My teaching prioritizes active learning strategies as I strive to make course content relevant to students' everyday lives.
Working as a writing center tutor and facilitating a variety of writing workshops has allowed me to teach beyond the traditional classroom setting.
This course takes a rhetorical approach to understanding video as a method for public storytelling, especially as it permeates popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Focusing on a range of video formats and genres, including short-form and long-form content, vlogs, video essays, and more, we examine the rhetorical strategies employed by social media users to tell stories for particular audiences and purposes. Moreover, students complicate their analyses by investigating how these rhetorical tactics get repurposed, or “remixed,” for unique contexts, especially by underrepresented creators. Equally important to their analysis, students also apply the rhetorical strategies they have learned to create original videos to tell stories of their own, accompanied by written rationales to explain their rhetorical moves. *This class does not require any public sharing online or otherwise*
Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are not just apps for viewers’ entertainment; they are venues through which ordinary people, turned “influencer,” make a living, wield great cultural capital, and well… influence us! From beauty, to sports, to food, social media influencers’ voices ring loudest in our collective understandings of nearly all cultural trends. Forbes magazine says “brands are projected to spend $15 billion on influencer marketing” this year alone. And no matter what’s being sold, whether it’s a new skin care regime or a meal plan subscription service, we can’t help but buy it. Why? Why do we willingly like, follow, and subscribe to influencers? Who “has what it takes” to be one? (And who doesn’t?) What do they tell us about ourselves and our culture? In our exploration of the role influencers play in our culture and everyday lives, this class employs visual and textual analysis techniques to better understand the rhetorical strategies influencers use that make them so successful. We examine a wide array of viral posts from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube influencers, applying critical thinkers’ frameworks to enrich our investigations. Moreover, we also practice content creation skills of our own (webpages, podcasts, video essays, etc.). The course culminates with a final project that asks students to use the skills honed throughout the semester to create a dynamic social media portfolio in an influencer niche of their choosing. *This class does not require any public sharing online or otherwise*
W171 develops skills of analytical and rhetorical thinking, reading, and writing through the lens of digital literacy. Together, these core competencies are key to your success as a university student and as a thoughtful, active participant in our digitally mediated world. But to meet that goal, we ground you in the local: anchoring this course and its aims to a critical, creative, and collaborative exploration of IU Bloomington (IUB). Meaning, you explore key elements of the IUB campus through personal connection (what is meaningful to me on campus?) and historical and socio-cultural frames (what is the history of X and what is its significance to IUB), and you do so across an assortment of digitally inflected writing practices and activities: making digital images, authoring digital essays, creating audio/video projects, and, at the core, building interactive experiences through Minecraft EDU.
This course is a first-year writing course designed for multilingual readers and writers. In this course, we develop skills of analytical thinking, reading, and writing that are key to your success as a university student. More specifically, we examine a range of texts and contexts in which language and languaging are key to the development of argumentative, academic, and analytical writing skills as well as engage with writing as a social practice within a community of fellow writers. This course is divided into 3 Units. In each Unit, you read/view and discuss texts that address language issues in society and in the personal experience of multilingual writers. Low stakes writing assignments in each unit foster new analytical skills, giving you practice using what you’ve learned in short, skill-focused papers that also serve as pre-writing for final essays. Each Unit culminates in a final essay that allows you to develop your own analytical claim about how a text works to represent social issues, compelling problems, and complex questions in everyday life. Drawing on your own personal experiences with language as well as the perspectives and concepts of other multilingual writers, we discuss the ways in which language experiences, choices, and identities inform what it means to be an analytical thinker, reader, and writer. By the end of the semester, and through your conscientious and dedicated work this semester, you will find yourself well prepared to participate in the forms of inquiry and expression that define academic discourse in ways that support multilingual perspectives.
In this course, we develop skills of analytical thinking, reading, and writing that are key to your success as a university student. To meet that goal, we examine essays, films, photographs, music videos, and a range of other cultural objects. In addition to drawing on your own personal experience, we will also consider the perspectives and concepts that other writers bring to our class themes of race and language. Through your conscientious and dedicated work this semester, you will find yourself well prepared to participate in the forms of inquiry and expression that define academic discourse.
Public speaking and listening is what we use to build our communities, our work spaces, and our public relationships with each other. You will succeed in life and career in great part from your ability to communicate with others, to understand who your audiences are and how to find common cause with them, and from your ability to respond to the communication situations you find yourself in. The communication skills you develop in this course will serve you for a lifetime. Our major assigments are not the ones you find in the mass-market public speaking course. This course is not Toastmasters (how to give a witty after-dinner toast or close the deal), and it is not slick persuasion or propaganda. You will get a thorough training in all the formal skills and techniques of public speaking, including argumentation, composition, delivery, and style, and you will learn how to distinguish between the dark arts of manipulation, deception, and snake oil, and the noble arts of eloquence and truth telling. Upon completion of this course, you will discover the power of speech to motivate, clarify, inspire, speak truth to power, expose fallacies and presumptions, and work through problems collectively. You will explore the close relationship of logic, ethics, and emotion, and come to understand speech’s role in cultivating our capacity for deliberative wisdom, our membership in community, and our humanity.