Summer 2021 English Course Descriptions
4-Week Session, May 17-June 12
English 3001 Section 600 CRN 60185
Tim Engles
Advanced Composition Online
This course will improve your writing skills as you gather your forces toward a career in a professional work environment. Nearly all professional fields include more writing tasks than those entering them usually realize, and the quality of a worker's writing greatly affects interactions with colleagues and supervisors. In addition to getting your skills up to speed for specific forms of professional writing, this course will help you anticipate key features of your future workplace, including those related to race, class, gender, and sexuality.
English 3001 Section 601 CRN 60194
Donna Binns
Advanced Composition Online
ENG 3001: Advanced Composition centers on advanced applications of the principles of writing analyses and arguments. This course offers opportunities to explore a variety of research sources and genres of writing. Attention will be given to analyzing writing situations, including the purpose for writing, assumed audiences, and appropriate styles and tones. Active participation in online class activities is required. In addition to major writing projects, homework assignments will consist of analytic reading responses and pieces of writing that contribute to larger writing-projects-in-progress. This course will include online posts in which students will exchange ideas about course readings, complete exercises, and provide feedback through peer responses by assigned deadlines.
Course Objectives (Connections to University Learning Objectives in Parentheses):
- Understand writing as a process that includes critical reading, research, evaluation of sources, synthesis, drafting, feedback, revision, and editing (writing and critical reading; critical thinking).
- Develop an analytic and reflective understanding of rhetorical context, purpose, and audience (writing and critical reading; critical thinking; speaking and listening).
- Develop strategies for reading and producing texts in a variety of modes, media and genre, with a particular focus on argumentation and its function in specific fields or disciplines (writing and critical reading; speaking and listening).
- Analyze the content and features of discipline-specific genre and scholarship (writing and critical reading; critical thinking).
- Understand the purposes and correct application of discipline-specific citation systems; integrate and document sources of ideas and information (writing and critical reading).
- Explore and consider a variety of perspectives on a topic in a field of interest. Establish and defend an argument (writing and critical reading; critical thinking).
- Share writing and give/receive feedback with classmates. Read carefully and critically, both your writing and the writing of others (writing and critical reading).
- Apply knowledge and skills to new and changing contexts within and beyond the classroom (responsible citizenship).
4-Week B Session, June 14-July 10
English 5585 Section 600 CRN 60193
Robin Murray
Writing Project for Teachers Online
Based on National Writing Project principles, this workshop focuses on the theory and practice of teaching writing across the disciplines in K-16 schools and provides K-16 teachers across the curriculum with opportunities to experience and apply researched composition pedagogies for use in their own classrooms and in a wider professional community.
A separate application is required to enroll in this class.
6-Week Session, June 14-July 24
English 3005 Section 600 CRN 60189
Terri Fredrick
Technical Communication Online
Technical Communication Online involves instruction and practice in technical communication and creating documents used in professional settings. The focus is on communicating complex information to specialized and non-specialized audiences. Students will complete case-based and/or client-based projects in multiple genres and media. The course will also address online communication, ethical communication, document design, intercultural/global communication, collaboration, accessibility, and document presentation.
English 4761 Section 600 CRN 60368
Colleen Abel
Advanced Nonfiction Writing Online
We all have a story to tell: This advanced course will provide students with an in-depth look of the styles and techniques of contemporary creative nonfiction in the service of helping develop their unique voice and style. We will read memoirs and essay collections to break down their structures and techniques, and students will workshop and revise their own writing in the service of transforming life into art.
English 4906 Section 600 CRN 60190
Melissa Ames
Issues in Teaching English--Teaching Popular Culture & Media Literacy in the ELA Classroom Online
In the post-truth era where alternative facts and echo chambers abound and screen saturation finds people awash in social media influencers and clickbait, how can our lessons on close reading, critical thinking, and ethical writing practices extend beyond the walls of the classroom? English Language Arts instruction has long incorporated a range of “texts.” This course will focus primarily on the ways in which popular culture can be featured in ELA curricula in order to teach students to be critical consumers of media. This course will explore pedagogical debates and best practices for studying a range of media (film, television, music) and the ways in which popular culture artifacts can be employed to further social justice and civic literacy goals. Course participants will develop instructional strategies for teaching visual literacy skills, considering how to craft lessons that feature graphic narratives and digital texts (e.g. advertisements, political cartoons, memes, blogs) – both as the primary focus of instructional units and as supplemental texts partnered with canonical literature. Course assignments may include any of the following: reading responses, pedagogical research, multimodal presentations, teaching demonstrations, and instructional materials. Students will have the opportunity to customize the final course project to align with their professional development goals.
English 5011 Section 600 CRN 60192
Tim Taylor
Studies in Composition and Rhetoric--Writing Instruction & Grammar: Searching for Practical Solutions Online
One of the most famous statements about grammar and writing instruction is Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Shoer’s conclusion in Research in Written Composition (1963) that “the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even harmful effect on the improvement in writing” (37-38). To some composition instructors, that statement acts as a threat to their belief systems. To other writing teachers, that conclusion validates their experiences. To yet other writing instructors, they are conflicted and confused. What’s a writing teacher to do?
