1. Panel speaker at the November 2007 NCTE Conference in NYC
2. Review of John Golden’s Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and Other Nonfiction Texts (2006) in the National Telemedia Council’s Journal of Media Literacy, Vol. 53, No. 2
3. Co-author with Joe Berman of Writing About Research: A Manual For Physical Therapy Students (1999), for use by Marquette University’s Physical Therapy Department
4. Co-founder and Executive Director of the Milwaukee Spotlight Student Film Festival since 2005. MSSFF is one of the only film festivals in the country solely devoted to empowering, educating, and celebrating high school filmmakers and their films. 

Interests:

1. I’ve been trying for over a year now to finish a documentary about community efforts to stem gun violence in Milwaukee. Emancipation, Wisconsin will be completed, I hope, before the next millennium, at which time, of course, peace will reign supreme and the documentary will be nothing but an artifact from a more difficult time.
2. I’ve been drawn since college to literature about individuals facing great odds, about people who go to extraordinary lengths to understand themselves, others, and the universe. Tennessee Williams’ plays—try Night of the Iguana or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Italo Calvino—try Different Loves. J.D. Salinger—Seymour, an Introduction and Catcher in the Rye. Toni Morrison—The Bluest Eye. Annie Proulx’s stories—Close Range. Anthony Burgess—Clockwork Orange—and James Baldwin--Another Country.
3. I’m drawn to a wide range of films about individuals breaking free of their prescribed—or pre-scripted—lives: Les Quatre Cents Coups, Jules et Jim, Dead Poets Society, The Graduate, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Apocalypse Now, Como Agua Para Chocolate, Psycho, Dogville, Goodbye, Lenin!, The Last Samurai, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
4. I’m ultimately interested in how humans make meaning—and the consequences of doing so. 

In 30 words or less, please describe your personal teaching style:

Briefly explain how you integrate your faith and Catholic values into your teaching:

As a teacher in the humanities, I am, not surprisingly, a humanist. 

In my life and my teaching, I try to subscribe to three ideas, all of which require faith in life and the dignity of the human person. They are what I call:

Twain’s 12x16 Principle

In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the young narrator Huck discovers that the river liberates him from the constraints of the land-dwellers, represented by his strict aunt, his abusive father, and community after community of chaos.  On his raft, whose dimensions are 12 feet by 16 feet, he and the runaway slave Jim create their own, relatively safe, world, one in which white and black, youth and experience, faith and superstition, racism and acceptance coincide and coexist. 

Huck decides that if being on this 12x16 raft with Jim is going to get him sent to hell, then "All right, then, I'll go to hell."  He undoes his learned racism and undergoes a paradigm shift. 

To me, that's 192 square feet of change.

Thoreau’s 10x15 Principle

Henry David Thoreau wondered why so many of us lead "lives of quiet desperation," always working, sweating, toiling,  rarely with any purpose or end in mind.  He experimented with happiness, purpose, and simplicity by building a small hut at Walden Pond.  The hut was only 10 feet by 15 feet, but he found joy in the very act of building his own dwelling and living "deliberately," not desperately. For two years, he demanded answers from his world:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life living is so dear...I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily...as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms." 

To me, that's 150 square feet of living.

Whitman’s Sug

The poet Walt Whitman believes and commands: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that ask, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”