What Teaching Resources Does the MLA Style Center Offer for Digital Literacy and Literature Courses?

Updated

The MLA Style Center hosts a dedicated Teaching Resources section that covers digital and AI literacy, literature research methods, and reflective essays on teaching. The site is the authorized companion to the MLA Handbook and is free to browse; the MLA Handbook Plus digital edition is described on the site as subscription-based. If you teach writing, literature, or research skills and want ready-made discussion prompts, assignment ideas, or pedagogical models, the resources below are the most directly useful starting points.

Digital and AI literacy

Student Guide to AI Literacy

This is the site's main entry point for teaching students how to work with generative AI. It is aimed at students rather than instructors, which makes it usable as assigned reading. The site also invites instructors to share how they use the companion MLA Guide to Digital Literacy in their classrooms, so the Teaching Resources section functions partly as a place where teaching approaches are collected and exchanged.

Building Students' Skills with the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy

A Teaching Resources post that describes concrete strategies for developing students' digital literacy skills. Use it if you want a model for structuring a unit around evaluating sources, understanding how information circulates online, or introducing students to research as a critical practice rather than a search-and-cite exercise.

Literature research and the MLA International Bibliography

Two Teaching Resources posts focus on teaching research with the MLA International Bibliography:

  • Strategies for Teaching World Literature Research with the MLA International Bibliography — approaches for getting students to use the bibliography as a research tool in world literature courses.
  • Exploratory Research in the MLA International Bibliography: "News Reporting" and Contemporary Society — a model for exploratory, question-driven research rather than thesis-first searching.

These are useful when students need to move beyond general web searching and learn how a discipline-specific database is organized.

Thematic and reflective teaching essays

The Teaching Resources section also collects essays on teaching literature in specific contexts, which work well as readings for graduate seminars, teaching practicums, or curriculum discussions:

Resource Focus
The MLA Democracy Project: Essays on Teaching Democracy and Literature Civic knowledge and the role of humanities disciplines
Three Strategies for Using Christopher Nolan's Odyssey in Your Classroom Teaching classical texts through contemporary adaptation
A Century of Queer Korean Fiction: An Interview with Samuel Perry World literature, translation, and queer studies
Toward Educational Justice: An Interview with the Editors of Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons Teaching in carceral settings
Henrique Maximiano Coelho Neto's Sphinx: A Neo-Gothic Novel from Brazil: An Interview with M. Elizabeth Ginway Brazilian literature and genre
A Reflection on Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities on Its Twentieth Anniversary Disability studies in the humanities curriculum

Practical teaching support

Beyond the thematic essays, the site offers tools you can hand directly to students:

  • Formatting Your Research Project — a free sample chapter from MLA Handbook Plus covering how to set up a project in MLA format.
  • Interactive Practice Template — for practicing works-cited entries.
  • Sample Essays: Writing with MLA Style — annotated student essays.
  • Works Cited: A Quick Guide and Using MLA Format — quick reference pages.
  • Ask the MLA — short answers to specific citation and formatting questions, such as how to format a quotation of song lyrics (the same way you would format a quotation of poetry) or how to cite a quotation contained within a quotation.
  • Advice from the Editors — posts on language and usage questions, including commonly confused word pairs like flaunt/flout and compliment/complement.

How to choose

If your goal is to introduce AI or digital literacy, start with the Student Guide to AI Literacy and the digital literacy teaching post. If your goal is to strengthen research skills in a literature course, use the two MLA International Bibliography posts. If you want course readings or discussion material on the purpose of literary study, the thematic essays are the better fit. For day-to-day citation and formatting questions from students, point them to the Quick Guide, the Practice Template, and Ask the MLA rather than the Teaching Resources section.