Teaching
How I teach writing
My courses, laid out so other teachers can see how they work and borrow what's useful.
Process: Directed draftingFirst draft
I teach first-year composition, professional writing, and business, in person and online, in 15-week semesters and 8-week sessions. The schools and course numbers change. The shape of the courses mostly doesn't. Students start by studying their own writing, carry what they find into other modes, and end by bringing in outside voices.
The arc
- Personal
Students study themselves. Low stakes for being right, high stakes for self-awareness.
- Multimodal
Students work across the five modes and see that form follows function.
- Research
Outside voices and academic discourse come in.
Every course I teach makes those three moves. They differ in what counts as data at the start, how personal the multimodal project stays, and what counts as research at the end.
Pathways
Each pathway is one course's sequence of projects, in the order students do them. Stages with a solid outline have their own page; the dashed ones are on the way.
Self → Group → Conversation
First-year writing I · 15 weeks, in person; also run as an 8-week session
Self → Genre → Corpus
First-year writing I · 15 weeks, online
Essay → Self-Portrait → Discourse → Autoethnography
First-year writing II · 15 weeks, in person
Self + Genre + Discourse → Portfolio
College writing workshop II · 8 weeks, asynchronous
- Autoethnography
- Composition Studies Synthesis Posts
- Digital Genre Analysis and Rhetorical Choices Defense
- "Your Writing Journey" portfolio
Field Notes → Ethnography → Presentation
Introduction to professional writing · 8 weeks, hybrid
- Field Notes and workplace writing exercises
- Writing Culture Ethnography
- Digital Presentation of a Professional Culture
Pick by goal
What holds it together
- Writing is recursive. Each project reuses what students made in the last one. Many pieces of writing start in one form and end up in another.
- Students are researchers of their own practice. Their reading and writing habits are real data, transcribed and coded the way Sondra Perl studied her subjects.
- Multimodality is composition. The five modes are core content, and major projects can be video, audio, web, or visual.
- Revision is open-ended. As long as first drafts come in on time, students can revise as much as they like until the final portfolio.
- Workshop comes from creative writing. Most Fridays are workshop days, and groups choose their method: the Iowa model, Peter Elbow's teacherless writing class, or Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process.
- Literacy is personal. Disagreement is welcome when it's respectful, because these topics hit close to home.