ENWR 3660

Professor Stephenson is the BEST! She genuinely cares about her students and eagerly accepts feedback for how she can make the class better for us. She is very willing to meet and super easy to talk to. Travel writing is fun, very little work, and 2/3 papers can be revised for a better grade. HIGHLY recommend this class!

UVA needs more professors like Professor Stephenson. She is very friendly, approachable, and MINDFUL. I seriously have not met a professor more understanding than her. You should feel comfortable talking to her about your essays for help. There are 3 essays and you rewrite each one based on useful feedback from Professor Stephenson and classmates. Each essay is about 5 pages so it is doable and you pick what you want to write about based on the prompt. You read different types of travel narratives (from articles to a few books) and discuss very important and interesting topics from colonialism’s role in travel to how travel writing spurs social and political change. Towards the end of the semester, you take a history of African-Americans tour at UVA during class as a form of local travel which is really eye-opening. Take this class regardless of what major you are!

She is a great professor. Super friendly and engaging. There are three papers that are 25%, 30% and 35% of the great. They are pretty open-ended and they can be revised. If you really put in the effort, it's not hard to get good grdes on those papers. But if you don't put in the effort to submit a full draft, it's harder to get an A on those papers and unfortunately you'll end up with lower than an A just because of the papers.
It's still really fun and the travel writing narratives we read as we prepare for class or forum posts (participation and forum posts are 10% of grade) are actually really interesting. Overall, I recommend but if you want an easy A that means you really need to grind on the 4-6 page papers.

First off, this professor is lowkey racist (or is TERRIBLY blind). There are only a handful of minorities in the class and every time I visit her in office hours, she mistakes me for another Asian girl who looks absolutely nothing like me. It always bothered me and I always corrected her but I am even more frustrated at myself for being passive and 'letting her off the hook' by saying 'its ok/no worries.' No, it is NOT ok--especially when this has occurred multiple times.

Regarding the course itself, this was not an easy A course since it was pretty hard to obtain a A on each of the 3 papers (worth 85-90%) of the course grade. Though the professor seemed like a nice person, I personally didn't enjoy the course as much as I thought I would. There are readings for each week and I really only enjoyed half of them. Some readings didn't seem relevant to travel writing and sometimes it felt like the course was going on random tangents.
Class is basically 90% group discussion and 10% journalling. Sometimes we are expected to share our journals or form small-group discussions.
On grading, besides receiving a vague paragraph on our drafts and final papers, there were not clear or transparent process of why/how points were deducted from the paper. I hope that going forward, she would set clear guidelines on what warranted point loss.