EN101, 102, and 103

COURSE DESCRIPTION

English Composition, taken either as a single course (103) or as a sequence (101 & 102), teaches students that writing requires understanding diverse perspectives and expectations, both the writer’s and the readers’. Throughout these courses, students learn how to understand the expectations of audience and writing conventions of various genres of writing, including memoir, descriptive, informative, and argumentative essays. Further, they learn how these expectations press writers to use various means of persuasion or rhetorical appeals to effectively communicate their purpose for writing.

English Composition teaches students the work of analysis, how to approach various modes of communication–text and other media, and it challenges students to think beyond binary understandings of various topics. Through research, students additionally learn to use various modalities to approach familiar topics through new lenses such as disability as a critical modality. These courses introduce students to some of the strategies, tools, and resources necessary to becoming successful communicators in a range of academic, professional, and public settings. Students in my writing courses learn not only to think carefully through writing, but also to reflect critically about writing by engaging a variety of discursive forms, from the academic essay to opinion pieces, from research essays to remixes–assignments designed to help students learn the recursiveness of the writing process from invention through revision.

Focusing on the connections between place and identity, students in EN101 engage with a variety of texts, examining how writers use written language in print and digital media for self-expression and for social interaction.  Students in EN101 explore the self-reflective aspect of writing through memoir and position papers, and they expand their understanding of rhetorical strategies through rhetorical analysis.

Students in EN102 and EN103 explicitly explore their collective knowledge through collaborative activities, and engage with identity, illness, and disability as critical modalities that open well-worn topics ranging from inflation to reproductive health to re-consideration. Students’ own interests fuel their research, which is enhanced by visits to the W. S. Hoole Special Collections, where students examine documents from the Bryce Hospital, archival copies of the The Crimson White, and representations of diverse embodiments in the extensive collection of comic books housed in the archive.

In the past, I have incorporated texts that represent diverse perspectives, including essays from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/ La Frontera, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “In Other Words,” Brent Staples “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space,” and graphic memoirs such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis. More recent students have read creative essays such as disability scholar Ellen Samuels’s “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” and excerpts from collections such as Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility.

Each of my English Composition courses culminates in a multi-modal project that brings together all of the rhetorical strategies the students have learned over the course of the semester. For example, in EN101, students turn their memoir essay into a multimedia piece about their connection to identity and place; EN102 and 103 students re-apply the research they have done to a new audience and new medium in the remix project. The work of revising their writing to new modes of meaning-making  challenges students to more explicitly recognize the work of revision and the process of writing for every writer. This helps students to begin to see themselves as writers with a call to write of their own.