AKITA – July 2013 – Designing supplemental materials to study American culture through literature – Philip L. McCasland, Fukushima University. Creating engaging, authentic, quality classroom materials completely from scratch proves challenging for today’s busy teachers. However, adapting and supplementing materials from an already established textbook or classic piece of literature may be a more reasonable proposition. In this workshop the presenter began by providing several principles of materials design and asked the participants to describe what they consider appropriate materials for their teaching contexts. He then demonstrated the steps taken to develop these materials. Finally, the presenter asked the participants to brainstorm several possible designs that could be appropriate for their own classroom use. Some of the examples used include Akimoto & Hamada’s American Justice in Focus with John Grisham’s, The Rain Maker; John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The presentation finished with a Q&A session.

Reported by Stephen Shucart