more and more about providing multiple means of engagement and representation in our lessons and classrooms. That’s essentially where multimodal projects come into play. In order for a lesson to be as accessible as possible to students, there must be several points where students can interact with the material, and it is important the material is presented in several ways... This same concept goes for all the multimodal projects we worked on this semester. For example, with the scrolling essays we incorporate pictures, videos, picture collages, and different layout structure as methods of conveying analysis and information, rather than just as a piece of writing. While the writing is important, the point of mulitmodality is that information is presented in several ways, rather than just the one... I’ve found Adobe Express to be an easy way to produce professional looking work quickly. Once again, thinking from an educator’s point of view, I would not expect my students to be able to do anything I can’t figure out myself. I haven’t ever been able to work GarageBand, so I’m not going to go tell my students to go write me a 15 minute symphony on GarageBand. Adobe Express really ties in with the accessibility as mentioned earlier. It is important there is an easy-to- access and user friendly platform for students of all ages to be able to create projects. I’m glad that over the last few months, I have developed a skill with Adobe Express, at least to a basic level, to help future students.“