Jen McClung
- Associate Teaching Professor
- American Indian Studies
Course
AM IN 2010: Native People in American Culture
Resources
- TBL Module: Reading the Media
- TBL Module: Ways of Seeing & Knowing
- TBL Module: Cultural Appropriation
- TBL Module: Urban Indian Identity
- TBL Module: The Round House (Am In Literature and Sexual Assault)
Case Study
Jen McClung, a Senior Lecturer in American Indian Studies, holds her MFA in Creative Writing and has been teaching for Iowa State University’s American Indian Studies program since 2009. Her research interests and projects include the photographing and photography of Indigenous people, art as activism, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Introduction
While many open educational resources are designed primarily to save students money, I set out to design a series of interconnected lesson plans that would primarily give instructors more resources. As it turns out, there are few OER for those teaching in the field of American Indian Studies. The specific lesson plans I created are for our course offering, Am In 201 – Native People in American Culture, which is an interdisciplinary course examining current perceptions and the realities of Native people in American culture. However, the resources are built in a modular fashion and can be mixed-and-matched for other American Indian Studies courses.
Modules
The lesson plans include modules on five major topics:
- Reading the Media (critical media analysis)
- Ways of Seeing and Knowing (exploring indigenous ways of thinking)
- Urban Indian Identity
- Cultural Appropriation
- Native Literatures (specifically, Louise Erdrich’s, “The Round House”)
Format
The course is formatted for Team-Based Learning (TBL), but the resources are flexible and can be easily adapted for a non-TBL course.
Other Notes
As a scholar-settler in this discipline, the creation of these resources presented a unique opportunity to reciprocate the many gifts of knowledge and experience I’ve been given throughout my years in this field. It is with gratitude that I send these resources out into the world with the hopes that they nourish the work of other educators and their students.