I have taught a range of courses in typical composition sequences, and been able to design a number of courses, though, I am also experienced teaching a programmatic standardized curriculum as well.
Here are some recent courses I have designed:
"Stop Breaking Down: Analysis in Writing & Reading" - First-year Writing
When problems overwhelm us and sadness smothers us, where do we find the will and the courage to continue? Well the answer may come in the caring voice of a friend, a chance encounter with a book, or from a personal faith. For Janet, help came from her faith, but it also came from a squirrel. Shortly after her divorce, Janet lost her father then she lost her job, she had mounting money problems. But Janet not only survived, she worked her way out of despondency and now she says, life is good again. How could this happen? She told me that late one autumn day when she was at her lowest she watched a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter, one at a time he would take them to the nest. And she thought, if that squirrel can take care of himself with a harsh winter coming on, so can I. Once I broke my problems into small pieces, I was able to carry them, just like those acorns, one at a time.
Like Janet, in The White Stripes’ song “Little Acorns”, we want to use a problem-solving approach to studying writing. We’re going to consider analysis as a problem, and like the song says, let’s “take all our problems and rip ‘em apart” let’s remember “the problems in hand are lighter than at heart”, let’s “be like the squirrel” and break these problems – of analysis, of research, of rhetoric, of writing – into small pieces and carry them more easily!
Writing is a useful and necessary tool both in academic and non-academic settings. In this course, we’ll break down the process of analysis (which is, itself, the process of breaking things down into their component pieces) in order to better understand how the specific pieces of rhetorical analysis – the most commonly used form of analysis in academic writing and any kind of persuasive text – to better analyze the texts and arguments of others, and compose arguments and texts of our own.
Divided into two Units, this course first focuses on what Lester Faigley, a prominent figure in composition studies, calls the “Keys to Rhetorical Analysis.” Our hyper-focus plays out over ten micro-essays – literally, single paragraph analyses – that challenge you to look at texts and arguments that you select to discuss one specific “little acorn” of analysis within. In the second Unit, you’ll stop breaking down (that’s another song by The White Stripes, hah!) the little acorns of analysis and practice the most common form of academic writing – a researched argument – by proposing, researching, drafting, revising, and drafting again.
"To Inform, To Argue, To Engage: Writing Research" - Advanced Composition
Research is not only a foundational skill to have as a university student, but also as an individual participating in society. With that in mind, this course focuses on research from a few different perspectives, first, by thinking about research and writing as a response to an audience, and how depending on the audience making choices based on the content and delivery of what we are trying to communicate; next, we’ll use different technologies and presentation methods to further negotiate the needs of a hypothetical audience to suit our argumentative and research-oriented needs; finally, you’ll engage in massive group projects, tying together the various themes and concepts we tackle this semester.
Expect to do a lot of writing, and a fair bit of reading too. Work this semester will ask you to be thoughtful and engaged, to be a present and active speaker, critical thinker, but mostly, to be honest with yourself and your interests so that your voice may enter into a discourse community of voices like, and unlike, your own to shape the world around you as you see fit.
"Visualizing & Playing the Writing Process" - Basic writing
This course will look at the writing process, something both necessary for expressing and communicating human experiences and success in a university setting in two different ways. First, we’ll visualize the writing process; next, we’ll reimagine the writing process as a game one might play; finally, we’ll connect these seemingly unrelated ideas into three cohesive final projects that collect the semester’s experiences into a meaningful conclusion. We’re going to look at board games, movies, Star Wars comic books, art, poetry, and UNO to sharpen our understanding and improve our practice of the different kinds of writing techniques you will use as a student, and elsewhere in your lives. How are these elements related? Read on!
The course is organized into three units:
Understanding Writing Visually: Multimodality, Comics & Collage
The Rules of the Game: ‘University’ Genres, Rulebooks & Gameplay
Putting it All Together
All told, this course will ask you to read and write a lot, expand your previously held ideas about what writing can be, discuss, contribute, participate, share, and explore. Ideally, after taking this course you will (a) be ready to engage with familiar college genres of ‘academic’ writing, & (b) have a new skillset for expressing and communicating your ideas to a wider audience, namely, the rest of the writing courses you’ll take.
