Courses Taught at UHCL

WRIT 1301: Composition I

My Comp I courses are designed to help students see that their interests have value in university writing. The first half of the class focuses on the student as an individual, adjusting to a new academic environment. It begins with a literacy narrative, describing a prior experience with literacy and liminality. Next, students complete an interview project to explore areas of academic interest or social activity at their new university. The second half of the course turns toward more formal academic writing, using analytical tools to evaluate and participate in the world beyond students' own circles. In the information literacy group project, groups read and discuss the U.S. Constitution and then create a scripted civil discourse on a related topic of a contention. Groups apply the CRAAP test to evaluate public sources in an annotated bibliography and pre-record and/or perform their scripted discussion for the class. The final course composition returns students to liminality but asks them to reconsider "in-between" spaces using Gloria Anzaldùa's description of nepantla. Students perform a rhetorical analysis on a text (broadly-defined) of their choosing. The text must depict a tierra entre medio (middle ground), in which multiple perspectives come together. The course concludes with a reflection portfolio that students create using Google Sites. Their portfolio reflects on the students mastery of our focal writing skills, provides feedback on my course design, and matches our coursework to the outcomes for First-Year Composition in the WPA Outcomes Statement. Each assignment is intended to help students become ethical, engaged, responsible, thoughtful citizens. See an example of the Information Literacy Group Presentation on the "Proud Teacher" page.

WRIT 3304: Writing for Education (online, f2f)

I created the Writing for Education course in 2015 in consultation with faculty from the College of Education. This upper-division course assists students in acquiring advanced levels of academic literacy in Education-specific disciplines. The course's five modules expose education students to practical expectations for "on-the-job" (K12) writing as well as formal conventions for academic researching, presenting, and composing. In the first half of the course, students create/revise a resume and a teaching philosophy statement, and they interview a professional in their sub-discipline. The shift to academic essays uses simulated conference presentations as a platform for student-guided inquiry. I explain and consistently use Elliot Aronson's jigsaw teaching strategy. Once students understand the racial equality origin of this pedagogical approach, they generally engage actively in the peer-interdependence it requires, and many students voice plans to use this technique in their own classes. For spring 2020, I am developing the first online version of WRIT 3304.

WRIT 3307: Advanced Writing (online, f2f, hybrid)

In many ways, Advanced Writing is the most complicated class to teach among our required writing courses. It satisfies the upper-level writing requirement for students in the fields of education, the humanities, and the social sciences. Additionally, it counts towards the Professional Writing minor. Students must learn their disciplinary writing style, which means that the faculty member teaches research methodologies for APA, MLA, and Chicago Manual Style in the same class and within the same assignment. Recent transfers, for whom this is their first class, are in the same sections as graduating seniors, for whom this is their last. Because of its diversity of student interests and motivations, Advanced Writing is, at once, my most favorite and most challenging course to teach. I tackle these complexities by assigning projects that are general enough to let students self-select their topics. I scaffold the course according to Bloom's revised taxonomy, beginning with summary and analysis, shifting to evaluative Rogerian argument, and finishing with a collaborative IMRAD project and a final CFP essay, both of which introduce students to conference presentations. This is a fast-paced and demanding class. Online students are required to meet in our synchronous web-space once a week, and they participate in a synchronous group presentation. It is boot camp for writing-in-the-disciplines, and I love it. I have taught this course 36 times since beginning at UHCL as a Lecturer in 2011. To date, 7 full-time faculty and adjuncts have adopted my WRIT 3307 Blackboard shell. An example of the WRIT 3307 Portfolio is on the "Proud-Teacher Highlights" page.

WRIT 3312: Business Writing

Focusing on the theory and practices of business communications, students in this course prepare emails, resumes and cover letters, policy statements, reports, and proposal. Usually, I coordinate mock interviews with UHCL's Career Services. I also solicit industry volunteers from the Houston-Galveston community to review students' resumes and cover letters and provide professional feedback directly to the students.

