This series last semester was interrupted by life—as you might notice if you scroll down, my third post talks about an assignment that occurred before the research paper and multimodal project. My semester did not end there. My students went on to complete research papers and multimodal projects, with adaptation (mostly) in mind. My life was busy, certainly, but so were the lives of my students and peers. It felt like all of us—at least educators I know—had a rough return to campus after the summer of 2021. It was also my first time back in a classroom since March of 2020. Even as a former TA and PhD student in coursework myself, I was not as well adjusted to pandemic classrooms as I had thought.

I will not try and (over)analyze every lesson in class that failed or fell flat, but I will offer one observation about my own teaching that I hope is relatable: I am not as engaging as I thought. Or, more positively, the rules of engagement in the space I inhabit as an educator have changed. When students elected to work in groups silently through Google Docs, I found myself unprepared to force conversations and liveliness. I’ve thought of various potential solutions. For instance, I could have temporarily outlawed devices. But at what cost? Some students need devices for accommodations and others simply work better with them—who am I to ask them to put them away, in the sake of how I want their learning to go?

There were also other factors I needed to adjust to. I was teaching after lunch for some and after waking up for others (my class started at 1:25). My students had varying levels of experience writing in high school. At the end of the semester, many admitted to logging in to Zoom classes during the lockdowns and then napping while their teachers talked. Others stated that their high school teachers didn’t say much about college, or what to expect, given their own scramble to prepare for Zoom classes in an (alarmingly, unfortunately) unprepared world.

I appreciate my students’ honesty and I do not say any of this to be denigrating. I think many of us can empathize with both parties—the students and their high school teachers. It’s also possible none of this played into why my lessons weren’t “working” in the way that I thought they might. And I likely need to reconsider what a lesson “working” means to me and to my students—though less of my students filled out their feedback forms than I would have liked, I did receive generally positive feedback about my accessibility and efforts to encourage them. It appears my own post-lockdown insecurities, like those of my students, bled into my perception of the room. 

As an aside: to the students who provided feedback—who almost certainly won’t read this—thank you for your encouraging notes and for motivating me to revisit my teaching strategies. 

Ultimately, though, when Olivia reached out to me last week, I knew I had to continue. I view adaptation more than ever as a necessary tool for survival in college classrooms as we continue to navigate changing environments, in flux for several reasons. The pandemic, terrifying book bans, accidental bombs on campus, and our neighborhood AI friend ChatGBT, are just a few recent instigators of change. It is not surprising that I felt more like a human product of BADaptation, “one that does not suit its new environment or changed conditions” (Elliott 20).

This semester, I am teaching in a classroom where all twenty-two of us sit in a circle at 8:00 in the morning. I initially wanted to move rooms (Cheryl, as always, is very kind and helpful), but ultimately decided to stay. Our forced proximity shows potential already, as students adapt to the change in seating and perspective. I will need to ensure my presentations are accessible, given the room’s constraints, but I look forward to making these changes with my students as a team of adaptors in a new space.

Regarding content, I am still using adaptation as a lens through which students can view composition. I kept Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) on the syllabus, but I replaced Robert Louis Stevenson with Joseph Harris’ Rewriting and other short texts. In addition to content changes, I (begrudgingly) adapted to available technologies and build out Canvas modules in addition to the syllabus, so that assignments would appear in the digital “to-do” list. I’m sure many of you already do this and I know from observation that many of you are successful without it. I wasn’t. So, though I do not understand using Canvas as a digital planner (in lieu of a physical planner), I don’t need to. As my harshest, probably imaginary critics would say: Cat, get on board or get out of the way. And, because I’ve elected to remain on board, I am going to prioritize time management this semester as a key component of writing. Digital planner, paper calendar, or neither, I want my students to utilize their community as they learn to manage their time as writers.

