Courses I Have Taught at City Tech
I have taught 10 different courses while at City Tech, and two different learning community designs of ENG 1101 – Introduction to College Composition I. Below, you will find a link to each course along with some brief context. Following the link, you will find the course catalog description, students’ feedback about their course experience (when available), and the latest versions of my course synopsis, syllabus, assignments, OpenLab site, and other materials that I have developed to facilitate course delivery.
ENG 1101 – Introduction to College Composition I
My ENG 1101 course provides students with a rigorous framework for connecting their own subjectivity to intellectual, academic, and professional topics through exploratory writing. The present course design is grounded in cognitive and sociolinguistic theories of learning and communication, combined with an assignment sequence that provides students with many low-stakes opportunities to “inventory” their ideas building to more complex textual forms like the essay and then reflecting deeply on the experience.
ENG 1101LC – “Writing the Recipe of Opportunity”
In 2020, I designed a new First Year Learning Community with Profs. Karen Goodlad and Claire Stewart in the Hospitality Management Department called Writing the Recipe of Opportunity: Hospitality, Writing, and You. The learning community was designed to provide HMGT students with an integrated cohort experience for their ENG 1101/HMGT 1101/HMGT 1102 experience. My portion of the learning community builds on my scholarship on working class student subjectivity and the role of reflection and identity-work in the writing classroom.
ENG 1101LC – “Psychology + Writing: Discovering Your Best Self”
In 2018, I developed my first learning community, “Psychology + Writing: Discovering Your Best Self,” with Prof. Amanda Almond. The course content is based on applying psychological and cognitive principles of communication, action research methods, and qualitative data collected by students about themselves to explore the details of their own experiences and the goals they have for themselves. This course was an important waypoint in the development of the ENG 1101 course I teach today.
ENG 1121 – Introduction to College Composition II
My ENG 1121 course, taught in Fall 2015, was a turning point in my teaching practice. In it, I had begun to think more thematically about my course design and the rhetorical ethopoeia of my coursework, which describes the art of creating and refining our character as the people that we aspire to be. This course was also the last paper-based course I taught.
ENG 1133 – Specialized Communications for Technology Students
In Fall 2018, after teaching several twice weekly versions of ENG 1133, I taught an evening seminar version with only 10 students with tremendous difference in their backgrounds. I pitched students the opportunity to work collaboratively to develop a proposal project from the ground up as a workplace team. That project was a proposal to fund an open-sourced robotic instrumentation platform with a pitch of how it can be used in college and high school classrooms.
ENG 1161 – Language and Thinking
Since 2018, I have regularly taught the department’s introductory socio-linguistics course. The course is divided into thirds, with the first third focused on traditional topics that tie language development, acquisition, and use with cognition. The second third focuses on the relationship between these topics with identity formation, ideological positioning, and power. The last third of the course focuses on the topics of nationalist propaganda, memetics in internet culture, and animation as social resistance. In each third, students complete an “field research” project where they apply concepts from the course to analyze empirical data they collect themselves from their everyday lives.
ENG 2400 – Films From Literature
In Fall 2019, I wanted to start teaching a regular literature course (I am heavily a writing specialist), and decided that ENG 2400 would allow me to develop a literature pedagogy while relying on my professional experience in the media industry as well as my theoretical work in identity and media as a PhD student. Each of the three times I have taught this course have been very different experiences for students and myself, but I consistently receive complements on my ability to create an intellectually rigorous, but meaningful, experience for students.
ENG 2570 – Writing in the Workplace
Because of my department’s critical need for ENG 2575 instructors, which I now teach, I have not taught ENG 2570 for the last five years, even though it is one of my favorite courses and I still keep in touch with a handful of students as they progress in their careers. Several of my ENG 2570 students have gone on to significant success in finance and as licensed engineers. With my industry experience, including as a hiring manager, I treated the course as a practicum for developing a managerial mindset with a focus on understanding what managers and executives look for in job applicants and new hires.
ENG 2575 – Technical Writing
I have taught ENG 2575 every year since 2013, and it has become a yearly tradition for me to teach two sections of it during Summer I, even if I don’t teach it during the regular academic year. I believe it is my most popular class, with students emailing me throughout the year asking when I am teaching it and if they can join. I teach my ENG 2575 courses as a cohort experience, with a friendly competition among students, who vote on the best proposal for a $5,000 project and the best document design. Many students say this course was the most important course of their college career. Three previous students have been funded by the CUNY New Venture Accelerator, one previous student by UNICEF for a village school in Sierra Leone, and one was awarded a year-long fellowship to MakerSpaceNYC among many, many other successes.
ENG 2700 – Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing
While I have not taught ENG 2700 since I began working in grants development, my pedagogy for it comes directly out of my professional experience working on and leading writing project teams more than my graduate training in writing pedagogy. I have a deep appreciation for the experience of introducing pre-professionals to the aspects of craft found within the field of technical communications and ENG 2700 was the perfect venue to do this.
ENG 3790 – Information Architecture
In Spring 2016, I taught the inaugural ENG 3790 course for City Tech’s first Professional and Technical Writing students. During the course, students had to present on current texts in Information Architecture, conduct a field study of information structures, and produce a portfolio of information design and visualization pieces. We visited the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section, which is home to more than 20 linear miles of some of the most important international records of the 20th century. This opportunity allowed students to literally see information architecture in a material, social, and enculturated practice from a global perspective.
ENG 4900 – Professional and Technical Writing Internship
Over three semesters until Spring 2018, I supervised the first nine Professional and Technical Writing students who completed their internships. For each student, I assisted them in securing an internship, navigating workplace concerns, and additional professional support as needed as they transitioned to the job market.
Other Teaching Activities
I am routinely contacted by former students for requests for letters of recommendation (see PARSE for recent examples), references, or just to keep in touch and let me know how they are doing. Occasionally, former students wish to continue to work with me in some capacity. Below are two instances where I have worked with students in an official, ongoing manner after they completed my course.
CUNY BA Mentorship
For three years, I served as a CUNY BA mentor in Strategic Communications for Siera Whitaker, who I meet with on a semester basis and advised by email regularly. Siera graduated in 2020 and started her own company, Affirm Noire, with the purpose of changing narratives via art, stories, and apparel for BIPOC creators.
CST Intern Supervision
In spring 2019, I supervised a CST 4900 120-hour internship for Nancy Cruz that focused on WordPress front-end development. With my assistance, Nancy led the update planning, research, prototyping, design, and site maps for my two OER project WordPress sites:
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/cunyopensourcediyrover/
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/seriouschangethroughplay/
