Dr. Alice Ridout

English at Algoma University

Overview

Dr. Alice RidoutPost-doctoral Fellowship in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Leeds Metropolitan University, England)
Ph.D. (University of Toronto)
M.A. (Durham University, England)
B.A. with First Class Honours (Durham University, England)

Alice Ridout is Visiting Assistant Professor of English. She has taught at a number of universities across the globe including Canada, Britain, Japan, and the Czech Republic. She was born and brought up in Japan and these transnational life experiences have resulted in her interest in working across national borders in her research and teaching.

She is the author of Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (Continuum, 2011) and co-editor of Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (Continuum, 2009). Her work has appeared in the journals Adaptation, Margaret Atwood Studies, Doris Lessing Studies, and the University of Toronto Quarterly. She was Book Reviews Co-editor for Contemporary Women’s Writing from 2009-2011 and is incoming President of the Doris Lessing Society.

This year she is teaching the English department’s exciting new courses in Popular Literature and Culture as well as the second year Canadian Poetry course, a third year seminar in Canadian Postmodernism in memory of Robert Kroetsch, and a senior seminar in the contemporary women’s historical novel.

 

Teaching Philosophy

My first teaching experiences were as a tennis instructor so I came to academic teaching with a model of teaching and learning that was focused on skills acquisition. I have carried this model from the tennis court into the classroom as I continue to see a key aspect of my role as a university professor to be to enable students to acquire and practice their own critical thinking, reading and writing skills. Therefore, my classroom is a very interactive space, to which each student is encouraged to contribute, and in which all students are encouraged to feel safe to practice and develop their thinking and communication skills. I encourage students to place the texts and cultural products we are studying in their socio-historical context and I hope that the material we cover in class transforms their approach to the world around them. For example, in studying class-based cultural theories in the “Introduction to Popular Literature and Culture” course, I gave students an open-ended assignment inviting them to respond critically, creatively or actively to our module on class. As we were studying this topic at the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement we looked at some of the cultural products coming out of that movement and one group of students created a YouTube video along the lines of the 99% campaign while other students designed posters and artwork for their assignment. Studying cultural theories of class enabled students to see the Occupy Wall Street movement differently and vice versa.