NeMLA 2026: Reviving the Classroom: Student Engagement Beyond the Screen (In-Person) (NeMLA 2026)
Pittsburgh, PA
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA 2026
he premise of this roundtable is that face-to-face interaction is the foundation of humanities classroom learning. Despite the ubiquity of tools meant to keep students engaged in reading and interpretation (think digital annotation tools, multimodal discussion platforms, collaborative video feedback, etc.) getting students to talk remains elusive and—given the “chilling effect on classroom climate and student investment in a course” generated by the current political and social polarization, as communication scholars Ruiz-Mesa and Hunter (2019) put it—a frequently Sisyphean task.
This roundtable invites instructors to share and reflect on strategies for fostering off-screen student conversations interpreting literary texts and other cultural objects in the college classroom.
What new “old” strategies have helped to revive classroom discussions? How and where do we coax students away from apps, LMSs, and LLMs and towards voicing less mediated responses to cultural texts, including affective responses of engagement such as boredom, pleasure, and resistance?
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21884
Maik Stanitzke