semesters & syllabi

• Spring 2008: Audio Essays

description
I taught English 246 as an Audio Essay class, in the spirit of radio stories and documentaries like those heard on This American Life. We started by making playlists of favorite songs to introduce each other through musical choices (in order to discuss the rhetoric of music and other forms of audio). We then worked on audio poems for Poetry Radio on WGLT (the local NPR station), moved onto 5-7 minute audio documentary-like stories, and concluded with This I Believe reflections about the class and learning experience.

teaching innovations

• I installed Moodle, an open-source content-management system, for the first time on my personal server for students to use as a place to hold online discussions and to upload their audio files. I used about half the features in Moodle, students preferred it to Blackboard/WebCT, and so I may use it again, although the freely available ning platform, which was not available at the time, may be easier.
• This semester was the first time I used a blog platform for an entire syllabus. All schedules, policies, readings, resource links, and class news was posted to the class blog, which students seemed to like. (Still, however, I did not have students using their own blog; there wasn’t a purpose for that kind of blog-portfolio for this class.)

teaching challenge
A challenge I faced in teaching this course had to do with the available hardware in my classroom. Because this course isn’t always taught in a computer lab, I had originally been assigned a “dumb” classroom, which is what my field calls a classroom with no technology, as opposed to a “smart” classroom, a common term in instructional technology that refers to a classroom with at least a teacher’s computer station and projection equipment. So I switched into a computer classroom with 27 older stations and furniture that was literally falling apart. (Given that the building was currently undergoing life-safety renovations and this particular classroom was being phased out for the following year, I was happy to have it.) Although the machines did not have CD burners, which would normally be a must for an audio essay class, we made do. (It turns out that despite students’ lack of technical production in multimodal composition, they know how to burn CDs on their home computers. :) However, I had another challenge with this room, which was both technological and ideological: It was built to house a large seminar instead of a smaller-sectioned writing class, but the room layout was too long and narrow to conduct discussions. Each of the 3 classes assigned to that room that last semester of its existence had less than 22 students, so (with permission) I removed 5 computer stations and the worst of the broken desks, which made the room feel more cozy and condusive to discussion.

accompanying materials

• student’s audio poem from class, published in Euphemism

semesters & syllabi

• Fall 2007 (as English 289.22: Multimedia Writing Workshop): 18 students
• Fall 2008 (hereafter as English 239: Multimodal Composition): 12 students
• Spring 2009: 9 students (7 undergraduates & 2 graduate students, as independent studies)
• Fall 2009: 14 students (11 undergraduates & 3 graduate students, as independent studies)

description
Started as English 289.33: Multimedia Writing Workshop. I wrote the course proposal to turn it into a permanent class. During Fall 2007, I taught the course similarly to how I taught English 3040: Perspectives in Writing & Rhetoric the previous year as a faculty member at Utah State University; its topic was an open-assignment video course where students progressed from smaller, monomodal exercises to 5-minute multimodal videos of various genres. I didn’t like the organization for the course (as described in my teaching development plan under Teaching), so I changed the syllabus the next fall. For Fall 08, Spring 09, and Fall 09, the course focused on having students compose digital media scholarship for a peer-reviewed publication in English Studies. The publication venue changed for different semesters, as students responded to real calls for papers in the field of digital writing studies.

teaching innovations

• Fall 2007, I implemented a teaching innovation of showcasing the student’s work at the local, historic cinema. I was nominated for the department’s innovative teaching award for this effort, although it turned out I was ineligible because I had not been at ISU long enough to meet the award criteria of two years.
• Fall 2008 came a different innovation as I changed the syllabus — having students compose texts for peer-reviewed publications provided them with the elusive “authentic audience” while giving them a specific rhetorical situation in which to work. Also innovative this semester was taking as many of these students who could go to a national conference about multimodal composition. From this event, which they filmed, they built several digital media projects and proposed their inclusion into the digital conference proceedings. Their proposals were accepted, and as of Fall 2009, I am working with one student from that class to revise the student projects for publication.