"Reading Popular Culture" - First-year writing
Depending on who you ask, the purpose of this course – first-year composition – can serve a few different goals: it is meant to effectively prepare you for the kinds of writing and communication you’ll be expected to do in the rest of the courses you’ll take here, it is meant to expose you to genres of writing and communication that you may have not previously utilized, or worked with in limited ways during high school, or, the writing class’s political goal: become effective members of a society wherein you can wield powers of rhetoric to enact change in the world around you.
Where this course might deviate from those aims is not necessarily in our goals (we do want to become better prepared for the kinds of writing you’ll be expected to do here, we do want to experiment with new and unfamiliar genres of writing, and we do want to develop a better understanding of rhetoric and persuasion) but rather, our road to those goals.
This semester we will closely examine, critique, and discuss popular culture as our road into understanding our world. While popular culture might at first seem like a strange site for inquiry in a writing course, consider this: popular culture is a reflection of attitudes and dispositions for our world. In 1996, the United States was (mostly) at peace and had yet to feel the impacts of climate change. We were by all accounts the masters of our own fate, so of course that summer was the perfect time for cinema classic Twister to be a blockbuster hit: man could outwit the weather and win in a heroic battle against nature. At face value, its just a movie, but viewing Twister in a historical lens we might begin to understand how the movie reflects the attitudes of the time it was released.
Silly example aside, this is the kind of critical thinking we want to begin doing. We’ll legitimize the pop culture texts you value and enjoy, we’ll critique what makes texts “popular” “culture”, and, working closely with the text book, The World Is a Text, we’ll consider popular culture as a road towards (or lens) for interpreting and responding to our world.
"Responding & Recreating" - Introduction to Creative Writing
Let’s get something important out of the way early: writing, doing writing, being a writer isn’t the privileged gift of an individual genius, tremendous writings magically bestowed upon them in the middle of the night at a candle lit desk. Rather, great creative writing is the product of work, and like most work, with practice, any of us can become quite good at doing that work.
The work of this class focuses on two concepts: responding and re-creating.
All writing begins from something: an event, a moment, or a memory, a thing we saw, or did, a song we heard on the radio this morning, a bird on a window sill, a smell in the air. This something is often mistaken for a muse, but really, the something is an internal stimuli that provokes from us a response, and that’s one reason to write. In class, you can expect to re-calibrate the way you observe the world in order to better respond to it with your writing.
Sometimes, the something we’re responding to finds itself oriented awful close to ourselves, and while I could (and most likely will during the course of this semester) go off on some tangent about how Carly Rae Jepsen is the best or how 1996 cinema masterpiece Twister is American culture’s greatest production, we don’t always want to bear our responses honestly. The inherent dishonesty of writing, the magic trick, is in the ways we re-create our response. The difference between re-telling something and really telling a story is in the decisions you make. In class, you can expect to protect, to mask, to make intentional decisions about the form, the shape, and the content of your writing to re-create the something, the inspiring event, or the way you want readers to experience the something.
Don’t worry if this all seems a little too abstract, at the end of each day, you should only expect this class, and its workload, to be the following three things: writing (duh), reading, and talking about your writing and reading. Alongside individual pieces I’ll provide, we’ll be reading the excellent collection of essays THEY CAN’T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US by Hanif Abdurraqib, which blend the ideas of responding and re-creating in really exciting ways. Abdurraqib is a poet in addition to an essayist, so readings from this book are cross-genre and embrace poetic and lyrical language, while developing ideas with a critical edge that toggle between subjects from popular culture and contemporary issues in social justice.
We’ll use essays from THEY CAN’T KILL US… both as models for the kinds of writing we’ll experiment with, but also as a guide for ways to both respond (topics, moments, ideas) and re-create (framing devices, narrative) to things in our lives. You’ll also self-select a recently published book of any creative genre that you’ll read independently and present on during the final third of the semester. It goes without saying this class will ask you to write and read quite a bit. You will often be asked to share work with the whole class or in small groups, and active, in-class participation is both an expectation and a requirement.