Looking back at my first blog post in October of 2021, I talked about adaptation texts and introduce adaptation as a more general concept. I ask how we define adaptation, why we define it, when we define it… I also ask, what is an adaptation doing? – how does it do it—and who does it do it for? This semester, I want to plant myself more distinctly in the role of an adaptation. What am I doing? How am I doing it? Who am I doing it for? I am also hopeful to open this conversation to some of my peers, to talk about adaptation in our department and in our community. How are we adapting, when are we adapting, and who are we adapting for?

In future posts, you should expect to see more classroom situations, student examples, and discussions with other educators. Rather than a specific outline, which I made far too rigid last semester, I am going to make this blog a space for constant adaptation. In other words, it will change depending on how everything goes. For instance, this was an uncharacteristically personal post—it is doubtful I will replicate it. Nonetheless, I reach an audience that resonates with my experiences and my self-deprecating humor.

In all seriousness, I am looking forward to the semester and to speaking with some/many of you in the weeks to come.

P.S. As a bonus, I asked ChatGBT how I should navigate a new circular classroom. All the advice I’ve received from peers and mentors has been more helpful, which I hope is not surprising. In addition to simply pasting “circular” in front of very generic teaching advice, the AI told me to just use more hand gestures. Thanks, ChatGBT!

As I write the third episode in this series, my class is working away on their adaptation essay “tests.” We’ve concluded our course readings designed directly on adaptation and now, finally, I’m putting them to the test.

The Adaptation Essay “Test” is comprised of two brief essays, based on prompts composed mostly by students themselves. Over the course of the last three or so weeks, students submitted discussion questions on course content, which we then adapted to fit the style of an essay prompt. Afterwards, with the reformatted questions, students voted on their preferences and can choose between the winning six questions (they must respond to two).

In the spirit of composition, the prompts were designed with rhetorical analysis in mind. As students and I discussed how to ask questions (a fundamental part of any research process), I talked a lot about designing questions for a course like ours—a first-year writing course. Thinking back to the first episode of this series, some guiding key terms were audience, form, and genre. One of the reading assignments which will appear on the “test,” for example, is Thomas Leitch’s “Adaptation, the Genre,” which allows students to read and adaptation and genre conventions, and to dip their toes in academic arguments.

The “test” is based on course readings that appeared after we read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This novella was perhaps the biggest risk in my content, as I recognize the boundary between literary analysis and rhetorical analysis can be a bit difficult to navigate. In order to frame conversations, I began each class with “flash” lessons in writing, taken from the open-access writing textbooks on my syllabus. The goal, by the Adaptation Essay “Test,” was to give students the technical writing information on how to perform quote synthesis in an effort to back up a coherent thought. So, we used Stevenson’s text to practice some of the close reading strategies and to trial using keywords to better analyze and understand the meaning of a specific writing tool.

After Stevenson’s novella, we read a variety of related adaptations. The adaptations, I’ll point out, were not just creative texts. I took the classification of “adaptation” very liberally, assigning content like the Better Read Than Dead podcast episode on Jekyll and Hyde as an adaptation of the English classroom, The Incredible Hulk (2008) (Jekyll and Hyde in Superhero form, perhaps), a video essay about Ang Lee’s Hulk and toxic masculinity (an adaptation of a research paper), cartoon adaptations, and the trailer for Disney’s She-Hulk. These choices were specifically designed to practice audience and genre analysis, with an interest also in exigency and modality. These conversations also led to other writing topics, like bias. All in all, I wanted to experiment with how Stevenson’s novella would assist students in their analyses of the other media.

Did this experiment work? Were these texts as transformation as Dr. Jekyll’s serum?

It’s too soon to tell—the results are yet to be submitted. But students were generally receptive to the material. Though it seems like a difficult point in the semester (I had to adapt my teaching to wavering levels of engagement), many students expressed genuine interest in the topic. After listening to the podcast episode, for instance, I eavesdropped on one student tell her group she found the Stevenson’s novella more accessible, because the conversation about it was funny. Another student became much more actively involved once we arrived to our Hulk era: he offered the class context for the video essay, as he was the only one familiar with Ang Lee’s Hulk.

