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Teaching Numeracy for Social Justice: Educational Equity
No full textThe special collection, “Teaching Numeracy for Social Justice: Educational Equity,” focuses on how quantitative reasoning (QR) can function as a vehicle for equity, empowerment, and democratic participation. Building on a longstanding tradition that treats numeracy as inseparable from social justice, these contributions highlight how progressive pedagogies (e.g., active learning, authentic research, and equity-oriented assessment) have the potential to broaden access for students historically excluded from quantitative fields. The studies span a variety of conceptual frameworks, introductory and advanced quantitative instruction, and interdisciplinary applications, showcasing how inclusive QR practices can build confidence, agency, and real-world understanding. These articles demonstrate that when students engage with socially meaningful data, numeracy becomes not only a cognitive skill, but a tool for personal transformative and civic engagement. By centering marginalized learners and advocating progressive approaches both for teaching and assessment, this collection affirms the importance of numeracy not only as a pedagogical approach but as a moral imperative for expanding educational opportunity
Quantitative Reasoning in Calculus III: Advancing Student Engagement, Confidence, and Aspirations at an HSI
No full textThis study examines the impact of integrating Quantitative Reasoning (QR) into a Calculus III course at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) on student engagement, confidence, and aspirations. The course is offered at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx. It incorporated QR-focused projects on economic inequality, environmental pollution, and access to healthcare. These projects allowed students to apply advanced calculus concepts to real-world social issues. A pre- and post-survey design was employed to assess changes in students’ mathematical confidence, perceptions of relevance, and career and educational goals. Results showed statistically significant gains in confidence and in the belief that advanced math supports their future success. Students, many of whom faced additional life responsibilities, showed robust improvements. Although no control group was included, the findings suggest that QR-infused pedagogy can meaningfully engage students from underserved backgrounds and help them view mathematics as a powerful tool for social understanding and personal growth. This paper contributes a replicable model for equity-focused math instruction and highlights the importance of contextualized QR in supporting student success in advanced STEM courses
Curious Objects: Form and Feeling in Mary Leapor\u27s Thing Poems
No full textMary Leapor (1722–1746) has long been recognized as something of a curiosity: a Northamptonshire kitchen maid with a rudimentary education who died at the age of 24, but who also wrote two volumes of poetry. In this essay I read Leapor’s “thing poems” to show how curiosity is also a supervening affective regime in her poetics. Minor and marginal, fixated by perverse objects which tend more to derail than deepen the production of knowledge, curiosity is an unsettling mode of inquiry because of its imaginative attachment to the strange stuff lurking within the ordinary as a diminished site of aesthetic value associated with women and the world of work. Spotlighting Leapor’s curiosity—and the curiosities of her thing poems—I argue that she rehabilitates its transgressive potential to imagine a new order of things into which her work as a poet, and not only a kitchen maid, might be valued as a positive object. What Leapor’s renovation of cultural codes of reception requires, and what the things in her thing poems obliquely provide, is a new ethos by which aesthetic “value” can be measured—not according to models of productivity but through an as-yet-unexpressed alternative to value’s more familiar economy
Framing Affect: Close up to Feeling with Women at the Eighteenth-century Theatre on the Twenty-first Century Screen
No full textPeriod films and television dramas of the twenty-first century use scenes of attendance at the theatre by women in the (long) eighteenth century as a test of their capacity to feel. Such scenes provide an opportunity to measure the competing affordances of screen and stage regarding affect in the eighteenth century and our present moment. Explored are scenes of theatrical affect from Dangerous Liaisons (1998) to The Duchess (2008), Harlots (2017), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Bridgerton (2020). The figure of the liberated, educated, and aesthetically sensitive woman serves in period fiction on stage, screen and page more generally as the bridge between the eighteenth century and our own present. Intense investment in this figure makes the past a speculative place to explore our own potential future. We might see her as a time-traveler of sorts moving between our (modern, liberated) present and a past not yet ready for her. In recent screen historical fictions we can see the symbolic capital with which the feeling woman is invested when she turns her attention to performance and becomes herself the performer of affect. And this is not only a matter of positive value but also a means of obscuring or deflecting the extradiegetic audience’s attention from the attendant costs and losses for other bodies who are in the shadow of the luminous presence of this normatively white figure
A Review of Deborah Weiss\u27s \u3ci\u3eWomen and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel: Injured Minds, Ruined Lives\u3c/i\u3e
No full textA review of Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel by Jennifer Nault
Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” for the First Time in an Online Undergraduate Women’s Literature Course
No full textAs one of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ most famous poems, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is often introduced to undergraduates; however, it is also an often-misunderstood text by undergraduate and graduate students alike when they first read it. Students often believe that Wheatley Peters is happy about her condition as an enslaved person in America and out of Africa. But upon deeper analysis of her word choice, use of punctuation, and biblical references, a reader can see her unique voice as an enslaved person criticizing slavery through sarcasm. Such responses can discourage instructors from teaching the poem, especially in online environments where immediate feedback from the instructor to encourage students to read the poem’s sophistication is usually not possible. This essay showcases the lesson plan I developed in the National Writing Project (NWP) community of practice for teaching “On Being Brought from Africa to America” for an asynchronous online Women in Literature class and my teaching the course at Los Angeles Harbor College, a community college in Wilmington, California. I write this essay in part to encourage instructors who may never have taught her poetry or taught Phillis Wheatley Peters before to teach her work even if their students have no prior knowledge of her writing or its eighteenth-century contexts. I also want to emphasize the value of teaching difficult, provocative texts in online environments with proper lesson planning and supporting students by providing clear guidance and using the multimodal aspects of online teaching to good effect
The Gendered Duality of Coldness in the Portrayals of Eliza Hayley
No full textIn the eighteenth century, coldness was defined, on the one hand, in relation to the body and the senses (a body that is lacking in heat) and on the other, to emotion (an individual lacking in passion). It was linked to illness and disability (Turner, 2012), equated to death, seen as both a cause and effect of physical decline and older age, and used as a synonym for low libido and infertility (Toulalan, 2015). In contrast to these negative connotations, coldness was also regarded as a remedy to temper the passions and to ensure longevity (Yallop, 2015), and taking cold baths and walking in the cold air were considered intellectually invigorating activities by some physicians (Buchan, 1769).