Mostly though, we’re going to be doing a lot of writing. Sometimes you’ll be given carte blanche with form and content, other times we’ll make conscious efforts to experiment with different genres and forms of writing. All in service of our goal this semester: respond to the world, and re-create our experiences in writing.
"Magic Tricks & an Honest Day's Work" - Introduction to Imaginative Writing
Working-class rock & roll hero Bruce Springsteen has a lot of songs about working in a garage, spending time in the steel mills of a New Jersey unlike the Rust Belt myth of places like Youngstown, Ohio & Detroit, Michigan. The Boss jokes:
I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud … he calls this “a magic trick” … I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life, I’ve never done any hard labor. I’ve never worked 9 to 5. I’ve never worked five days a week until right now
This is meant to be a joke. Springsteen’s entire discography features stories about hard-luck, hard-working people, personas he takes on during his long career. He cracks this joke during a year-long run on Broadway, which is the antithesis of every blue-collar character he plays. What can we, as developing writers, learn from Bruce Springsteen?
1. That the writing takes a bit of magic
2. That the writing is actually just work
Organized around these two themes magic & work, this class aims to approach a variety of nonfiction texts that tell their stories in imaginative ways. We’ll listen to semi-autobiographical music, read autobiographical comics, look at creative nonfiction reviews of sports, music, and popular culture, and look at films that use fiction and imagination to recreate real places and figures. Students will close-read a variety of creative texts from a range of genres and will respond in critical and creative ways. Primarily, though, the texts we read will always be in service of the writing students are expected to generate during the course.
Creative projects will ask students to use magic & do work. We’ll approach writing with a reverence to the magic and power imagination has on creating an impactful experience for an audience, and for the author. However, we also want to strip back the magic from the work, and begin developing methods and strategies for “working 9 to 5” on the writing we’re doing, developing our methods and techniques of imaginative writing, and in preparation for Introduction to Creative Writing.
When problems overwhelm us and sadness smothers us, where do we find the will and the courage to continue? Well the answer may come in the caring voice of a friend, a chance encounter with a book, or from a personal faith. For Janet, help came from her faith, but it also came from a squirrel. Shortly after her divorce, Janet lost her father then she lost her job, she had mounting money problems. But Janet not only survived, she worked her way out of despondency and now she says, life is good again. How could this happen? She told me that late one autumn day when she was at her lowest she watched a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter, one at a time he would take them to the nest. And she thought, if that squirrel can take care of himself with a harsh winter coming on, so can I. Once I broke my problems into small pieces, I was able to carry them, just like those acorns, one at a time.
- Mort Crim, quoted in “Little Acorns” by The White Stripes
Like Janet, in The White Stripes’ song “Little Acorns”, we want to use a problem-solving approach to studying writing. We’re going to consider analysis as a problem, and like the song says, let’s “take all our problems and rip ‘em apart” let’s remember “the problems in hand are lighter than at heart”, let’s “be like the squirrel” and break these problems – of analysis, of research, of rhetoric, of writing – into small pieces and carry them more easily!
Writing is a useful and necessary tool both in academic and non-academic settings. In this course, we’ll break down the process of analysis (which is, itself, the process of breaking things down into their component pieces) in order to better understand how the specific pieces of rhetorical analysis – the most commonly used form of analysis in academic writing and any kind of persuasive text – to better analyze the texts and arguments of others, and compose arguments and texts of our own.
Divided into two Units, this course first focuses on what Lester Faigley, a prominent figure in composition studies, calls the “Keys to Rhetorical Analysis.” Our hyper-focus plays out over ten micro-essays – literally, single paragraph analyses – that challenge you to look at texts and arguments that you select to discuss one specific “little acorn” of analysis within. In the second Unit, you’ll stop breaking down (that’s another song by The White Stripes, hah!) the little acorns of analysis and practice the most common form of academic writing – a researched argument – by proposing, researching, drafting, revising, and drafting again.
"To Inform, To Argue, To Engage: Writing Research" - Advanced Composition
Research is not only a foundational skill to have as a university student, but also as an individual participating in society. With that in mind, this course focuses on research from a few different perspectives, first, by thinking about research and writing as a response to an audience, and how depending on the audience making choices based on the content and delivery of what we are trying to communicate; next, we’ll use different technologies and presentation methods to further negotiate the needs of a hypothetical audience to suit our argumentative and research-oriented needs; finally, you’ll engage in massive group projects, tying together the various themes and concepts we tackle this semester.
