Summer 2020 English Course Descriptions
4-Week Session, May 18-June 12
English 3001 Section 600 CRN 60150
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.
4-Week B Session, June 15-July 10
English 5585 Section 600 CRN 60151
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.
English 5585 Section 601 CRN 60152
Donna Binns
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 B Session, June 15-July 24
English 3001 Section 601 CRN 60491
Angela Vietto
Advanced Composition Online
Advanced study and practice of writing in public, professional, and discipline-specific genres.
English 3005 Section 600 CRN 60154
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.
8-Week Session, June 1-July 24
English 4275 Section 001 CRN 60160
Terri Fredrick
Internship in Professional Writing
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 four-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 4761 Section 600 CRN 60156
Daiva Markelis
Advanced Nonfiction Writing Online
In this class students will develop a repertoire of artistic strategies in the writing of literary nonfiction prose. Students will deepen their understanding of the subgenres of creative nonfiction, including memoir, the personal essay, literary journalism (including travel, nature, and sports writing), and hybrid forms such as the lyric essay through short readings and discussion. Four essays of varying lengths will be required.
English 4906 Section 600 CRN 60157
Melissa Caldwell
Issues in Teaching English--Teaching Early Literary Texts in the Age of Texting Online
We live in a one-click culture where efficiency and ease of use are qualities we have come to expect from most of the media we consume—including literary texts. And yet texts that pre-date the 20thcentury can be especially difficult to navigate for the 21st-century student and can hardly be called “user friendly.” This 8-week summer course is designed for teachers or pre-service teachers who are interested in thinking about how we teach “the classics” in effective and meaningful ways for our students. The course will largely be constructed as a workshop in which students work on developing or revamping their teaching of early texts. Participants in the course will be able to choose a primary text they want to focus on (e.g., The Odyssey, one of Shakespeare’s plays, The Scarlet Letter, or another appropriate text) while they craft instructional materials and learn new strategies and pedagogical approaches that increase student engagement and learning. Every week we will grapple with a new critical issue concerning questions of accessibility, culturally relevant pedagogy, literacy, periodization, textual pairings, the value of difficulty, adaptation, and more.
English 5011 Section 600 CRN 60159
Tim Taylor
Studies in Composition and Rhetoric--Believing and Doubting the Essay Online
In this online graduate seminar, we will play an extended version of Peter Elbow’s believing and doubting game. First, we’ll immerse ourselves in the common prose-model approach of reading essays to learn how to write essays in composition classes. We will read belletristic essays spanning from Seneca to Solnit, from Twain to Berry, from Montaigne to Mencken. And then we will think about how to best implement using essay models to have students “live the examined life” through writing their own essays.
Partway through the course we’ll explore some significant readings that will make us interrogate and question the usefulness of reading and writing essays. We’ll consider the point Erika Lindemann made decades ago in A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers: “Despite the long tradition of using essays to teach writing, we ought to question their purpose” (126). Or to put it bluntly, we will basically take this attitude: “Screw the essay.”
During the latter part of the course, we will think about other genres—creative, professional, multimodal, hybrid—that can be used in the composition courses at the middle school, high school, and college levels. To channel George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic, the aim of this section of the course is to make the composition classroom “bring the funk.” We’ll consider alternative readings and assignments beyond the traditional essay or academic paper.
Course requirements include daily discussion board posts in response to readings, a belletristic essay writing project, a non-essay writing project, and pedagogy-based writing project (writing assignment paired with a unit plan).
English 5061B Section 600 CRN 60158
Bobby Martinez
Special Topics in Literature and Literary Theory--New Directions in Latin American Literature and Film Online
ENG 5061B is a "special topics course in language and literature not ordinarily treated in standard courses. Topics vary each semester.” In this iteration of the course, we will explore a variety of exciting literature often obscured by the shadows of the United States/North America, Britain, and Western Europe. We will study contemporary Latin American literature and film, including some earlier “modern” works that helped to give rise to this genre (i.e., mid-to-late twentieth century). Our course will explore how literary and cinematic (and some music!) narratives broaden our understanding of the complicated ways in which identity—both personal and national—have developed across Latin America, Mexico, and for Latinx peoples in the United States during the late-twentieth century and early twenty-first century. In particular, we will consider the innovative strategies that Latin American and Latinx writers bring to the novel and cinema to address problems of existence, political strife, and nationhood—from the excitingly bizarre literary experiments of “magic realism” to the current re-invigoration of gritty social realism and crime/mystery fiction. These literary experiments illustrate a new generation of global voices from South and Central America, the Caribbean, and Latinx writers in the U.S. responding to everything from life in the USA, to the brutal legacy of political dictatorships in South and Central America, to the ongoing culture of drug cartel violence.
Central to all these explorations will be a set of thematic questions: How do these writers imagine new conceptions of the self/identity in Latin American/Hispanic/Latinx conceptions of art? How are personal issues of love, romance, and family altered? And most importantly, just what is “History,” and how do narratives and experiences of the past affect us?
This course will be taught online and is writing intensive. Projects may include short analysis papers, scholarly summary papers, a research term paper or project geared towards teaching in the high school classroom, several online forum posts, and active class discussion via D2L Forum. This course actively aims to prepare students to meet EIU’s university learning goals of critical thinking, writing and critical reading, speaking and listening, quantitative reasoning, and responsible citizenship.
English 5960 Section 001 CRN 60161
Terri Fredrick
Internship in Professional Writing
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.
