Teaching

First-year writing courses should do two things: 1, disrupt what students think writing is and how they practice it, and 2, prepare students technically and dispositionally to adapt to diverse writing situations throughout their careers and lives (adapted from Downs/Robertson in Naming What We Know). In general, my FYW courses aim to be high-impact experiences.

Recently, students in an experimental course designed escape rooms for the purposes of research instruction and source evaluation in a university library, and, in another, students conducted semester-long inquiry into specific, place-based concerns, mapped the discourses of these concerns, and wrote in a variety of genres to publicly intervene in local issues. I’ve also experimented recently with design-oriented, client-based writing courses, as well as other community-engaged models.

In my courses on the public humanities, we explore possible answers to 2 questions: what do the humanities offer to public life, and how are we equipped for public life by training in the humanities? Through readings, investigation of organizations and projects, and informational interviews, students build a sense of the current landscape of the public humanities, and then turn to inventing new ways to articulate their place/s in that landscape through projects of their own design.

I also re-designed and taught Georgetown's English M.A. digital capstone seminar, the program’s thesis-alternative, incorporating the design methods I’ve published on in enculturation. The seminar, intended to guide students as they work with individual faculty mentors, functions as a semester-long design exercise in which students identify and create the core goals, audiences, and rhetorical strategies of digital projects.

Public Writing

The Teaching Writing Workshop

Introduction to Rhetoric

Studio in Design and Communication