Teaching

I teach a variety of classes, including first-year writing, advanced writing, technical writing, and theory courses at the university level.

First-Year Writing

This is an introductory two-course sequence, fulfilling a general education requirement for all incoming first-year students.

In first-year writing, I primarily take a dual approach of (1) teaching concepts about writing, and (2) teaching critical analysis of digital technologies. First, he seeks to introduce students to concepts about writing that they are probably not familiar with. Here my pedagogy resembles a Writing about Writing (WaW) or Teaching for Transfer (TfT) approach, in that I focus on understanding concepts about writing that, once explored, will help them learn the skills of writing. Many of these concepts come from the open-access textbook Bad Ideas About Writing and include concepts like:

• Everyone is a writer and writing is not a natural ability. For instance, you are not just “a math person” or just “bad at writing”!
• The “five paragraph essay” taught us some useful rhetorical moves, but in college, it can really hold you back if you take it as the ultimate writing model.
• There is not just one correct way to write and speak. These assumptions are often rooted in unexamined racist, sexist, and classist assumptions what it means to be a legitimate writer.

Secondly, my first-year writing courses include a focus on thinking critically about digital technology. We examine the (un)ethical decisions tech companies make in their designs and hiring decisions, which often leave marginalized folks out of the picture (incorporating the work of Sara Wachter-Boettcher and others). I encourage my students to think about their own future careers in light of making ethical and wise decisions about how to treat people well, whether they be customers or colleagues.

Internet Culture and Information Society

This is an upper-division course (junior- and senior-level) that fulfills the advanced writing and technology and society core requirements.

This upper-division course is sort of an advanced version of my first-year writing courses. I have students reflect on certain concepts that they likely learned in their introductory writing courses, such as the importance of writing to an audience. And then I complicate it. What happens when we write to an algorithm as our audience? How does this change our impression of an audience and of what it means to be a human and a writer? This course dives deeply into the (mobile) internet’s role in changing many aspects of daily life, including personal workflow, educational systems, and social and political issues around the globe.

Engineering Communication

This is an upper-division (junior- and senior-level) course that fulfills requirements for the engineering majors, including the advanced writing requirement.

Forthcoming

Introduction to Rhetoric

This is a lower-division (first-year- and sophomore-level) course that fulfills an English major requirement and the advanced writing requirement.

Forthcoming