Contact Information
Teaching
As an Assistant Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing I have had the opportunity to teach the standard introductory course as well as design my own courses that focus on writing and rhetoric. My goal in designing these courses is to improve the cultural literacy of my students while challenging them to reflect on the process of writing both at the university and in society at large.
An example of this is the documentary project from my Spring 2008 Rhetoric of the Body course, which required students to compose multimedia arguments in place of the unit essay. You can see an example of student work here:
This project was one of the winners of the Slatin Memorial MEME Award. You can read more about the project and the specifics of the assignment prompt here.
You can review other courses here and find a complete teaching statement here
Fall 2006 and Spring 2007
- Rhetoric 306: Rhetoric and Writing
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Rhetoric and Writing is a required course for all students at the University of Texas. The curriculum is standard, and consists of three units that move students from understanding and identifying arguments in their basic building blocks (mapping claims and support) to analysis of the rhetorical strategies at play in a certain argument (text and context) to producing his or her own argument in a current, socially relevant discussion (advocacy). Students in RHE 306 also participate in the First Year Forum by reading a shared text (for 2006-2007 that text was Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture), discussing the text in class, and attending related lectures or events.
Summer 2007 and Spring 2009
- Rhetoric 309s: Critical Thinking and Persuasive Writing
- The Idea of the University
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RHE 309s is a course that emphasizes the understanding of and participation in public texts. With this in mind, I designed the course around Cardinal Newman's nineteenth-century treatise The Idea of a University. Students were encouraged to investigate how a university produces arguments about its identity and that of its student body using a variety of texts including websites, maps, printed promotional material, music, fiction, and visual art. Students followed individual university-related controversies and ended the semester advocating a position in these controversies that depended on their own definitional arguments answering the opening question for the course: What is a university?
You can see an example of the student newspapers this class produced here.
Fall 2007 and Spring 2008, Summer 2009
- Rhetoric 309K: Rhetoric of the Body
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This course is a study of the ways bodies have been argued on, with, and about in regards to understandings of identity, both communal and individual. The class investigates the rhetorical strategies behind such representations: how these arguments might buffer regimes of power, how they might be taken up in defiance as a mode of self-determination, and even how an expanding idea of corporeal limits might change the way we think about the body.
Fall (46040)
Spring (45030)
Summer 2009 (87215)
Fall 2008
- E398T: Supervised Teaching
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This course is a graduate pedagogy course required for all new Rhetoric 306 Instructors in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. As an Assistant Director in the Department, I co-taught this course with Professor Diane Davis. The course addressed pedagogical theory as well as specific classroom issues.
This year, the instructors will teach a controversy curriculum centered on the 2008-2009 First Year Forum book, Michael Lewis's The Blind Side, which I nominated in committee the previous year. The First Year Forum book is a shared text among all 306 classes and should provide a constellation of issues to discuss in class or interrogate through assignments.