Teaching Portfolio

Overview

Teaching Philosophy

My primary goal as a teacher is to provide my students with critical thinking, reading, and writing tools that enable them to analyze and understand current and past formations of our media landscape. The materials and theoretical frameworks I introduce to students in my classes ask them to reorient their understanding of the relationship between reality and representation; between various media formats; and among producers, texts, and audiences. 

I juxtapose mainstream and independent, historical and current texts and media artifacts to encourage students to discern connections where they may not have seen any before, and to develop a habit of questioning common sense assessments of the media. 

Read Full Statement of Teaching Philosophy.

Subsections of the Portfolio:

Experience & Interests

This section provides an overview of my pedagogical experience, interests, and training at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at Brown University.

  • Course Design
  • Teaching Fields
  • Pedagogical Training
  • Teaching Consulting

Syllabi

An overview of syllabi for classes on media and on American culture.

  • Transmedia Television
  • Web 2.0: Collaboration/Consumption/Creativity
  • Digital Media and Participatory Culture
  • Understanding Television
  • Media/Technology/Everyday Life
  • The "Gay 90s"?: Sexuality, Identity and the Media in the 1990s
  • 1900/2000

Assignments & Sample Student Projects

View sample multimedia assignments and corresponding student projects.

  • Transmedia Storytelling Project
  • Remix Project
  • The Visual Essay
  • The Multimedia Manifesto
  • TV Studies 101 Prezi
  • Writers vs Networks
  • Assignment Sequence: The Research Paper
  • Critical Reading Response


Summary of Student Evaluations

Creative Commons License
This work by Melanie E. S. Kohnen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.