Expect to do a lot of writing, and a fair bit of reading too. Work this semester will ask you to be thoughtful and engaged, to be a present and active speaker, critical thinker, but mostly, to be honest with yourself and your interests so that your voice may enter into a discourse community of voices like, and unlike, your own to shape the world around you as you see fit.
"Visualizing & Playing the Writing Process" - Basic writing
This course will look at the writing process, something both necessary for expressing and communicating human experiences and success in a university setting in two different ways. First, we’ll visualize the writing process; next, we’ll reimagine the writing process as a game one might play; finally, we’ll connect these seemingly unrelated ideas into three cohesive final projects that collect the semester’s experiences into a meaningful conclusion. We’re going to look at board games, movies, Star Wars comic books, art, poetry, and UNO to sharpen our understanding and improve our practice of the different kinds of writing techniques you will use as a student, and elsewhere in your lives. How are these elements related? Read on!
The course is organized into three units:
Understanding Writing Visually: Multimodality, Comics & Collage
- Here, we’ll first use visual analysis as a way to practice writing and analytical thinking; then explore a concept called multimodality that deals with using writing + as a way to better delivering information, and finally we will assemble all these ideas into a first unit project that takes writing beyond words on a page to new avenues of expression and communication.
The Rules of the Game: ‘University’ Genres, Rulebooks & Gameplay
- Next, we’ll use board and card games – their rules and the way their rules work – as a metaphor for understanding how ‘academic’ writing is, in of itself, a game we have to play. Success as a writer means winning that game, or at least, being able to understand both the rules and the game we’re playing as writers and communicators.
Putting it All Together
- Finally, we’ll synthesize all our learning with hopes that, after this course concludes, you’ll have a keen understanding of the ways to interpret and understanding what specific writing game each situation requires you to play, and how you might win that situation.
All told, this course will ask you to read and write a lot, expand your previously held ideas about what writing can be, discuss, contribute, participate, share, and explore. Ideally, after taking this course you will (a) be ready to engage with familiar college genres of ‘academic’ writing, & (b) have a new skillset for expressing and communicating your ideas to a wider audience, namely, the rest of the writing courses you’ll take.
"Reading Popular Culture" - First-year writing
Depending on who you ask, the purpose of this course – first-year composition – can serve a few different goals: it is meant to effectively prepare you for the kinds of writing and communication you’ll be expected to do in the rest of the courses you’ll take here, it is meant to expose you to genres of writing and communication that you may have not previously utilized, or worked with in limited ways during high school, or, the writing class’s political goal: become effective members of a society wherein you can wield powers of rhetoric to enact change in the world around you.
Where this course might deviate from those aims is not necessarily in our goals (we do want to become better prepared for the kinds of writing you’ll be expected to do here, we do want to experiment with new and unfamiliar genres of writing, and we do want to develop a better understanding of rhetoric and persuasion) but rather, our road to those goals.
This semester we will closely examine, critique, and discuss popular culture as our road into understanding our world. While popular culture might at first seem like a strange site for inquiry in a writing course, consider this: popular culture is a reflection of attitudes and dispositions for our world. In 1996, the United States was (mostly) at peace and had yet to feel the impacts of climate change. We were by all accounts the masters of our own fate, so of course that summer was the perfect time for cinema classic Twister to be a blockbuster hit: man could outwit the weather and win in a heroic battle against nature. At face value, its just a movie, but viewing Twister in a historical lens we might begin to understand how the movie reflects the attitudes of the time it was released.
Silly example aside, this is the kind of critical thinking we want to begin doing. We’ll legitimize the pop culture texts you value and enjoy, we’ll critique what makes texts “popular” “culture”, and, working closely with the text book, The World Is a Text, we’ll consider popular culture as a road towards (or lens) for interpreting and responding to our world.
