Dr. Ted Pelton

Award for Excellence in Creative Inquiry

2019-2020

English

Dr. Ted Pelton is a Professor of English. Dr. Pelton was selected for the Award for Excellencein Creative Inquiry—Instruction for his exceptional teaching that engages students in thediscovery of new knowledge as a part of Tech’s Quality Enhancement Plan. He received anEDGE Grant for his course, The Novel. The course examined six novels, emphasizing worksexhibiting formal experimentation and books by women. The main part of each class wasstructured through student questions, with each half of the class taking a turn each week to askquestions about the reading and choosing the best of these questions as the basis for each of theclass discussions. Students used their questions throughout the semester toward the creation ofan open-ended creative inquiry project. The results of these were often marvelous, including astudent who wrote letters to each of the novel protagonists, using thematically designedstationery and identifying issues for discussion particular to each; a student who executed awatercolor painting, developing private symbols and color associations for the different books;and a student who created an artistically rendered book of redacted poems, created by blackingout letters from existing books. Students presented their works in a thrilling, finals week class,getting to see how their peers had each imaginatively responded to the work of the semester.

Instruction