By way of conclusion, I want to be forthright in mentioning my disappointments alongside these successes. I had forgotten, in my excitement for this experiment of my own, the challenges of teaching first-year writing

Cat Champney is a second year PhD student and graduate instructor at the University of Delaware. She studies literary adaptation of the 19th century, with an emphasis on authorship and female gothic narratives. Prior to attending UD, Cat received her Master’s Degree in 19th Century Literature from Brooklyn College and a joint degree in English and Political Science from SUNY Binghamton. Her master’s thesis examined the absence of Scarlett O’Hara’s children from David Selznick’s film adaptation, Gone with the Wind. Prior to her current composition course at UD, Cat taught various composition and writing courses at CUNY Brooklyn College and City College of Technology. 

By Cat Champney

(FERPA Disclaimer: students are quoted in this article. All personally identifying information has been removed. Regardless, though, the students quoted here gave written consent to use their words.)

The goal for the first few weeks of my class sound simple: define adaptation. However, that’s not really so easy. As I mentioned in my first post, arriving at a single definition for adaptation is futile and perhaps even useless. We agree on a central definition of adaptation… then what?

After watching Adaptation (2002), I had students talk about what they thought adaptation meant, to the film. What does the film tell us about adaptation, and how might those features help us define it? The film allowed us to talk about adaptation in different dimensions: how was it a theme? How was it a genre? What about a format, or medium? Some of the class dipped into some literary/film analysis, which I entertained, but we quickly focused on the rhetoric of the film and its paratexts: what can Adaptation tell us about adaptation in writing?

The following class, we discussed two online articles about the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion. After briefly recapping our previous discussion, we talked about how the two authors considered adaptation in their arguments and what specific rhetorical devices they used to signal those considerations. I selected both articles because they used somewhat inflammatory language—terms like “Fleabagification”—to provoke students’ realization of the power of rhetoric. Students quickly came to realize that both authors, in a similar way, projected certain expectations on to adaptations. Expectations, of course, quickly gave way to talking about audience and genre.

Prior to assigning the film, I was nervous to its reception. Would students be caught up in the meaning of it all, or would we be able to focus on rhetoric? Would they be able to compare a film to an argumentative essay online? Or, would it be too distracting?

Ultimately, all of these fears were unfounded. There was value in the change of medium, from the film to the online article, and the topic was met with high levels of engagement. Even if it wasn’t apparent that students had read closely, they were listening to others’ elaborations and contributing their own thoughts on the many nuances to adaptation. I took this opportunity to open the room and ask about personal connections to the material: how do these qualities of adaptation apply to our own creation and writing processes?

These questions were strategically placed. My first assignment in the course is a low-stakes diagnostic essay. I began using these when I was an adjunct instructor as a way to gauge students’ strengths and weaknesses. I explain the essays as both introductions and samples: I want students to try their best to introduce their writing to me, without the added stress of grades. Then, students and I work together throughout the semester to build on their strengths and practice their weaknesses. The prompt for the essay is intentionally basic: I ask a general question and encourage students to use a mix of course material and personal experiences to back up some sort of central claim.

For this essay, as you might have guessed, I asked, what is an adaptation? Although only a sampling, I’ve included some interesting replies:

“An adaptation is a process of change due to disruption in the environment. The world’s smallest sunflower adapted to the sidewalk by wriggling its flexible stem through the fissures in the rock. This process of tactical revision, however, extends beyond nature; when a written work is to be ‘adapted,’ it too must acquire a new set of traits—a unique demeanor and fresh commentary…” (my emphasis)

“An interesting paradox I can think of that relates to this is the Ship of Theseus… But what if, over time, every part on the boat got damaged, and replaced with a new part? Would this still be the same ship? Would it be a new, different ship with a different identity?”

