Review Portfolio for Gloria J. Betcher

Vita 2008 (updated 10/12/08)

Portfolio Documents (password protected)

Promotion Dossier 2007-08

List of Journals & Articles with Abstracts

Course Syllabi and Web Sites

The links below will take you to online syllabi and course materials for several of my recent English and Honors courses. Each Web site provides 1) a syllabus/course policy sheet, including course description and objectives; 2) an assignment schedule with links to .pdfs of password-protected course readings, PPTs, and other informational pages within the site; and 3) links to other resource pages. (Please note that not all of the links within the sites are functional. I have not been updating the pages.) Resources that are password protected may be opened using the dept. designator and the course number written as one word.

Engl 450: Seminar in Drama--Devils, Demons, and Damnation in Early British Drama, Spring 2006

Engl 533: British Literature to 1830--Arthurian Legend, Summer 2006

Engl 373: Survey of British Literature--The Middle Ages, Fall 2006

Hon 321A: Honors Seminar--King Arthur; History, Legend, & Cinema, Fall 2006

Engl 452: Seminar in Prose--Arthurian Legend, Spring 2007

Hon 322K: Honors Seminar--Robin Hood: History, Legend, & Film, Spring 2007

Download a .zip file of a student project--a computer game called Robin's Merry Launch (a.k.a. Robin Lobbin')

PowerPoint Presentations

The PowerPoint Presentations below were created for a variety of audiences, including students, medieval scholars, and Ames residents and government officials. All of the PPTs below will download as PowerPoint Shows (.pps) to accommodate a better range of PPT versions.

For Class

This first set of PPTS have much more text than those for conferences or civic events, more text than is typically appropriate for PPTs because they were designed to be self-contained lectures of a sort. In 2001, when I created these class PPTs to use as lab exercises, many of my students did not have high-speed Internet access and some did not even have home computers. I opted to create these PPTs rather than using Flash or other streaming media to accommodate the variety of computer technology available to students at home. While I knew they would be able to access higher-tech materials in the computer lab, I wanted to be sure that as many of them as possible could also review materials at home with lower-end computers and Internet connections

Hell and Damnation in the Visual Arts

The York Plays in York

The York Plays in York: Play 3--"The Creation of Adam and Eve" (The Cardmakers’ Pageant)

Medieval Costume in N-Town "Passion Play I"

Engl 450: Seminar in Drama--Devils, Demons and Damnation in Early British Drama, Fall 2001

I designed these PPTs as components of an eight-part series for student tutorial use in Engl 450: Seminar in Drama--Devils, Demons, and Damnation in Early British Drama, Fall 2001. Students downloaded the PPTs and used them during scheduled lab exercise days when we met in Ross 115. These exercises incorporated active learning principles and ensured that students didn't have to listen to me lecturing on elements of material culture with which they needed to be somewhat familiar in order to understand iconographic concepts, staging issues, and cultural references within scripts. Among other things, the series introduced iconographic terminology and literary terms useful for the analysis of drama; helped students identify common medieval visual symbols; taught viewers how to read complex images; promoted a general understanding of the (sometimes irreverent) ways in which hell and damnation might be used to reinforce propaganda, stimulate compliance among believers, and further agendas of the Church; and taught students about how plays were staged (processional staging on wagons, staging in the round) before the advent of the professional theater.

Updated PPT use--Engl 450: Seminar in Drama--Devils, Demons and Damnation in Early British Drama, Spring 2006

For Engl 450 in spring 2006, I cut back on lab time and in-class computer exercises and, instead, assigned an online forum exercise, for which my students worked on teams with students in an early drama seminar at Virginia Military Institute. (For more on the intercollegiate online forum exercise, see Forums, below.) Students this semester downloaded only the PPT on Medieval Costume in N-Town "Passion Play I" and used it as a reading assignment, not part of a lab exercise. I introduced iconography and iconographic concepts in the first two class periods of the semester using a DVD, "Heaven or Hell: The Last Judgment," created by an art historian. This allowed us to see many more examples of the sort of iconographic elements that influenced medieval staging, and it encapsulated other religious attitudes effectively, as well, leaving time for discussion on day two.

For Conferences

The PowerPoints below also appear in hard copy in my print portfolio. This second set of PPTs includes two that I used while presenting papers at conferences. To be experienced as fully as possible, they should be viewed while reading the paper text if possible (text available in my hard-copy research portfolio). The texts include commands to "click" for slide changes. Both PPTs were created a few years ago and seemed impressive to conference-goers in the days before the prevalence of WiFi and cheap, high-end computers.

Typology, Technology, Text, and Image: Representations of the Noah Story in Cornish Art and Drama, presented at Text and Image in Medieval England, an international conference, University of Minnesota, 2003.

Bringing Early Drama, Art, and Music to the Digital Stage: Multimodal Communication and Digital Literacy in the Early Drama Classroom, presented at the 37th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May, 2002.

For Public Lectures

They were created for public lectures in Ames in 2006 and 2007. The audience for the first were fans of Dan Brown's blockbuster The DaVinci Code, hungry to learn more about the historicity of the seemingly historically-based book. The audience for the second were members of the Ames City Council, who were expecting a succinct presentation of the results of the historic resources survey that they had funded in 2006-07: Fourth Ward: Ames, Iowa, a 250+ page Multiple Property Document Form written by public historian Will Page.

