Teaching — Alexa Alice Joubin

Pedagogy

AI in an Inquiry-Driven Society

Teaching Shakespeare with AI

Critical Questioning Skills and AI

Pedagogy

It has been Alexa’s calling to tell stories and to show others how to listen for silenced voices. She believes that storytelling makes us human because it helps us understand the human condition in different contexts—a core value of the humanities.

An award-winning teacher, Alexa’s goal is to ensure equal access to knowledge and to further our understanding race and gender in the mobility of early modern and postmodern cultures in their literary, performative, and digital forms of expression. She teaches critical AI literacy, and incorporates generative artificial intelligence (AI) into her classroom.

She has received the 2022 Writing in the Disciplines Distinguished Assignment Design Award as well as grants for course development, such as the Online Course Development grants (in 2021 and 2023 for two new courses), the 2022 and 2024 Adapting Course Materials for Equity Faculty Grants (read more about the project’s impact), and the Washington Research Library Consortium’s Open @ WRLC grant (new story) which enables her to create three openly licensed, open-access online interactive textbooks with AI features (news story). She wrote and designed an interactive, online textbook entitled Screening Shakespeare.

Born in a farming village in Taiwan, and now having family also in France and the United States, Alexa has been an advocate for equity and meaningful diversity. There are two leading principles in her teaching philosophy:

“Collaborative Creation of Knowledge”: is conducive to inquiry-driven learning in both in-person and remote classrooms as social spaces.
“Intersectional Pedagogy” gives students a voice in narratives that matter. These narratives connect students to other racialized communities, times, and places.

Her presence as an Asian woman in the English literature classroom, for example, has enabled students of color to feel represented, and inspired them both to examine exclusionary practices in our own times and to reevaluate Shakespeare as a gender-inclusive and anti-racist canon.

Featured

Professor Alexa Alice Joubin’s open-access AI has been featured in:

AI and the Humanities Graduate Seminar

Artificial intelligence is a feminist issue, and technologies often have colonial implications. In fact, technologies as disruptive agents are inherently queer. This course examines the long history of technologies leading up to the public release of ChatGPT. We will chart the Western societies’ apprehension of and faith in, as the case may be, technologies of masculinist representation practices, as evidenced by science fiction, philosophical writing, and film culture. Students learn in a hands-on environment and conduct individual research projects. From generative AI as assistive technologies to long-standing humanistic questions of agency, identity, and mind and body, critical theory provides essential tools to participate in current cultural discourses.

SYLLABUS

Screening Shakespeare: An Interactive Textbook Textbook by Alexa Alice Joubin

This open-access textbook contains openly-licensed learning modules that introduce students to key concepts of film studies, such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, and sound and music within the context of film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays.

Link to Open-Access Textbook

Being Human Graduate Seminar

How has the human condition been redefined throughout history from Plato and Aristotle through Ovid and Shakespeare to Michel de Montaigne, Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka, and science fiction? As AI tools provoke rethinking of creativity and the human condition, it is all the more important to examine what it entails to be human, to construct the social spaces of humanity, and how we envision the relationships between human and nonhuman entities such as the machine, environment, animals, and objects.

SYLLABUS

Introduction to Critical Theory Undergraduate Course

This course introduces students to theories of race, gender and sexuality that are most relevant to our contemporary political and cultural life. We will ask new questions through a carefully curated selection of key writing—from influential classics to more current works. Students will gain fluency in the conceptual frameworks associated with structuralism, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, post-colonialism, and feminism, with an emphasis on critical race, gender, sexuality, queer, and disability studies.

SYLLABUS

Decolonizing Shakespeare Graduate Seminar Middlebury College Summer Institute in Global Humanities , Monterey, California

This graduate seminar decolonizes Shakespeare studies by connecting the canon to social justice issues in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. The classical texts are traditionally associated with colonial and patriarchal practices, but through the lenses of critical race and gender theories, we can re-interpret Shakespeare’s plays and their adaptations in a more socially inclusive manner.

Syllabus

Graduate

AI and the Humanities

Graduate Seminar

Screening Race and Gender

Graduate Seminar

Decolonizing Shakespeare

Graduate Seminar

The Renaissance on Screen

Graduate Seminar

Global Shakespeares

Graduate Seminar

Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice

Graduate Seminar

Undergraduate

Shakespeare, Race and Gender on Screen

Fully asynchronous, online course with professionally filmed short lecture videos. Certified by the Quality Matters’s Distance Learning rubric and criteria. This course will utilize Alexa Alice Joubin’s open-access web-based textbook

Introduction to Critical Theory

Accredited asynchronous online course. Through the lens of social justice, this course introduces students to theories that are most relevant to our contemporary political and cultural life, such as critical race theory, ecocriticism, feminism, and queer and disability studies.

Decolonizing Shakespeare: Graduate Seminar

Synchronous, in-person, online course taught at Middlebury College Bred Loaf School of English, a summer MA program. Using critical race and gender theories, this seminar equips students with interpretive strategies and critical tools to de-colonize Shakespeare’s plays.