"Responding & Recreating" - Introduction to Creative Writing
Let’s get something important out of the way early: writing, doing writing, being a writer isn’t the privileged gift of an individual genius, tremendous writings magically bestowed upon them in the middle of the night at a candle lit desk. Rather, great creative writing is the product of work, and like most work, with practice, any of us can become quite good at doing that work.
The work of this class focuses on two concepts: responding and re-creating.
All writing begins from something: an event, a moment, or a memory, a thing we saw, or did, a song we heard on the radio this morning, a bird on a window sill, a smell in the air. This something is often mistaken for a muse, but really, the something is an internal stimuli that provokes from us a response, and that’s one reason to write. In class, you can expect to re-calibrate the way you observe the world in order to better respond to it with your writing.
Sometimes, the something we’re responding to finds itself oriented awful close to ourselves, and while I could (and most likely will during the course of this semester) go off on some tangent about how Carly Rae Jepsen is the best or how 1996 cinema masterpiece Twister is American culture’s greatest production, we don’t always want to bear our responses honestly. The inherent dishonesty of writing, the magic trick, is in the ways we re-create our response. The difference between re-telling something and really telling a story is in the decisions you make. In class, you can expect to protect, to mask, to make intentional decisions about the form, the shape, and the content of your writing to re-create the something, the inspiring event, or the way you want readers to experience the something.
Don’t worry if this all seems a little too abstract, at the end of each day, you should only expect this class, and its workload, to be the following three things: writing (duh), reading, and talking about your writing and reading. Alongside individual pieces I’ll provide, we’ll be reading the excellent collection of essays THEY CAN’T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US by Hanif Abdurraqib, which blend the ideas of responding and re-creating in really exciting ways. Abdurraqib is a poet in addition to an essayist, so readings from this book are cross-genre and embrace poetic and lyrical language, while developing ideas with a critical edge that toggle between subjects from popular culture and contemporary issues in social justice.
We’ll use essays from THEY CAN’T KILL US… both as models for the kinds of writing we’ll experiment with, but also as a guide for ways to both respond (topics, moments, ideas) and re-create (framing devices, narrative) to things in our lives. You’ll also self-select a recently published book of any creative genre that you’ll read independently and present on during the final third of the semester. It goes without saying this class will ask you to write and read quite a bit. You will often be asked to share work with the whole class or in small groups, and active, in-class participation is both an expectation and a requirement.
Mostly though, we’re going to be doing a lot of writing. Sometimes you’ll be given carte blanche with form and content, other times we’ll make conscious efforts to experiment with different genres and forms of writing. All in service of our goal this semester: respond to the world, and re-create our experiences in writing.
"Magic Tricks & an Honest Day's Work" - Introduction to Imaginative Writing
Working-class rock & roll hero Bruce Springsteen has a lot of songs about working in a garage, spending time in the steel mills of a New Jersey unlike the Rust Belt myth of places like Youngstown, Ohio & Detroit, Michigan. The Boss jokes:
I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud … he calls this “a magic trick” … I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life, I’ve never done any hard labor. I’ve never worked 9 to 5. I’ve never worked five days a week until right now
This is meant to be a joke. Springsteen’s entire discography features stories about hard-luck, hard-working people, personas he takes on during his long career. He cracks this joke during a year-long run on Broadway, which is the antithesis of every blue-collar character he plays. What can we, as developing writers, learn from Bruce Springsteen?
1. That the writing takes a bit of magic
2. That the writing is actually just work
Organized around these two themes magic & work, this class aims to approach a variety of nonfiction texts that tell their stories in imaginative ways. We’ll listen to semi-autobiographical music, read autobiographical comics, look at creative nonfiction reviews of sports, music, and popular culture, and look at films that use fiction and imagination to recreate real places and figures. Students will close-read a variety of creative texts from a range of genres and will respond in critical and creative ways. Primarily, though, the texts we read will always be in service of the writing students are expected to generate during the course.
Creative projects will ask students to use magic & do work. We’ll approach writing with a reverence to the magic and power imagination has on creating an impactful experience for an audience, and for the author. However, we also want to strip back the magic from the work, and begin developing methods and strategies for “working 9 to 5” on the writing we’re doing, developing our methods and techniques of imaginative writing, and in preparation for Introduction to Creative Writing.
