Teaching, for me, is an act of social justice. Through assignments that move learning off the page and into the community, I help learners from all backgrounds develop the skills they need to be caring, thoughtful citizens of the global community. I have been teaching first year and intermediate composition for 9 years and have also been a Teaching Assistant for a variety of literature courses. As someone who researches multimodal texts, I have students practice all modes of communication, from writing to speaking, to listening, and even drawing. By thinking of the classroom walls as porous, both by bringing in texts from outside the course and by encouraging students to research in community spaces, I imbue students with the sense that the arts and humanities can help us see our society in new ways, providing a mirror, but also a prism that shows a different view depending on the perspective you take. In that context, they have a multitude of tools available to them, and the tools they choose to express themselves both constrain and promote their perspectives.
Below you will find a selected list of course descriptions, along with links to albums of student work. See my CV for a full list of courses I have taught. For a publication on teaching comics as a form of multimodal composition, see the abstract for “English 177: Introduction to the Graphic Novel.”
Comics and Civic Engagement
[link to course materials]
[samples of student work]
You may think comics an odd fit for serious issues, but may organizations–from the UN to the Alzheimer’s Association–and authors have begun using them to explore and educate on such topics as the refugee crisis, medical issues, and violence against women. Why have these organizations turned to the comics form to communicate with their audiences? How does comics’ alchemical combination of text and image lend itself to discussions of social problems and their solutions, particularly regarding urban development? How can you use comics to engage members of your community? Answering these questions will help you gain a better understanding of the role text and image can play in communication, and selecting what to represent via text and image when making comics will help you learn how to more effectively use the tools at your disposal in today’s multimedia landscape.
In this course, you will explore how comics become tool for civic engagement and craft your own research-based comic about a topic related to Atlanta’s underserved West Side (just 1.5 miles from campus). The course will culminate in an exhibition designed to raise awareness about the issues and assets of this community. We will be focusing on comics as a mode of inquiry and communication, so no artistic skill is required. By the end of the course, you will be able to make thoughtful decisions about how to choose the right mode of communication–speaking, writing, or images– for a particular context.
Digital Authorship
In the digital age, everyone is a writer: we tweet, email, post messages, pictures, and videos to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media sites, we create webpages or blogs or Tumblrs, and we respond to media via comments and like buttons. How does this writing help form communities and how are those communities often in tension with one another? What rhetorical moves do authors make on the Internet to capture audience attention? What are some effective ways for you to break media bubbles and reach broad audiences? In answering these questions, you will learn to be a critical consumer and powerful communicator in the digital world, which also exploring how, for better or for worse, the Internet calls into question notions of authority.
Designed as a hybrid course combining face-to-face sessions with online interactions, this course asks you to analyze digital texts, engage with theories of digital authorship, and become a digital author yourself. Assignments in the course build on one another. The postings and subsequent conversations you have with your peers on course blogs will help you develop a research topic that your will pursue through the main assignment sequence composed of 1) a case study of a moment of tension between two digital communities, 2) a research project about an issue important to one of those communities, and 3) a website with accompanying social media campaign on a selected topic. The last of these will be completed as a group project, where you will collaborate using digital tools. Along the way, you will write, revise, and reflect, developing a portfolio for each assignment.
Public Memorial
Because memorials generally employ multiple forms of communication in addressing their audiences, the theme of public memorial allows us to explore communication from a broad perspective. We will address questions such as: What counts as a memorial? What constitutes a public? How do memorials address the public? What are the most effective strategies for addressing a broad audience? and How do memorials combine different forms to communicate their messages? In exploring the answers to these questions, we will examine many kinds of memorials from local Madison memorials to the Holocaust Museum in Israel to the 9/11 memorial towers in NYC. We will consider some of the conversations surrounding both the Vietnam Memorial and the 9/11 memorial, and we will hold our own debate concerning a memorial design. The culminating project for the semester will be to design and pitch your own memorial. Over the course of the semester, we will pay close attention to the rhetorical nature of genres, and specifically writing, relevant to the idea of public memorial. Such attention will help us recognize the social dimensions and public consequences of literacy, particularly writing.