👨🏻🏫 Pedagogy
My pedagogy of writing and rhetoric compiles my wide-ranging experiences and training across multiple but interrelated disciplines within writing and rhetoric studies and my professional work. I also approach teaching in higher education as a foster care alum who had a tenuous relationship to consistent enrollment at my local community college. I love talking teaching and pedagogy, especially using technology in daily activities and projects. If you ever want to chat about these topics, please reach out. Below, you'll find my current courses and teaching materials. I'm always down to talk about any of these materials, too!
If you want a deeper dive into my pedagogy, check out my teaching philosophy.
I Am Currently Teaching...
📝️ Current Theories & Applications of Writing
Upper-level undergraduate course
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Building on historical approaches in composition and rhetorical theories, this activity-based class engages students in a variety of tasks that help them enact the main principles of the discipline. Learning how theories in writing are processes in the making, students use theories to interrogate writing challenges, adapt theories when new tasks present, and develop flexible approaches to communicating in traditional and emerging contexts.
🎙️ Reading, Writing, Archiving Charlotte
Upper-level undergraduate course
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Researchers who work with the public have a particular need to be comfortable with digital tools. Using the City of Charlotte as its subject, this course offers students a basic grounding in the technological skills needed to conduct online historical research and to present the results online, emphasizing how the internet changes the relationship between researchers and their audience, as well as shapes the kinds of texts we circulate and the stories they tell.
Other Classes I've Taught Include...
🌐 Information Literacy & Digital Composing
Upper-level undergraduate course
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This course introduces students to key issues and conversations that impact our information-driven and platform-based world. Over the course of the semester, students will unpack what a platform is, how tech companies occlude or hide their intentions amid user policies and hidden agendas, how mis/disinformation circulate online via everyday people and bad actors, and how we can better facilitate informed decisions among internet users. By looking at how the very real issues of the world circulate as information online, students will attune themselves to combatting these issues and resolving them in their own discrete compositional methods.
🗣️ Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (UNCC)
Upper-level undergraduate course
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In this class, students review the conditions by which how knowledge is made in writing and rhetoric in an effort to attune themselves to the conversational flow of the discipline, as well as to participate in rhetorical criticism and craft. Since the field first developed in the mid-twentieth century, writing and rhetoric has used rhetorical theory derived from theories of history, culture, and politics (to name a few) to develop underlying foundations for the work in the field. As such, a primary goal of the course is to familiarize students with some of the contemporary conversations at the fore of this triptych that highlight current debates and trends related to writing and rhetoric studies that use European and Whitestream theories as a point of departure, centering Othered discourses. The readings in this course also focus on theory and rhetorics from the mid-20th century through the early 21st century, with a focus on the last twenty-five years.
⛑️ Rhetorical Health / Digital Medicine (UNCC)
Upper-level undergraduate course
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How do marginalized communities keep themselves safe and healthy? In this course, students work toward answering this and other questions to refresh their thinking about the technologies that relate to their and others’ health, the cultural dimensions of what “healthy” really means, and some of the most pressing issues we face today amid public health crises, climate change, and a changing society. Over the semester, students use the affordances of rhetorical theories of health and technology, analyzing key medical documents, practices, and communication practices, and designed online health information, patient education materials (such as decision aids and white papers), public health and pharmaceutical ads on social media sites, and other projects aimed at mental health. Students are also encouraged to find their commitments to their communities, organizations, or interests and to center them within this course.
🎨️ Writing & Multimodality (MSU)
Upper-level undergraduate course
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A core course in MSU’s Professional and Public Writing (P2W) program, this course centers on the rhetorical and cultural dimensions of composing in digital spaces, the study of and practice of rhetorical affordances and expectations of different writing spaces, and routine practice in messaging across contexts and composing with multiple technologies. This course builds off of—and continues to develop—the foundational rhetorical concepts students learn and hone in prior course, such as rhetorical situation, rhetorical analysis, audience awareness, collaboration, and rhetorical rationale for the choices they make upon composing a text. This course takes that work a step further by offering a more tailored focus on the complex rhetorical and cultural dimensions of multimodal composing.
✍️ First-Year Writing (MSU / UNCC)
Upper-level undergraduate course
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In this course, students learn to analyze and to compose various texts, using a range of technologies, as well as adapting language and style for particular audiences, contexts, and purposes. Throughout the semester, they develop flexible composing strategies, locate and evaluate primary and secondary research, deepen engagement with source material, and wrangle numerous means of strengthening claims and logical arguments via composing.