teaching
(2005-06)
I have taught 7 new preparations out of 8 classes in the past two years (plus two summer courses, one of which was a new prep). Each of these classes allowed some connection to my research agenda of teaching and studying multimodal composition. Below I outline the four courses I taught in 2005–06.
English 3410: Professional Writing Technologies.
This course focuses on the rhetorical and technological aspects of designing digital texts, specifically web sites, with the culminating project being a web portfolio, to which students add throughout their time as professional writing majors. This class went smoothly, and one colleague commented that the students coming out of my (and one other colleague’s) 3410 classes were much better prepared for working with the technologies they would need in their other courses. Thanks to additional start-up funds ($50,000) given from the Vice President of Research (the request was made with the help of several colleagues), I was able to outfit the lab with the technology we needed to teach this course, a vast improvement since Fall 2004 when I taught it the first time. See the description and artifacts for this class.
English 6890: Studies in Writing and Rhetoric.
The course focused on creative digital texts. This class was my first time teaching a graduate class and my first time teaching entirely online. Teaching online was a learning experience for me. Migrating multimodal pedagogies to a completely online environment required me to rethink many of the pedagogical and technological assumptions I’d gathered in my years of teaching with technology. Regardless of my own challenges, the students and I engaged in asynchronous discussions of substantial theoretical readings, and they produced amazing final projects, several of which I have incorporated into scholarly presentations and articles on student-produced new media work. See the description and artifacts for this class.
English 5430: Professional Writing Capstone.
I based my syllabus on that of previous teachers’ syllabi for this class. The focus of this undergraduate course is on mentoring graduating seniors to enter the job market. The class included lessons on writing résumés and cover letters, networking, participating in mock interviews, and building two job portfolios (one print, one online). I was disappointed with the student evaluations, but learned several things from the experience that I will change the next time I teach this class. First, if I ask students to volunteer as consultants in the computer lab (a teaching innovation that didn’t work well), I will provide them with more rigorous training and useful projects to show them how working in such a setting can be very beneficial to their professional writing careers. Second, I will prepare my syllabus so that students don’t find it difficult to understand when assignments are due. Third, I will emphasize that real-world working situations require initiative and the ability to work on one’s own. Overall, I learned that I should provide more intermediate projects/steps to help students complete their portfolios. See the description and artifacts for this class.
English 6/7400: Advanced Editing.
For this online, graduate class, I learned how to better use Syllabase to distribute course materials (although there are many features I still did not use as best as I could have). I significantly changed the assignment sequences to better match my specialty of editing online texts. I believed that introducing students to this area of editing would broaden their knowledge and abilities to edit all kinds of documents in whatever media they might confront. I am pleased with this course’s outcomes and the gains in learning about professional editing and editorial work that students’ exhibited. This class helped me to write more detailed assignment sequences and to distribute them in multiple ways so that students could access them readily. See the description and artifacts for this class.
Update on 2006-07: I am currently teaching two new preps—English 3040: Digital Narratives and English 6/7480: Studies in Technology and Writing, the latter of which is my first doctoral seminar and focuses on multimodal and digital composition theory.
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