This article considers "My Friend Dahmer" as a pedagogical document of educational critique. A graphic novel memoir, "My Friend Dahmer" depicts the teenage life of Jeffrey Dahmer in the years before he gained notoriety as a serial killer. One of the memoir's central tensions is that at Dahmer's school, even a…

This qualitative study highlights how children's literature can serve as a springboard for discussing current events while making connections with a similar historical event. Undergraduate students enrolled in children's literature courses read the graphic novel "Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918" and discussed the parallels between the…

This article argues for greater attention to the embodied experiences and material practices of single mothers in the academy. Using critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch) to analyze how texts in the field have represented single motherhood, I identify three patterns of how mothers complete work, or what I term survivalist strategies to resist…

Anatomy and Physiology should be considered a gateway course due to its challenging scope and key role as a foundational prerequisite for many degree programs. Students often encounter gateway classes early in their college career when they are academically vulnerable due to their lack of university experience. A&P teaching methods are…

Many of us know the courses within our curriculum that slow student progress toward graduation. Existing research has found that research design courses often serve as barriers, as one of these students arrive on the first day with high anxiety and low motivation. This article reviews how revisions driven by the Quality Matters framework resulted…

In this article, I present a thought experiment highlighting some lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic for language education. I focus on two characteristics of the pandemic and the English language teaching (ELT) industry. First, during the pandemic, humans appeared to grapple with the ancient problem of killer viruses, with modern medicine initially…

Framing as a metacommunicative device establishes the narrative of a given story and mobilizes emotional support. Within the framework of monster theory, horror movies are seen as a way of framing common fears about moral decay, concerns about the future, anxiety about outgroup members, and spiritual unknowns. In the classroom, we explore the…

"Biology Myth-Killers" is an activity designed to identify and correct common misconceptions for high school and college introductory biology courses. Students identify common myths, which double as biology misconceptions, and use appropriate sources to share the "truth" about the myths. This learner-centered activity is a fun…

This manuscript will focus on cyber-bullying, which has become an epidemic in this country amongst children and teenagers of all different races, backgrounds, socioeconomic status, and religious beliefs. Using virtual mediums to harass, taunt, tease, threaten, and bully has become pervasive due to the availability of technology, the incredible…

For the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago, a cartoonist named Robert Ripley would create his first odditorium, a public archive of his personal collection of curiosities. While Ripley was not the first to capitalize on the display of "exotic" and "monstrous" curios, his odditoriums illuminate pervasive ideas about human difference…

With the high prevalence of college students experiencing psychological distress, it is becoming increasingly important to provide prevention and early intervention programs in addition to traditional psychological counseling services. This study examined the effectiveness of a suicide prevention program led by peer educators/trainers on a diverse…

Although MOOCs have not lived up to previously breathless predictions of disruption, they have had an outsized influence on university administrators who see online learning as a "savior solution" for ever-shrinking budgets. Despite lower student persistent rates, faculty skepticism, and burdensome faculty workloads, the general public…

The body of literature on a Writing-to-Learn (WTL) approach in math courses offers up a variety of assignment types from which to choose. However, few of these articles provide empirical evidence on the ways these writing assignments contribute to students' learning. This mixed-methods study, conducted at the University of New Mexico, a…

Genocide education would benefit from a renewed focus on how ordinary people perpetuate atrocities more so than villains. Ordinary evil is often understood via Hannah Arendt's political theory, which explains how people can contribute thoughtlessly to genocide. This "banality of evil" explains an important aspect of human behavior,…

The leading substance of misuse among teens after tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana is the use of pain killers. Very few longitudinal studies on prediction of pain killer use have been conducted among teens. This study examined the 1-year prediction of self-reported last 30-day pain killer use controlling for baseline 30-day painkiller use among…