“The students are helping to invent the future of writing. This attitude and relationship to learning has to be made explicit and encouraged, since students are unaccustomed to working in an experimental way.”
– G. Ulmer (Internet Invention. Florida, 2003)
Theories and Practices of Composition
As an introduction to Composition theories and research, this course addresses the histories, theories, and rhetorics of contemporary writing pedagogies. It focuses heavily on the connections among theories and practices, since practices enacted outside of any theoretical context are often misguided.
Teaching Writing in Digital Culture
This course explores the implications for teaching composition in digital culture, and practices what I have characterized as “participatory composition.” “Digital Culture” characterizes practices of transferring information freely and refers to how we interact with each other, form identities and communities, build and maintain relationships, experience learning, and participate online.
Digital Rhetoric
Digital rhetoric is now ubiquitous, and it deserves intense scholarly attention beyond simply acknowledging that more people write and communicate with computers. Digital rhetoric entails more than critiquing writing we encounter in digital environments or producing simple web texts; instead, studying digital rhetoric requires examining theoretical and ideological issues involved in the shift from writing in a text-only medium. Accordingly, digital rhetoric entails larger cultural shifts in recognizing new patterns of thinking, rethinking familiar conceptualizations about both the self and human interaction, and re-envisioning attitudes and expectations toward reading, writing, and rhetoric, regardless of the physical presence of machines. This course interrogates how central tenets from post-structural and postmodern theories (especially regarding identity and community) play out in the digital realm.
Applied Composition
This is both an advanced writing course and an introduction to theories and pedagogies of writing. Itl focuses on rhetoric and academic writing, including advanced written argumentation, and then moves toward writing in digital environments.