Getting digital projects off the ground is only the first step to bringing neglected texts by American women authors into the sunlight. Without college/university instructors and high school teachers adopting them in the classroom, these texts may continue to remain forgotten. Recovery Hub aims to support educators in adding recovered texts by American women writers to their courses—particularly free digital editions like those published by the project creators the Hub supports.

Recovery Hub provides the following support for educators:

Teaching Resources: The in-progress Teaching Resources section of our website includes lesson plans, unit plans, syllabi, and other materials aimed at encouraging educators to use existing digital recovery projects or engage students in the creation of new literary-recovery projects in the classroom.

Open Call for Teaching Materials: If you are a college/university or high school instructor working on a digital recovery project or engaging students in digital literary recovery, the Hub invites you to submit assignments, unit plans, or lesson plans for peer review and possible publication on our website.

Pedagogical Mission Statement: Read the Hub’s anti-racist, feminist mission statement for the pedagogical materials it hosts.

Teaching Materials Peer-Review Process: Learn more about the Hub’s peer-review process for pedagogical materials related to digital literary-recovery projects in the classroom.

OPEN CALL FOR TEACHING MATERIALS

Recovery Hub for American Women Writers is currently seeking teaching materials related to using digital recovery projects or engaging students in recovery projects in the classroom.

Our team aims to collaborate with instructors to develop publishable, shareable resources on how to do recovery in the classroom or how to use digital recovery projects with students. By responding to this open call via the submission form linked below, you will be eligible to have your teaching artifacts peer reviewed by other scholar-teachers and published on Recovery Hub’s website.

We welcome anything from a classroom activity to a unit plan, a detailed syllabus, or just a few general thoughts about a teaching experience you had with a digital archive in the classroom. And while we would particularly invite instructors who have taught one of the below archives showcased at the Hub to submit, we are also interested in hearing from you if you have a classroom activity that focuses on other digital recovery projects or recovery work in the classroom.

If you have any teaching materials or brief reflections to share, please review Recovery Hub’s pedagogical mission statement (which includes a list of possible teaching materials) and our Memorandum of Understanding.

To submit: While our official deadline has passed, we are always happy to consider new materials to add to our shared resources! Please send an email with a brief description of your lesson plan, activity, etc. to recoveryhub@siue.edu. We would love to hear from you!

PEDAGOGICAL MATERIALS MISSION STATEMENT

The Recovery Hub for American Women Writers supports the development and resource-sharing of teaching artifacts as well as the promotion of Hub-related digital recovery projects by collecting, collaborating on, and facilitating the accessibility of pedagogical projects from educators from across venues, including higher education and informal learning environments. 

The Hub seeks to promote the intersecting relationships between feminist practice, content, and technical specifications. The Hub also aims to demonstrate an awareness of how feminist recovery projects can be used within a classroom. Because every classroom is different, the Hub recognizes the value of resource-sharing, transparency within the pedagogical peer review process, and personal reflection on classroom experiences. The Hub serves as a center for sharing teaching artifacts that use digital recovery projects in the classroom. Finally, the Hub also seeks to elevate the status of lesson plans as a scholarly genre by offering peer review and scholarly collaboration for teaching artifacts more broadly. In general, our pedagogical mission aligns with the Hub’s general mission statement.

To support this mission equitably:

  • We commit to cultivating a community that is inclusive in terms of who is involved in designing teaching artifacts as well as the content they represent. Practicing anti-racist models of restorative justice, we aim for at least 50% of the peer reviewed teaching artifacts selected to be featured on the site center Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQI+ stories, texts, experiences, and voices. When peer reviewing materials to be shared, we will collaborate with educators to design and advocate for models that are inclusive of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and ability.
  • The educators whose teaching artifacts are selected for publication and our peer review evaluators will also reflect the BIPOC/LGBTQI+ representation sought in projects recovered. 
  • Our peer reviewers will also reflect the BIPOC/LGBTQI+ representation sought in our recovered projects. 
  • Because women’s texts are often extra-literary and can include commonplace books, scrapbooks, cookbooks, prophecies, and other genres, the Hub will actively encourage teaching artifacts that cover materials expanding the traditional definitions of authorship and canonicity.
  • We privilege free, open-access teaching resources, while acknowledging that humanities labor is valuable and that certain classroom activities can require certain institutional, monetary, and technological resources. 
  • We value the contributions of all educators and invite them to submit materials: secondary and post-secondary school educators, librarians, independent scholars, graduate students, etc. We also acknowledge the potential for adaptations of college-level materials for K-12 use (and vice versa) even if the teaching artifacts included on our site are not yet adapted as such.
  • We value student-centered, anti-racist, feminist pedagogical practices in which students and teachers learn with an from one another, personal experience and emotions are recognized and valued as forms of knowing, students are empowered to reflect upon their positions in the classroom, students and teachers avoid making assumptions about others’ experiences, and the classroom is seen as a space open to dialogue that may generate tension and disagreement.


TEACHING MATERIALS PEER-REVIEW PROCESS

The Hub uses a hybrid model of peer review for teaching materials, with private, actionable feedback followed by online publication within a professionalized format. Curated, peer-reviewed teaching artifacts become part of the Hub’s permanent collection of teaching materials for ongoing pedagogical use. Below is a non-exhaustive list of examples of what qualifies to us as a “teaching artifact”:

  • Lesson plans for in-class activities
  • Unit plans for classroom texts
  • Handouts for an assignment designed to be done inside or outside a classroom
  • Detailed syllabi 
  • Curated lists of discussion topics/questions
  • Reflections on a pedagogical experience 

While we particularly welcome lesson plans for in-class activities for inclusion in our permanent collection, we welcome the submission of any teaching artifact if the submitting educator is willing to collaborate on building out their materials with the Hub’s team. 

The Hub’s peer review process for pedagogical materials is grounded in feminist practice; reviewers use an open model that emphasizes collaboration and encourages submitting educators to build upon and cite the work of other feminists. The Hub also values the embodied, experiential nature of classroom activities by offering an opportunity  for educators to reflect on the variability of their teaching artifacts in different contexts. For more information on how our peer review works, see our Teaching Materials Peer Review Instructions

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