Welcome to English 810S! In this course, we'll think about how to integrate teaching writing with other literacy skills like making multimedia, reading, speaking, listening, and viewing. We will focus on composing writing and multimedia works, although it is difficult (and even undesirable), to attempt to fully separate these literacy skills and practices. 

We’ll learn about how English teachers meet the needs and interests of a richly varied population of students. We will review many English teaching standards, construct and critique teaching documents, and discuss and apply the work of master literacy teachers and theorists.  

Working collaboratively, we will examine and compare philosophies of English teaching and learning, and we will develop approaches to writing and literacy instruction. We will discuss theoretical, pedagogical, and practical ideas for teaching writing in large and small groups, engage in reading and composition exercises, produce and practice instructional activities and assessments, and evaluate teaching approaches. Successfully completing this course (along with English 892) will help you recognize and affirm literacy skills and practices, and to consider how they can help your future students write, comprehend, describe, analyze, and evaluate various texts.

*This class starts at 6:00pm on Tuesday/Thursday in Ham Smith 240. Course ends at 7:30pm. 

Fall 2024 Special Topic: Environmental Theory

How can we talk about environmental crisis? What words can we use to represent the natural world—and human interactions with it? Is it possible to describe nature without cultural projections? How can language change vision, policy, action? In this course, we will grapple with the urgent need to articulate environmental issues by reading contemporary ecocritics who are inventing vocabularies to do so, such as Rob Nixon on “slow violence” and Stacy Alaimo on “trans-corporeality.” We’ll also read 19th-21st century nature writers, poets, and fiction writers who write about different environments from different perspectives, shaped in part by race, gender, and indigeneity, from Henry David Thoreau and Mary Austin to Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, Joy Harjo, and Octavia Butler. We’ll explore ecofeminism, environmental justice, postcolonial ecology, and the concept of the Anthropocene.

Graduate students taking 897M will write a graduate-level research paper; those taking 897M for credit towards a Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies will also write such a paper and will focus their written work on women writers, ecofeminist theory, or gender and the environment.