accompanying materials

• original 239 course proposal
• current 239 syllabi (links to website index of all available semesters)

see also

• “Who Needs YouTube?!” (under Research Designs)
• “Talking Back to Teachers: Undergraduate Research in Multimodal Composition” (under Chapters)
• “A Case Study in Revision Processes in Student-Authored Digital Media Scholarship” (under Honors)

semesters & syllabi

• Fall 2008 (2 sections; 12 Masters & PhD students enrolled in my section)
• Fall 2009 (2 sections; 10 Masters & PhD students enrolled in my section)

description
The first time I taught this required course, I created a syllabus that addressed a different composition pedagogy each week, building from historical options (e.g., current-traditional, expressivist, process, etc.) to more recent additions to the field (e.g., feminist, critical, multimodal, etc.). I chose not to use the traditional anthology for this class because it lacked any readings about more current theories, especially on visual rhetoric, multimodality, or teaching with technology, so I added readings relevant to those topics to each week, as appropriate. (I did this because students teach in computer-assisted classrooms and otherwise they wouldn’t get any theory on teaching in those spaces.) In addition to the theoretical/historical focus, students studied the professional aspects of being a rhetoric and composition scholar, to give them a look at how different fields (since only two or three of the 12 students had a rhet/comp emphasis) enact their professional goals. Students reviewed journals and textbooks, did brief ethnographies on a blog or conference, led class discussions, created short videos about their or others’ writing processes, and drafted teaching philosophies. I was happy with the course, but the evaluations showed otherwise. I realized, after the fact, the level of buy-in needed from students in a required course outside their field. (Apparently, according to others who have taught this course, such reactions to 402 are not unusual.)

The second time I taught this required course, we had hired a new Writing Program Administrator, and she and I decided to write a shared syllabus. It was completely different than my previous syllabus, with a focus on genre studies, which helped us rethink the goals of ISU’s writing program. The assignments were shared across the two sections and included discussions on a shared ning (online learning space with characteristics of a social networking space); ethnographies of others’ writing classes to study the physical, material, and ideological ways writing is taught; group and individual manifestos about ways to change the current writing program practices at ISU; short praxis-based articles for possible publication in one of two scholarly venues; and proposals (based on manifestos) for enacting change in the ISU writing program.

teaching challenge

• My evaluations for the Fall 2008 semester were not as good as I am used to, and many of the students commented that the homework I assigned seemed more like busy work to them, although I had discussed at length during several classes how that work was professional development and would help them see the kinds of scholarship rhetoric and composition scholars often undertake. For the Fall 2009 class, the new Writing Program Administrator (Joyce Walker) and I are team-teaching our sections with a new syllabus and new assignments that we hope will reinvigorate the writing program at ISU. Compared to last year, overall there are less assignments that focus on professionalization in rhetoric and composition since we decided that the point of 402 should be about the teaching of writing, broadly construed, and not just how rhet/comp scholars engage with the teaching of writing. We did, however, keep some assignments that were similar to those I assigned last year, such as the short articles, but these assignments are pitched as performances of pedagogical scholarship, which is appropriate for all students in our program, rather than on service to the field.
• In Fall 2009, the only challenge that this class has faced is an issue of classroom space. The 3-hour course was originally split between two classrooms (50 minutes in the seminar room, two hours in the computer lab), which did not work with the open discussion style of this class. After looking around, Tara Reeser (Publications Unit Director) offered us the Publications Unit lab, which has suited us extremely well (even though it displaces Tara from her office because of its location to the lab). It doesn’t have enough computers for all my students this semester, but it does have excellent wireless access, which Stevenson (where we normally meet) does not, so some students bring their laptops. The challenge here is recognizing that English studies courses need technologically rich spaces in most cases, and that we need more of these spaces on campus. I hope to work with the department’s Associate Chair to resolve this issue in the coming years.

