Originally posted by: Center for Mark Twain Studies on June 18, 2021

Next month, the Center For Mark Twain Studies will host the 2021 Summer Teachers Institute. This annual event is coordinated by Jocelyn Chadwick and Matt Seybold, who choose the theme, create resources for teachers to use during and after the Institute, and participate in conversations throughout the intensive two-day event. You can learn lots about Drs. Chadwick and Seybold by exploring the resources from past Institutes, as well as reading their published writings.

But this episode of The American Vandal Podcast offers a more intimate conversation between the two friends and colleagues, as they discuss not only Mark Twain, but the contemporary politicization of U.S. education, the specific challenge this generation of students poses to educators, the relationship between secondary schools and higher education, and much more.

Jocelyn Chadwick & Matt Seybold at the 2019 Summer Teachers Institute

Jocelyn Chadwick is former faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as a past president of the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE). Dr. Chadwick also serves as a consultant for school districts around the country and assists English departments with curricula to reflect diversity and cross-curricular content. She is a consultant for NBC News Learn, the Folger Shakespeare Library, PBS American Masters and The Great American Read, and Pearson. Her many publications include The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (U. Mississippi, 1998), Common Core: Paradigmatic Shift (Cambridge Scholars, 2015), and Teaching Literature on the Context of Literacy Construction (Heinemann, 2015).

Listeners to this episode may be especially interested in Dr. Chadwick’s recent publications about Generation Z for MarkTwainStudies.org (here and here), for the Today Show Parenting Team, and Education Week.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature and Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College and scholar-in-residence at the Center For Mark Twain Studies. He is also co-editor of The Routledge Companion To Literature & Economics (2018) and a 2019 special issue of American Literary History. His writing can be found in Aeon magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and across this site.