|
Teaching English 110 - Composition
I English 120 - Composition II (Spring 2005) English 275 - Introduction to Writing Studies English 320 - Practical Writing Engineering 320 - Technical Communication English 358 - Intermediate Composition English 357 - English 458/658 - Advanced Writing Workshop English 457- Electronic Communication (Spring 2006) English 755 - Composition Theory English 757 - Composition Studies English 758 - Composition and Rhetoric
|
English 458/658: Advanced Writing WorkshopLast taught: Fall 2000 Texts Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest. Ed. Mark Vinz and Thom Tammaro. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Course Pack, available in bookstore. Course Description and Objectives A writing workshop is a student-centered course–it is about helping you develop as a writer. You will all be starting this course as different kinds of writers with different experiences; the assignments are meant to help you re-enforce your strengths, extend your range, and experiment in what might be a new medium for you. This course is also about learning to be comfortable sharing your work with others: in print, orally, and electronically. We will be trying to build a supportive writing and reading community. You will read primarily non-fiction essays and experimental electronic writings as models or starting points for your own writing. More specifically, the objectives of this course are to:
Essay One: Imagining Home Vinz and Tammaro essentially gave the authors of Imagining Home an assignment: "explore the ways in which the midwestern landscape of [your] lives, past and present, have influenced [your] thinking and writing." While the landscape may not have influenced your writing to date, Vinz and Tammaro also say that they hope the essays in their book "will offer readers a starting point for exploring and discovering how the landscapes of their own homes have been a shaping influence in their lives." Using these comments as starting points, I would like you to write a non-fiction essay about your relationship to landscape(s) and/or home(s) in your life. Landscapes and homes can be settings for writing about people or issues, or they may be the focus of the essay themselves. Criteria: voice and texture (a palpable sense of place, a dominant and/or recurring image). 200 points. Essay Two: Literacy Narrative Many of the essays in Imagining Home can also be classified as "literacy narratives"–essays about how these writers came to be interested in words, books, and writing, or how they came to write about and from the place in which they live. Write an essay about how you came to take an interest in words, books, and/or writing, or what you hope to do with the words you plan to write. These essays can range from developmental (first book to most recent) or can focus on one or two words/books/events. Criteria: voice and contact zones: identify the ways in which "becoming literate" has caused tension in your life. 200 points. Collaborative Electronic Writing Project–Hypertext and Popular Culture Genres Some of the most interesting web writing projects produced to date are collaborative sites that draw on familiar fiction genres like soap operas and mysteries. You will work in a group to study at least one web project, and then produce your own collaborative hypertext that is grounded in the conventions of one or more popular genres. Criteria: voices and webbiness–the final product should be sufficiently large to allow readers various navigation paths. 200 points. |
Research Recently published "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs." Into the Blogosphere. Ed. Laura Gurak et al. University of Minnesota, 2004. "The McLuhan Retrieval Reviewed." Kairos 9.1, 2004. In-progress "Changing the Ground of Graduate Education: Wireless Laptops Bring Stability rather than Mobility to Graduate Teaching Assistants." Book chapter. McLuhan for Compositionists. Book project. Other Stuff The annual Regional Studies Lecture, which I have co-ordinated since spring 2001.
|