teaching innovation
The Fall 2009 semester was the first time I’ve co-taught a course (even though we each have our own section that meets at different times). Dr. Joyce Walker and I co-created the syllabus, readings, and assignments, and we’ve visited each others’ classes to meet the students and discuss assignment options with them. This is also the first time I’ve used a ning in a class, with both sections sharing the same class syllabus/blog and ning so that they can “meet” each other virtually throughout the week and share ideas across sections. It has worked seamlessly because both Joyce and I have administrative control in the blog and ning, so we add users ourself. (This would be difficult, if not impossible, in Blackboard, while the ning allows us the same, if not better, features and usability. Plus, using the ning and blog (both of which are open-access and free) allow us to show students technologies that they can use in their own teaching.

accompanying materials

• see syllabi above
• Fall 2008 student videos
• Fall 2009 (Section 01) manifesto

semesters & syllabi

• Spring 2008 (see readings/calendar)

description
This course was an introduction to the intersections of textual production and consumption, modes of communication (i.e., visual, linguistic, aural, gestural, spatial), and media within English studies since the advent of the World Wide Web. The subtitle for the course was “What is ‘new media’ in an English department?” We studied the eras of digital, literary hypertext (1989–1994), hypermedia (1994–1999), and new media (2000–present), with some attention paid to the impact of Web 2.0 on these texts (2006–present). We read primary texts (i.e., Joyce’s afternoon: a story and Jackson’s Patchwork Girl) that helped introduce students to these genres. We also read theoretical texts (literary theory, computer science, rhetoric, design, cinema studies, etc.) such as Landow’s Hypertext 3.0, Hayles’ Writing Machines, and Manovich’s The Language of New Media. Students produced final projects that embodied/enacted these theories.

teaching challenge
467 was the first graduate-only class I had taught at ISU, so I wrote the syllabus trying to appeal to the broad range of English studies backgrounds that students might bring to class. Because, I suspect, of the word technology in the class title and my newness on campus (students didn’t know me or my research yet), the course enrolled mostly Masters students studying technical communication. In addition, three students from the Arts Technology masters program enrolled. Because of the broad range of backgrounds, I learned to explain the theoretical and e-literary works in more detail than I would have normally (leading to a bit more lecture than discussion, which is not my preferred method for graduate classes), but this was a great learning experience for me in understanding the range of students we teach at ISU and in enacting a pedagogy useful for an English studies model.

accompanying materials

• syllabus
  

semesters & syllabi

• Fall 2007 (paper syllabus not currently available; lost in a hard-drive crash)
• Enrollment: 18 students (16 undergraduates, 1 Masters, 1 PhD student)

description
In my first semester at Illinois State, I taught English 350, modeling it on previous publications classes I taught, with the modification that this class didn’t need to focus on pre-press issues because the intro course in the publishing sequence does that. Students started by focusing on how the design of written text, including use of fonts, makes meaning for audiences/readers and designing small documents (flyers) in Microsoft Word. Then transferring that knowledge to larger projects and more complicated software programs (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop). Projects included collateral material (résumés, business cards, letterhead) and final projects of their choosing, which included chapbooks, children’s books, sets of print advertising material, etc.

teaching challenge
The challenge for me was two-fold: figuring out how to adapt a service-learning syllabus focusing on a single class project (i.e., a literary magazine) to individual projects, and accommodating learning needs at the undergraduate through PhD-level in one class. I didn’t feel very successful in doing this, and although I love teaching print design and visual rhetoric, I asked to be taken off the rotation for this course until I could figure out a better strategy. Another faculty member is teaching that course regularly now (and with seeming great success), so if I need to teach it again, I will sit in on her class to borrow some of her teaching strategies. Despite my hesitancy about the way I taught this class, I won a Sigma Tau Delta Teaching Award after undergraduates in that class nominated me.

accompanying materials

• none available
  

see also

• Sigma Tau Delta Teaching Award