All aboard the Medieval school bus: making Old and Middle English Literature come alive in the classroom

For more information, visit teachingstrides.caYou can follow Dr. Olsen on Twitter @KennaOlsenSHOW TRANSCRIPT:Meg Wilcox: (00:00)I'm Meg Wilcox and this is Teaching Strides, MRU faculty daring greatly. In this episode, how Twitter can better help students understand medieval literature. What do popular culture and old English literature have in common? Well, an MRU classroom. Dr Kenna Olsen is a professor in the department of English Languages and Culture. She teaches Old and Middle English Literature, but that doesn't just mean reading the texts. Dr. Olsen brings popular TV shows and social media into the classroom to keep students engaged and that's what we'll be talking about today. Thank you so much for joining me. Kenna Olsen: (00:37)It's amazing to be here, thank you. What a nice introduction!Meg Wilcox: (00:40)So your students have often commented on how enthusiastic you are in the classroom. Do you have a tactic or a reason behind your enthusiasm or is it just there? Kenna Olsen: (00:52)It's just there, it's just there. I can even just think of yesterday I was teaching literature in the age of Chaucer and on the docket was the Friar's tale. And I just get a lot of energy. I think just feeding off of the students, you know, when I can illuminate it for them, something that's in the text that maybe they didn't know was there or weren't quite comfortable with those things. And then just to have that conversation, I don't know, it's so energizing that to me it's just so wonderful when you can say, yes, these are how the pieces fit together. And by the end of a class...it takes me hours to come down after class teaching. So I think it's just my interest in the material and when I can see that the students are generating that same kind of interest, it's just, it's so, it's so wonderful and it just, you know, sparks this energy. So how can you not be enthusiastic about it? Meg Wilcox: (01:42)Well, and you mentioned your enthusiasm for the topic itself and then the students are really into it. Do you think that's rubbing off of you or do you think that it's a chicken and egg thing? Kenna Olsen: (01:52)It's kind of hard to tell. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know where the origin is for that. And maybe you've noticed my egg that there seems to be like a lot of medieval tropes in popular culture. And so I think students come with sometimes like an expectation or an anticipation of what a class might be like. And I really like to turn those expectations upside down and we do a lot of that. And that I think has some, you know, fulfilling conversations. Meg Wilcox: (