I’ve had the opportunity to teach a range of courses in media studies, public and professional writing, and composition. As a teacher, I aim to help students understand how cultural artifacts move and shape the world – and how students, as thinkers and makers, might move and shape the world themselves. My pedagogy brings together production and analysis: even in my most ‘traditional’ classes, hands-on activities supplement class discussion and analytical writing. Students create set diagrams, sound effects, data visualizations, graph paper games, and smart phone videos as a way to cultivate tactile, embodied relationships with their objects of study. Since I ask students to try out forms of reading, writing, and making that are new to them, each major assignment begins with a smaller, exploratory one. Below, you’ll find descriptions of courses I’ve taught and links to materials.
COMPOSING DIGITAL MEDIA, ENGCMP 610
A mid-level, writing-intensive course introducing students to theories, tools, and practices for composing across media. Students produce individual websites, environmental sound projects, and captions and audio descriptions for video content. They also compose alphabetic texts geared toward online environments and design a transmedia campaign intervening into a local issue of interest. Through this work, students gain experience with HTML, CSS, Adobe Creative Cloud and its open source alternatives.
Fall 2018
Course Website | Syllabus | Assignments
Spring 2018
Course Website | Syllabus | Assignments
Spring 2016
Course Website | Syllabus | Assignments
NARRATIVE AND TECHNOLOGY, ENGLIT 399
An interdisciplinary, writing-intensive literature course exploring the relationship between emerging technologies and practices of storytelling. Through encounters with novels, comics, interactive fiction, and video games, students consider how technology shapes stories (and how stories shape technology). Students complete a variety of writing assignments, including a data-driven narrative analysis, a transmedia adaptation of an existing narrative, and a group spatial storytelling project.
Syllabus | Assignments
FILM GENRES, ENGFLM 532
A writing-intensive film course exploring the origin and evolution of media genres. Content-based units cover science fiction, romantic comedy, musicals, and spy movies. Over the course of the semester, students research and become expert in a genre of their choosing, engaging it through alphabetic writing assignments and production experiments. Final projects have included video essays on gangster movies and the figure of the zombie, an original science fiction short, and an analytic essay on horror-comedy that won a departmental writing award.
FILM DIRECTORS, ENGFLM 1470
An upper-level elective focusing on a single filmmaker. This course centers on Joss Whedon and considers media authorship in relationship to his work as a screenwriter, showrunner, and film director. It also takes up complications to the model of director-as-auteur, including franchise branding and participatory fan culture.
INTRODUCTION TO FILM, ENGFLM 400
An introductory, lecture-based course emphasizing the study of film as art, culture, and industry. This class pays particular attention to film’s intersections with lived human experience, including race, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability. Students lead discussion during one class session and complete an annotated bibliography and paper (or equivalent production project) on a film of their choosing.
SEMINAR IN COMPOSITION, ENGCMP 200 & 205
Introductory course in college writing required for all incoming freshmen. This course emphasizes critical inquiry and revision, and asks students to compose in experimental and multimodal forms in addition to the traditional essay. I’ve taught two significantly different versions of first year writing: one centered on cultural constructions of gender, and a second on the concept of taste that is based around a series of media screenings.