Renaissance Women In Literature Essay

Many of you will be moving on from the UCF English Department into teaching positions. For this option, pretend that you have your dream job - you find yourself in charge of introducing high school junior and senior honor students to early English literature. Your department has insisted that this be a college-prep course, and has recommended that you use one of the texts we've read in the course to familiarize your students with the way gender has been understood in the English Renaissance. You can bring in and assign additional texts but you must follow departmental regulations.

Your job: Using one of the texts (several poems is OK too) we've read in the class, design one teaching unit. You should write a short 3-page essay (12-pt font; 1.5 spaced) that attends to the following:

What do you most want your students to understand about gender in Renaissance England?

What text(s) will you assign and why? What sections of texts will you pay close attention to as you talk to the class? What do those sections demonstrate?

How will you teach this stuff? Unlike this class, your class is a more traditional face-to-face class - will you lecture and what will you talk about? Will you have group projects - what will they be? Will you bring in other texts - what and why? Will you have class trips? Where and why? This is your dream class and you have an endless budget...!

This project was designed with some of the real issues of the teaching profession in mind: curricular design, teaching philosophy, and practice (called ‘praxis' by those in the know - theory plus practice is praxis). If you are thinking of moving into the profession, you are urged especially to take this!

Text Options Include: Twelfth Night by Shakespear

Queen Elizabeth's Response to the Parliament's Request She Marry: (10 February, 1559).