In an attempt to answer to that question, this graduate seminar will explore the research about grammar and the teaching of writing. We will discuss practical solutions for helping students learn and implement grammatical principles to improve their writing.
English 5061B Section 600 CRN 60191
Melissa Caldwell
Special Topics in Literature and Literary Theory--Reading and Writing the Iraq War Online
“There were ugly moments and there were hopeful ones, and they made me wonder not only what the Americans were doing to Iraq, but what Iraq was doing to the Americans.” –Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
Among the most recent of U.S.-led armed conflicts, the Iraq War (2003-2011) gives us the opportunity to examine the narratives of war in the 21st century. In this brief 6-week course, we will read fiction and non-fiction accounts of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. We will consider both American and Iraqi perspectives in order to get a composite picture of the experiences of many of the people affected by this war. Course texts will draw from a number of genres, including novels, short stories, graphic novels, blogs, journalistic accounts, and film. In addition to making us aware of the current position of the U.S. in the modern global world, the ethical and practical repercussions of nation building, the importance of cultural bias in global decision making, and the re-emergence of nationalism in the U.S., these narratives also allow for an exploration of the rhetorics of masculinity, the ethics of reading, writing, and teaching trauma, the importance of language and media in shaping our attitude towards and our understanding of war, and the evolution of war literature in the 21st century.
The course project will give participants the freedom to tailor the class to fit their academic and professional goals regardless of concentration within the MA. Participants will meet with me early on in the course in order to define goals and establish a plan for a meaningful project.
8-Week Session, June 1-July 24
English 4275 Section 001 CRN 60475
Terri Fredrick
Internship in Professional Writing Arranged
Students must meet with the Internship Coordinator (Dr. Fredrick) to arrange an internship placement before registering for ENG 4275.
A community-based experience featuring practical application of skills developed in the English curriculum, the Internship is open to any student who has taken ENG 2760 or ENG 3005. To the extent possible, placement is matched to career goals with the expectation that students might approach graduation and the job search with writing/editing portfolios to show potential employers. Recent English interns have worked as writers or editors for nonprofit organizations, small businesses, corporations, libraries, local government offices.
English 4275 is a three-hour course offered on a credit/no credit basis. In addition to work created as part of the internship, students will engage in reflective writing about the internship and organizational culture. The coordinator and site-supervisors cooperate in evaluation. Students who have taken English 4275 previously may repeat it again as an elective; students who repeat the course will be placed at a different internship site.
English 4904 Section 600 CRN 60186
Bobby Martinez
Studies in Film--"Decay" in Modern Society Online
In this course, students will explore the ways in which we understand film as a tool for examining cultural and social decay. Through a study of films from around the world, we will consider how directors characterize "decay" in a variety of guises: from the problem of evil, to racist and gendered violence, to fights over social justice, to urban disaffection and technological alienation. We will think critically about how cinema magnifies the erosion of society, and what possible remedies it has to offer.
English 5002 Section 600 CRN 60187
Christopher Wixson
Studies in Renaissance Literature--Shakespeare: Ecology and Infection Online
“Sickness is catching: O were favour so.” ---A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare wrote at a time in many ways similar to our own. Cast in the shadow of the aggressive spread of bubonic plague through London and often employing the terms of contagious epidemic, his plays interrogate ideologies of social distancing according to gender, race, sexuality, social class, and species. In this course, we will closely read five plays by Shakespeare, most of which often appear in high school classrooms and all of which were written during periods of lockdown or performed soon after the reopening of the public theatres. Our “lab sessions” will put them in dialogue with period texts, literary scholarship, and even a contemporary play (Toni Morrison’s brilliant Desdemona). The course’s subtitle makes clear our interpretive lenses. The word “ecology” is derived from the Greek words for “house” and “study” and denotes networks of relations. The concept of “infection” refers to the presence of various contaminants within such systems. Broadly concerning themselves with (as Hamlet puts it) “something rotten in the state,” Shakespeare’s plays depict how outbreaks of all kinds in our relationships to our natural and social environments, our dealings with one another, and our understandings of ourselves can cut either way --- towards tyranny and tragedy or towards reform and rebirth. The ways in which the plays stage the friction between contagion and containment provide us with vocabularies and contexts to map our own contemporary landscapes. As such, Ben Jonson’s epitaph has proven prophetic in that Shakespeare --- “not of an age but for all time” --- is alive and well in the 21st century.
English 5960 Section 001 CRN to be determined
Terri Fredrick
Professional Writing Internship Arranged
Students must meet with the Internship Coordinator (Dr. Fredrick) to arrange an internship placement before registering for ENG 5960.
A community-based experience featuring practical application of skills developed in the English curriculum, to the extent possible, placement is matched to career goals with the expectation that students might approach graduation and the job search with writing/editing portfolios to show potential employers. Recent English interns have worked as writers or editors for nonprofit organization, small businesses, corporations, libraries, and local government offices.
English 5960 is a three-hour course offered on a credit/no credit basis. Internship work is part time (an average of 10 hours per week over a 15-week semester) and can be completed while enrolled in other courses and/or while holding a graduate assistantship. In addition to work created as part of the internship, students will engage in reflective writing about the internship and organizational culture. The coordinator and site-supervisors cooperate in evaluation.
Notes:
ENG 1002G is a prerequisite for 2000-level and above courses.