WRIT 5138: Multimodal Composition Theory (5-week hybrid)

This graduate course is a detailed study of the theory and methods for composing multimedia texts. Students use online applications and available software to analyze and create mediated projects, targeted at clearly-defined audiences and with purposeful rhetorical aims. The course does not require prior experience of creating webtexts or mediated composition. The class begins with a study of contemporary theories and trends in multimodal composition. Students then compose mini-assignments, testing out, "playing" with the affordances offered by various communicative modalities. After reviewing the history of new media in Composition Studies, my 5-week summer courses focus on aurality as the focal modality. After studying and analyzing of example audio texts (soundscapes, podcasts, audio narratives, oral histories, etc.), students design and produce multimedia webtexts and publish their work in a multimedia e-portfolio. To integrate more expertise about multimodal genres, I Skype speakers into the course to present on relevant topics. For summer 2017, Dr. Maria Curtis presented her work on Moroccan soundscapes; Dr. Mary Hedengren discussed podcasting and her show Mere Rhetoric; Dr. Christina Cedillo talked with students about starting an online journal and her work as co-editor of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics; and Mr. Blaise Leleux played clips from his production series, Gen Does Games, and discussed tools for recording audio dramas.

WRIT 5939: Independent Study in Writing: Online Pedagogy

Dr. Chloe Diepenbrock, instructor of record for this independent study, connected me with Ms. Lisa Hacker. At the time, Hacker was completing her M.A. in Literature at UHCL and was interested in online teaching in higher education. Hacker became a TA for my two online sections of WRIT 3307 in spring 2013. That following summer, she presented with me at the Computers & Writing Conference, and upon completing her degree, Hacker started teaching online classes for UHCL as an adjunct. She continues to teach one to two sections of online Advanced Writing each semester.

DMST 5236: Digital Storytelling (5-week hybrid)

This course explores the theory, role, and process of storytelling from oral tradition to its digital present. It includes discussion of basic narrative design structures/conventions and of various digital media storytelling genres. Graduate students create their own linear and non-linear narratives using various stages of production including: story boarding, script writing, directing, filming, editing, and distribution. I use my background in folklore to emphasize a deep sense of why humans create and value stories and how digital communication technologies are affecting traditional ideas of narrative. Students develop an online identity that they use to narrate their processes as creative practitioners; they learn to network and critique digital projects with their community of peers. They explore a variety of digital technologies to create multimedia and interactive narrative forms. Students create mini-projects like a Twitter tale or a photo narrative, and they create a large culminating story and artist statement, often a webtext or choose-your-own-adventure narrative with branching plot-lines. Because this course is part of the Digital Media Studies master's program, student artists used the media with which they were most experienced or WYSIWYG apps I provided that students could adopt quickly. Examples of DMST 5236 mini-projects for audio-only and image-only narratives are on the "Proud-Teacher Highlights" page.

LITR 5131: Online Writing Pedagogy

This course introduces graduate students from the Humanities and the Literature MA programs to the study of theory, tools, and methods for teaching online college writing. Students analyze prominent online writing instruction (OWI) theories and consider the pedagogical challenges of content-delivery, assessment, and classroom management strategies in OWI. Since many students taking this class are earning the rhetoric and composition certificate with the intention of teaching online classes, course assignments include developing a personal teaching philosophy, participating in an active undergraduate online class, and composing a scholarly essay on a topic relevant to 21st century OWI. Two students from my fall 2018 class are now online Advanced Writing adjuncts for UHCL.

WGST 4308: Perspectives in Women's and Gender Studies

My section of "Perspectives in Women's and Gender Studies (WGST)" focuses on LGBTQ+ Theory, History, and Rhetorics. The class familiarizes students with core texts and key debates that have shaped queer theory. Course readings follow the evolution of Lesbian and Gay Studies through its early derivation from feminist theory, to its expanded inclusion of bisexual and transgender identities, to the emergence of the term “queer” as a broad framework that designates non-normative modes of knowledge, cultural practices, and political activism. Because the spring 2019 course was cross-listed with Advanced Writing, I used writing-to-learn, short (1-2 page) reading role reports, to help students prepare for weekly reading group discussions and to practice individual writing skills. The course culminated in the CFP Essay project referenced above in satisfaction of the academic research skills required for Advanced Writing. However, it was the first major project that engaged students' collaborative, creative, and composing skills. The Zine Group Project required students to create a zine, using the imperative style found in many manual print, counter-culture, feminist manifestos and punk zines of the 1970s-1990s. Student groups selected the topic for their zines, handmade the copies, and presented their work to the class. Individually, students composed a rhetorical analysis of their zine. Three student groups presented their zines at UHCL's Student Conference on Research and Creative Arts with one group earning the conference's "Outstanding Commendation" award.

Student Evaluations

Proud-Teacher Highlights