“Often it depends on the context of the work being adapted, however this basic format of an adaptation requires a balance. An adaptation is the balance between the accuracy of the original work and the updating to bring modern ideas into the new pieces of work”

Other students spoke of adaptation more generally, referring to their own adaptation from high school student to college student. Though I disagree with the categorization, many of them found such personal adaptations “unremarkable”—even though they’ve build an entirely new identity. Another student created an adaptation trifecta: Nature, Literature, and Culture as three ways to “center” or ground adaptation, while others approached the question in a less structured manner, organizing their paragraphs by evidence instead.

While I think every teacher is impressed with their students’ work, I found myself struck by the variety in their responses, even using the same evidence. I was happy to see some students flat out disagree with the argumentative essays, providing counter examples like Harry Potter and other media to construct their own definitions. While it’s just a start, that was the point in this assignment: encouraging students to think about how they define adaptation and how to enter into existing conversations about it. What matters, and to whom?

The next few weeks of the semester will build on their responses to this question and their skills in discussion questions about Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde—how does this frequently-adapted novella inform us further about adaptation, and rhetoric? While there will certainly be challenges with this text, I look forward to talking about it… and reporting on it here!

Until next time!

Cat Champney is a second year PhD student and graduate instructor at the University of Delaware. She studies literary adaptation of the 19th century, with an emphasis on authorship and female gothic narratives. Prior to attending UD, Cat received her Master’s Degree in 19th Century Literature from Brooklyn College and a joint degree in English and Political Science from SUNY Binghamton. Her master’s thesis examined the absence of Scarlett O’Hara’s children from David Selznick’s film adaptation, Gone with the Wind. Prior to her current composition course at UD, Cat taught various composition and writing courses at CUNY Brooklyn College and City College of Technology. 

By Cat Champney

Adaptation is an appropriate key term for many composition instructors returning to the classroom for the first time since the lockdowns in 2020. All of us have had to change our syllabi, our assignments, and our mindsets around teaching composition in the digital, pandemic age. Even if we were tech-savvy before, a shift in and out of online classrooms (and potentially some time in a hybrid classroom) left its mark on all of our individual psyches. On top of the pandemic, we are living in an era of misinformation: teaching students how to evaluate sources, recognize bias, and write for specific audiences holds near-apocalyptic prescience.  

After reflecting on my own adaptation as an educator and, frankly, as a human being, I asked—why not center the composition classroom in adaptation itself? Why not talk directly about our shared experiences through adaptation as a process and medium? 

These questions, I must admit, were not brought on only by the pandemic and social injustices that sparked adaptation for so many of us in the last few years. As an adaptation scholar, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about adaptation texts, how we define them (if we can), why we define them (if we do), and how adaptation studies fit in with English departments. For some, an adaptation is simply a film born out of a movie—and, of course, the book is always better than the movie. For others—myself and other adaptation scholars—that definition limits the vast potentialities of our field… and the book is not always better than the movie, my apologies. Before formally becoming an adaptationist (in training), I was most interested in the nineteenth century: but I never understood why many disdained movies that recreated the period. Who cares if Netflix’s Persuasion uses contemporary slang? Does it not send young, new readers back to Austen’s novel? I became more interested in other questions: what is the adaptation doing? – how does it do it – and who does it do it for?

As students begin to try and define themselves and their writing processes—which are both perhaps equally undefinable—why not use adaptation, then, as both a metaphor and a literal tool for first-year writing instruction? What is their writing doing? How is their writing functioning? What rhetorical devices achieve what ends? Who are they writing for?

Definition uncertainty aside, the process of adaptation in theory is a very useful, adaptable, term for writing instruction. Marty Gould writes, “when we focus our student’s attention on adaptation as a process, we help them understand that verbal and visual communication necessitates multiple contingent decisions involving audience, medium, and message, and this perspective should make them more aware of form and content in their own writing” (my italics, 636). That is, like many adaptationists, students are capable of reading beyond book fidelity (how loyal an adaptation is to its “source” text) in order to understand the process of adaptation in creation. How does adaptation as a process, then, help us to understand writing today? Especially in a first-year classroom, where students adapt to changes in location, lifestyle, and academic rigor, how might adaptation aid students writing for their institution and beyond?

