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WINTER 2009

- Taught two sections of ENG 101: College Rhetoric

- Taught one section of ENG 200: Advanced Rhetoric

FALL 2008

- Taught two sections of ENG 100: College Rhetoric I
This semester was significant. After a few years of experimenting with different assignments, I finally hit on a sequence of assignments that I felt the students learned a lot from and I was very comfortable with. The first half of the semester was devoted to a "LIteracy Autobiography" where the students dug deep into their lives to discover their successes and failures, their strengths and weaknesses, and their loves and hates when it came to reading and writing. This assigment, because it was personal and required no outside sources, allowed us to spend a lot of time focusing on some basics like using examples, commas, solid paragraphs and the like. They also had ample time to revise as I would read their drafts, comment on them, and give them more time to revise again. In addition, this kind of ontological assignment helped students in this "basic writers" class understand why they were there and how to improve.

The second assignment was a synthesis paper where students wee required to read at least three articles, read and annotate them, and be ready to write a thesis-driven response on the topic. This assignment allowed us to focus on reading carefully,plagiarism, annotation, summary, and paraphrasing.

These two assignments gave these students a solid college writing experience, introductions to models of good writing, a chance to understand and practice good writing.

- Taught one section of ENG 200: Advanced Rhetoric

WINTER 2008

- Taught two sections of ENG 101: College Rhetoric II

- Taught one section of ENG 200: Advanced Rhetoric

FALL 2007
- Redesigned and taught three sections of ENG 100: College Rhetoric I
I redesigned and taught three sections of English 100 at Alma College where we focused on basic writing skills, basic rhetorical concepts, and basic research techniques. The first half of the semester, students wrote several responses to articles and journaled every day about every aspect of their writing process as we worked through five basic criteria for writing: content, purpose, support, organization, and composition (for more detail, see my master rubric). The second half of the semester, students designed multigenre research projects collaboratively as we learned about various genres, voice and tone, and audience.

WINTER 2007
- Taught two sections of ENG 101: College Rhetoric II
Students wrote several papers ranging in scope from opinion papers to extended research. This semester I added a unit on visual rhetoric, which was received with great enthusiasm and creativity as students worked to turn their research papers into a visual argument. The results ranged from PowerPoint presentations to comic strips to videotaped commercials.

- Designed and taught ENG 133: Intro to Literary Analysis
I designed and taught one section of literary analysis, an introductory course of mostly students who need a humanities credit and very few who are English majors. Students wrote several papers, some as research of literary analyses and some as analysis of their own, as we focused on some of the basic literary theories like deconstruction, formalism, and feminist/gender theory.

FALL 2006

- Designed and taught ENG  100: College Rhetoric I Syllabus | Sample Unit
I designed taught two sections of English 100 at Alma College where we focused on basic writing skills, basic rhetorical concepts, and basic research techniques. The first half of the semester, students wrote a "guided" research paper, walking through all parts of writing and research together, with special emphasis on dealing with students' concerns about their writing, especially grammatical and punctuational concerns. The second half of the semester, students designed multigenre research projects collaboratively as we learned about various genres, voice and tone, and audience.

- Designed and taught new course: ENG 210: Teaching Writing
This course began as a request from those who worked as writing center tutors and from those who were going into teaching English and felt unprepared to teach writing. The course was divided into five units: theory, creating assignments, assessment and rubrics, responding and conferencing, and grammar. Within these five units, we covered everything from plagiarism to comma splices.

SUMMER 2006
- Designed and taught an independent study for ENG 100: College Rhetoric I
Over a 7 week period in the summer, I worked with an international student who had been in my English 100 course in the fall of 2005 and had struggled considerably, subsequently failing English 101 in the winter 2006 semester. In order to further his ability to write and speak in English, we went through various writing assignments, working repeatedly on drafts to identify specific language problems and his understanding of standard English conventions.

WINTER 2006
- Redesigned and taught ENG 101: College Rhetoric II Syllabus | Sample Unit
The redesigning of this course involved taking what I had taught at CMU before and making it fit the Alma College curriculum and requirements. First, this meant condensing two semesters of writing into one, as CMU requires two and Alma one. Second, this meant shifting focus toward a more rhetorically based course of study and using a new textbook. Students wrote several papers ranging in scope from opinion papers to extended research.

- Designed and taught ENG 190: Creative Writing Syllabus | Drafts Handout
I designed and taught one section of creative writing. Students were graded by portfolios, one at midterm and one at finals, and attempted all four genres. All students were required to submit their writing for publication in the campus creative writing journal and participate in the subsequent reading upon publication (nine of my students were published!).

- Designed and taught ENG 133: Intro to Literary Analysis Syllabus | Sample Unit
I designed and taught on section of literary analysis, an introductory course of mostly students who need a humanities credit and very few who are English majors. Students wrote several papers, some as research of literary analyses and some as analysis of their own, as we focused on some of the basic literary theories like deconstruction, formalism, and feminist/gender theory.