Fordham University
ENGL 1102: Composition 2
In my class, students complete three major writing assignments (a personal narrative, a rhetorical landscape report, and a research essay) as well as daily low-stakes writing to practice rhetorical analysis of visual texts and applications of rhetorical tools, reflect on course readings and their own writing, and establish personal goals for the course. Every week, students study two or more new rhetorical devices and find examples from the real world to share and analyze on a discussion board.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
ENG 101: Exploration and Authorship: An Inquiry-Based Writing Course
John Jay’s writing curriculum includes eight prescribed assignments for this course: a piece of creative nonfiction, a research proposal, an annotated bibliography, a scripted interview, a working outline, a first draft, a revised draft, and a reflective cover letter for the digital portfolio. My section is framed around the social effects of algorithms in our daily lives, which I’ve taught as an OER section as well as with a book students were required to purchase. In Fall 2020, I also took over another section of ENG 101 midway through the semester when a colleague went on medical leave and was able to guide most of the students to a passing grade despite the serious disruption to the course.
ENG 201: Disciplinary Investigations: Exploring Writing Across the Disciplines
Course Site (Spring 2021)
Revised Syllabus (Spring 2022)
In the second required writing course at John Jay, students study various genres across a minimum of three disciplines. In the first full school year of the pandemic, I taught this course as “Genre and Imagination,” in which I asked students to make up content for their papers as if they were researchers/writers in an imaginary world of their choosing. For instance, writing a scientific report on algae at Hogwarts, news articles on the destruction of the Death Star, or an ethnography of the Justice League Headquarters. This framing had multiple purposes: first, to introduce a bit of escapism into our course content given the immense stress of the real world circumstances; second, to provide assignments that would not require students to expose themselves to the coronavirus, as real-world ethnographic fieldwork would do; third, and most importantly, to keep the focus of the course squarely on genre study itself, since the actual substance of the papers was fictional. This is particularly useful when asking students to make up bibliographies, because then they must think about source types, variety, and credibility from the ground up, rather than simply citing the sources they happened to find.
For the Spring 2022 semester, I revised that version of the course for in-person learning, and this version is more geared toward multi-genre writing about the students’ own lives and interests, rather than fictional worlds. In our media criticism unit, they write reviews in magazine-style, multimodal, and academic forms. This semester, we watched and collectively annotated the film Don’t Look Up to have a shared text that was also deeply related to science communication, the topic of the second unit. In the second unit, students first research a topic of their choosing and write a report of their findings (essentially an annotated bibliography) and then choose how to communicate that information to three different audiences: a peer, a child, and a third person of their choosing. Choices for the third audience have included letters to Mayor DeBlasio, to the student’s imam, and to people harmed by misinformation about the student’s topic, and apart from letters, chosen genres have included picture books, infographics, posters, Instagram posts, and texting conversations. The third unit remains focused around ethnography, but students are encouraged to engage in participant-observation in places relevant to their lives: past examples have included their own homes, the homes of friends or partners, worship places, workplaces, and the student’s own commute to school.
New Jersey City University
ENG 101: English Composition I
This course, as I taught it at NJCU, was essentially an earlier form of the syllabus I am now teaching at Fordham, since at Fordham, Composition “2” is actually the introductory course, and Comp 1 is for students who self-select to take an extra writing course to better prepare them for completing their Comp 2 requirement.
ENG 102: English Composition II
ENG 96: Developmental Composition II
My section of ENG 102 at NJCU was paired with a co-requisite section of ENG 96. Essentially, it was the same course as other sections of 102 but with additional class time and support for students. At this school, the second composition class was focused on writing about literature, which I taught as a class focused around science fiction and fantasy. We read short stories and essays by Ursula K. LeGuin, literary criticism about the film Black Panther, discussed superhero creation myths and read translations of medieval romances, and compared the film and musical adaptations of Shrek, which included a class trip to NJCU’s own production of the musical.
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
ENG 390: Writing Center Theory and Practice (Teaching Assistant)
This is the upper-level, writing-intensive training course for prospective employees of the campus writing center. My role was to participate in class discussions, assist with grading, lead two class sections over the course of the semester, and mentor the students while they were on-shift at the writing center.
ENG 290: Rhetoric of Social Movements (Teaching Assistant)
This was a brand new, speaking-intensive course that I co-designed with the instructor of record, including selecting readings, writing assignments and rubrics, and developing lesson plans for each week. The first unit focused around abolitionist speeches and writing, and the second unit explored the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement. In the third unit, we briefly discussed Black Lives Matter as a continuation of these legacies, and then students developed projects around social movements of their choice.