All of these questions are the basis for my composition syllabus this semester, though I realize it’s doubtful I’ll form concrete responses in one semester, or twenty. In the opening of my syllabus, I ask students a serious of framing questions: “What is an adaptation? How do we adapt our writing for new audiences? How can we adapt writing from one format (a novel, or research paper) to another (a film, or digital advertisement?” By looking at adaptations and formulating hypotheses about the processes of adaptation, I hope that students then understand that they have the power to replicate, transform, and recreate their own reading and writing processes. Not to sound too metaphoric, but I hope students strive to become adaptations of themselves, in a way, well positioned to write for the college classroom and beyond.

My assignments and readings for the semester emphasize adaptation, with a secondary emphasis on digital media and content beyond creative texts—in conjunction with our department’s interest in multimodal writing. I began the semester with a viewing of Adaptation (2002), followed closely by two online articles about Netflix’s recent Persuasion (2022). The first assignment in the course is a combination of a literacy narrative and a traditional five paragraph essay: I asked students to try and define “adaptation” in three pages, using examples and evidence from the course content and personal experience. The definition they define in their essay will help them frame the rest of the semester, as we talk about adaptation, but also exemplify how reading new texts in new ways can change opinions, mindsets, and writing strategies. They should look at this first essay / first definition not as a formal argument that they must defend, but as a work-in-progress… much like their reading and writing processes at this stage in the semester.

As an overview—and by way of conclusion for this post—I intend this regular blog series to track the success of adaptation in the composition classroom. By the end of the semester (and the culmination of this series) I hope to find answers to the following questions:

First, how does adaptation function as a key term, a strategy, and a metaphor in first-year writing?

Second, what are the challenges and pitfalls of talking about adaptation? Will the class succumb to performing literary analysis, as opposed to rhetorical analysis? Or, will they challenge this opposition altogether?

Lastly, how can I adapt the syllabus, my own teaching, and my own understanding of adaptation to better meet the needs of post-pandemic students and multimodal English departments?

Though this is a large undertaking, I am not without support. Scholars like Thomas Leitch, Marty Gould, Julie Sanders, and Kamilla Elliott (to name only a few) all have excellent scholarship on adaptation in the English department. Similarly, the learning goals and objectives for first year composition at the University of Delaware are extremely compatible with such an undertaking and in line with pressure from adaptationists to include adaptation in the English classroom. Key terms from these goals, such as audience, context, multimodal, community, revising, and more apply to the process of adaptation, which is in itself a process of writing and rewriting. I will revisit these goals and objectives frequently in this series, to pinpoint how adaptations (texts) and adaptation (process) complete and exceed such goals and objectives.

Finally, and selfishly, I hope that this project works towards more unity between literature and composition departments. Though the University of Delaware is more united than most, it would be irresponsible to claim that there does not exist any tension between writing studies and literary studies—adaptation studies, in this case, might be a perfect mediator to two to-be-divorced parents who, to follow the metaphor, should remain married rather than pursue co-parenting.

Throughout the semester, I’m happy to invite visitors to class sessions, share content, and collaborate with other instructors on this endeavor—you can reach me at champney@udel.edu.

Cat Champney is a second year PhD student and graduate instructor at the University of Delaware. She studies literary adaptation of the 19th century, with an emphasis on authorship and female gothic narratives. Prior to attending UD, Cat received her Master’s Degree in 19th Century Literature from Brooklyn College and a joint degree in English and Political Science from SUNY Binghamton. Her master’s thesis examined the absence of Scarlett O’Hara’s children from David Selznick’s film adaptation, Gone with the Wind. Prior to her current composition course at UD, Cat taught various composition and writing courses at CUNY Brooklyn College and City College of Technology.