Teaching with Taylor: Pedagogical Approaches to Taylor Swift in the 21st Century Classroom (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_GxIqJlPBeMeov-j727q3jJkSxADg5XeD7yyS3RJBJI/edit?usp=sharing)
Event: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_GxIqJlPBeMeov-j727q3jJkSxADg5XeD7yyS3RJBJI/edit?usp=sharing
Taylor Swift is everywhere, it seems, and teachers at all levels have begun to Taylor-tailor their courses to harness her popularity for student learning. At the K-12 level, the TeachersPayTeachers site boasts TS figurative poetry lessons, TS-themed reading comprehension mystery games, TS rhetorical analysis units, and pages more of TS-specific materials (“Taylor Swift”). At the college level, courses devoted explicitly to Taylor Swift are proliferating, from BYU’s political science offering, “Ms. Americana: Taylor Swift on Ethics and Society,” to “Taylor Swift, Gender, and Communication” at Pennsylvania State University, Berks, to Salem State University’s media and communications course, “The Media Impact & Societal Influence of Taylor Alison Swift” (“These Colleges”). We editors have each offered our own Taylor Swift-themed courses: “English Studies (Taylor’s Version)” at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and “Taylor Swift and the Rhetoric of (Almost) Everything” at Northern Arizona University. This steady accretion of pedagogical devotion to Taylor Swift suggests that teachers are ready and willing to bring various fields’ lenses and expertise to studying and becoming a part of the Taylor zeitgeist.
With this proposed collection, we hope to help other Swift-curious instructors productively harness the current popular fascination with the singer-songwriter as the ultimate exploration of “meeting students where they are.” Using the current uptick in pedagogical appropriation of Swift as a subject, we seek to help introduce and develop a conversation surrounding the use of Swift specifically, and popular culture in general, and all its pertinent meanings across a variety of instructional contexts. We all know Taylor Swift is a boon to any local economy--how can she similarly be a boon for teaching and learning spaces?
We seek both personal and scholarly contributions from a wide variety of teacher-scholars examining the advantages and possibilities of Teaching with Taylor.
We invite proposals for chapters that seek to answer or challenge questions such as:
How have you reinvented your teaching with Taylor Swift as a subject?
What resources or tools have you adopted for that reinvention? What was your affective experience before, during, and after?
How has your personal engagement with Taylor Swift shaped your pedagogical choices?
When you’ve taught a Taylor Swift-themed lesson, unit, or course, what has worked, and what has tanked, and why?
How is your Taylor Swift pedagogy affected by gender, race, and/or class?
What are the possibilities and challenges associated with teaching Taylor?
How could past examples of ideal and/or problematic pedagogies related to celebrity speak to Taylor Swift-related teaching?
How do you push back against an academic culture that tends to denigrate pop culture texts/figures such as Swift and prop up more traditional, “canonical” texts and authors?
We hope to see proposals for an expansive array of submissions including course designs, pedagogical reflections, and the stories of a wide range of scholars’ pedagogical engagement with Taylor Swift. We’re looking for chapters between 5000 and 8000 words, including MLA citations.
Expected Timeline
Please submit 500-word proposals and 50-word bios by 1 June 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 July 2025. Full chapter drafts (5000-8000 words, including Works Cited) will be due 1 November 2025. Requested revisions will be due 1 February 2026. Please send queries and proposals to: teachingwithtswift@gmail.com. Devori and Kim are happy to talk over ideas over Zoom, phone, or email.
Works Cited
“These Colleges Have Taylor Swift Classes.” BestColleges.Com. https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/these-colleges-have-taylor-swift-classes/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.
“Taylor Swift.” TeachersPayTeachers. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/browse?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA2oW-BhC2ARIsADSIAWrV1tWUW6DXVoFxMWLGfqA1j4d-fmUnxPMrxYFtxG0hho0TnRjYkrkaAgBBEALw_wcB&page=3&search=taylor%20swift. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.
Other possible sources
Irwin, William. Taylor Swift and Philosophy: Essays from the Tortured Philosophers Department. Edited by Catherine M. Robb and Georgie Mills, 1st edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2024.
Sheffield, Rob. Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: A Celebration of Taylor Swift’s Musical Journey, Cultural Impact, and Reinvention of Pop Music for Swifties by a Swiftie. Dey Street Books, 2024.
Devori Kimbro/Kim Hensley Owens