The DaVinci Code: Fact, Fiction, or Fake?: The Medieval Elements

Fourth Ward, Ames, Iowa

CEAH Panel at the Ames Public Library

The DaVinci Code PPT was used as part of a panel presentation on The DaVinci Code that the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities sponsored at the Ames Public Library in May 2006. The panel, originally sponsored by the Western European Studies Program and presented in February 2006, featured Prof. David Hunter, Religious Studies, Prof. John Cunnally, Art, and I, speaking, respectively, about the ancient, Renaissance, and medieval elements in Dan Brown's book, and assessing whether what was included in the text was fact, fiction, or fake, You can watch a video of the February panel (missing some audio during my presentation due to a dead microphone battery) on the e-server. These panel presentations demonstrate that I am willing to utilize my knowledge as a medievalist to teach others in the local community and able to draw on my technical communication and technology skills to assist me in that teaching.

Ames City Council

In 2005, the Ames City Council commissioned public historian Will Page to complete a reconnaissance survey of historic resources in the city's historic Fourth Ward (West Ames). As chair of the Ames Historic Preservation Commission (a governmental body) and a resident of West Ames, I assisted Will throughout the project, providing research material that I had completed, acting as a liaison between him and the residents, helping to train residents in historical surveying, and finally, presenting the results of the survey (a 250+ page National Park Service preservation Multiple Property Documentation Form) to the City Council. The Fourth Ward PPT is intended to summarize the findings in the MPDF in order to help the city prioritize future preservation projects. I utilized professional skills related to historical research and technical communication during this process to gather and convey information to various audiences effectively. While the subject matter is not medieval and my research specialty is not Rhetoric and Professional Communication, this historical research project and the presentation of its findings represent the way in which the duties outlined in my PRS work together as part of my professional practice.

**Constructing The Castle Forum**

Sample of threaded discussion from Constructing the Castle Forum

Engl 450: Seminar in Drama--Devils, Demons and Damnation in Early British Drama, Spring 2006

In this class ISU students created online forum postings while working on teams with students in a medieval drama seminar (EN 460A: Medieval Drama) at Virginia Military Institute. Prof. Alan Baragona (VMI) and I had the opportunity to experiment with a joint online forum project because our students were studying The Castle of Perseverance at the same time in the semester. Since his students were reading Prof. David Bevington's edition of the text in Middle English and my students were reading the online performance modernization created by Prof. Alexandra Johnston, the teams offered students the chance to capitalize on multiple perspectives on the same play. These perspectives were multiplied even further by our different teaching emphases; though we both were teaching close reading of the play texts, my teaching emphasized iconographic elements and staging while Prof. Baragona's emphasized more the religious and philosophical elements of the play. Thus, the students on the teams shared a common text but could approach it in a variety of ways.

We used the Forum function available on the department Web site for this activity since the Moodle was not yet widely available. I created accounts for all the VMI students and provided them with log on instructions. Prof. Baragona and I described the project to our classes orally and explained their assignments. Some of the materials that students used as background for the forum are available at <http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gbetcher/450/Castle.htm>. We instructors posted prompts, some of them intended for team response, some for individual response. You can see a sample Castle Forum group prompt with threaded responses by clicking the link above. Students in both seminars gave informed consent, in conformance with IRB regulations before the start of the project, allowing us to use their responses for future educational or professional activities. At the end of the project, we collected data on the forum through student survey forms.

Despite a few problems with long-distance communication between the students at the two schools, the general success of this project may be gauged by survey responses such as these:

The online discussion forum helped facilitate class discussion so well, I think everyone in the class would agree that no one was left out of discussion or felt that they had nothing productive to add. That alone lifted my expectations of the analysis of material – ... I wasn’t sure if discussion would be all that stimulating, but it was, and it surprised me. Most lit classes at ISU are not like that – discussion is normally dominated by a few people who are willing to talk in class – this project forced everyone to say something and respond to something someone else said. Since I am a talker, I have often felt in other classes that more often than not I am listening to myself talk, and getting no feedback from others in the class. This wasn’t the case for 450. That being said, I think medieval drama is particularly well suited to heated discussion because of the many different ways to attack it – staging (and all that accompanies it), medieval history and culture, theology and philosophy, religion, authority and subversion … lots of ways to disagree that is often not as controversial in other areas of English lit because we know more about a text, author, etc…

I liked that the responses made me think a little more critically than I might have otherwise.

Not only did I benefit from the class discussions on the postings but I think this assignment taught me how to communicate with a student I had never met to complete an assignment.

It was interesting to see the points of view of an entirely different class because there were fresh voices and ideas contributed to the discussion. Examining the other class’ postings online started conversation in our in-class discussion because we had ideas to discuss that might not have been thought of or voiced in our class.

The online forum forced people to contemplate issues in-depth before in-class discussion. We had to cite line numbers for our posts so we were able to come to class with the actual lines to back up what we were saying. We did not always do this in other discussions and therefore spent time we could have been talking, looking up line numbers.

...it made us do the work to prepare us for discussion, but also, we were more confident and thoughtful about the play when we took a stance for answering questions. Knowing that everyone would see my post made me work harder to make sure that what I said was relevant, useful, and based on textual evidence, which in turn helped me to know the text VERY well.

Professor Baragona and I are currently working on an article for Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, discussing our experience with this forum. Because we did not envision using this project as part of our research, we did not gain IRB approval before beginning the forum; I routinely distribute informed consent forms to students in any class that involves technological projects. VMI has granted retroactive IRB approval; ISU has not yet reviewed the project since, as co-PIs, we had to gain VMI's approval first to complete the ISU IRB application. The project, however, is related to innovative classroom techniques and involved a forum posted on the WWW for public viewing, which should allow us exemption under IRB policies. We are optimistic that our research article will be approved.