Cadets Get Published in Commonweal Magazine

Dr. Cassandra Nelson traveled to the University of Dallas to present a paper entitled "Sense and Comprehensibility: Revivifying Literature for First-Year College Students" at the 21st Annual Conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. Dr. Nelson's paper shared strategies for effectively teaching literature to first-year undergraduates, by encouraging them to read experientially—that is, for discovery and mastery, not skimming for standardized-testable keywords—and by demonstrating how the work of interpretation will benefit them in their future careers. One in-class exercise that Dr. Nelson has successfully used to re-empower fourth-class cadets as readers and thinkers combines Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Filling Station" with ADRP 6-22, Chapter 3, to show the importance of empathy as one of the foundations of Army leader character. Two weeks after the conference, Dr. Nelson published an essay—entitled "'Why, oh Why, the Doily?': Aristotle, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Work of Preservation"—in the Fall Books issue of Commonweal magazine. The essay includes analysis of Bishop's poem by ten cadets who took EN102 last spring: Cadets Davis Benn, Nicole Drago, Nathan Hein, Denali Jackson, Amira Mohamed, Malik Mitchell, Lauren Schultz, and Jackson Szczerbik, they reunited to pick up copies of the magazine and to see their writing in print, some for the first time.