In 1796, the essayist and translator Eliza Hayley (b.1750-1797) published her first and only original work: The Triumph of Acquaintance over Friendship: an Essay for the Times. In the dedication that prefaces this text, Hayley recurrently uses concepts related to coldness as an allegory for her state of mind. She portrays herself as lethargic and apathetic as a consequence of a cold and long winter spent in social semi-isolation in a rural setting, and the self-presentation that emerges is enhanced by her metaphorical usage of nature imagery. Hayley likens her mental state to the inertness of animals and plants in the colder seasons, suggesting that her depressed spirits are due to a lack of intellectual activity, and as such, she reveals her plan to turn to the intellectual stimulus that essay writing provides to dissipate her lethargy—a plan that she puts into practice with the philosophical essay that follows this dedication. In parallel, when writing about her, Hayley’s estranged husband William employs coldness exclusively in connection to her body and her alleged lack of passion, thus reducing Hayley to her biological self, and disregarding the intellectual dimension of her person. From his point of view, Hayley is exclusively a wife and a sexual partner; and he finds her lacking in both these roles. For William, coldness represents Hayley’s biological and social failure. This interpretation was widespread: research has revealed partial portrayals of Hayley authored by reviewers and acquaintances in which coldness and warmth are similarly used to describe Hayley in pejorative terms, undermining the author’s self-presentation as a philosopher and intellectual.
With this in mind, this article argues that Hayley turns around the connotations of coldness in her writing, redefining the concept as a key element in her intellectual life. It juxtaposes the author’s use of coldness as an intimate exercise of self-presentation and self-assertion with other portrayals of her in which coldness and warmth are used to delegitimise her. Further, it suggests that the analysis of Hayley’s engagement with coldness uncovers an exercise of self-presentation that, in retrospect, gives the author back agency in her public portrayal. Thus, this article addresses the dual conceptualization of coldness (physical and intellectual) in the eighteenth century and the gender dynamics it exposes: How does Hayley balance emotion and reason through the idea of coldness in her writing? How is the author’s own body used to delegitimize her intellectual and personal identity, and how does she assert her standing by the same means? Through the lens of gender and age studies, this article analyses references to coldness and warmth in excerpts from Hayley’s (largely unexplored) textual corpus: the paratext and text to The Triumph as well as her unpublished manuscript correspondence, and contrasts them to excerpts from other portrayals of Hayley, including William’s letters and poetry, Anna Seward’s correspondence, and the reviews to her work in The Analytical Review and The Monthly Review
Association, Affect, and Material Reading Practices of Anna Laetitia Barbauld
No full textAt the end of the eighteenth century, reading practice was shifting from an embodied, affective exercise to a detached cognitive one. This essay examines how debates about truth and knowledge diverged along disciplinary and gender lines during this critical transition. The essay traces the influence of association psychology—particularly the theories of David Hartley and Joseph Priestley—on Romantic-era poets including Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through Feminist Formalist Analysis attuned to affect and cognition, this essay demonstrates how Barbauld\u27s poetic montages challenge the period\u27s scientific discourse. Her Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley\u27s Study and two Hill of Science works insist upon physiological and cognitive alignment between readers and textual bodies. Where Priestley and Coleridge detach themselves from direct experience, Barbauld locates truth in the cooperative, embodied encounter at the site of the poem—a material consciousness that collapses symbolic scientific discourse into affective translation
“[B]oth in body and mind”: Gothic, Affect, and Power in Eliza Parsons’s \u3ci\u3eThe Mysterious Warning\u3c/i\u3e (1796)
No full textDrawing on recent enquiries into how affect theory could enhance our understanding of eighteenth-century fiction, this article offers a reading of Eliza Parsons’s Gothic novel The Mysterious Warning (1796) to examine how affective resonances in the text are used to codify relations of power. It therefore argues that the power dynamics between the characters are enacted through encounters with human agents and material objects, such as letters and haunting (dis)embodied voices. The article further suggests that affective intensities in the novel, articulated through the language of sensibility typical of mid- and late eighteenth-century writing, generate an ensuing imbalance of power, registered through a suspension of agency and loss of control, on the one hand, and, on the other, a sense of empowerment. Interactions with material and immaterial, non-human and human entities thus prove instrumental in shifts of agency and authority, underscoring the significance of the body’s capacity to be used as a conduit for psychological, social, and political meanings