Writing and Great Works Programs, Baruch College, CUNY
One sunny Saturday in the spring of 2023, my beloved dog was hit by a car. The circumstances were a series of heartbreaking missteps: a friend’s chaotic house during her daughter’s birthday party, a door left open, a group of strangers who, trying to catch my disoriented dog, chased him into the street.
An Activity for a More Student-Centered Classroom and a Story of Constant Revision
Before telling the genesis story of this assignment, I want to provide a quick overview (read the full prompt here). The assignment asks students to read up on specific conventions of written English and then, in class, present on these conventions and engage their classmates with an activity about these conventions. It is designed to give students agency in exploring common writing conventions that are part of the learning outcomes of ENG 2100(T) and ENG 2150(T). The process allows students to draw on knowledge they might already have as they enter these classes, but that they should continue to develop throughout (and beyond) them. Continue reading “Engaging with Conventions and the Unconventional”
Leveraging Multimodal Projects to Enhance Metacognition in Writing Instruction
The concept of flow is abstract to someone whose English is a second language. One can recognize it, but teaching it so that others will notice flow is different. When a comment reads, “The essay does not flow very well,” what does that mean exactly? Concepts commonplace to the teaching of writing, such as flow, organization, and coherence, can be quite an enigma, especially to freshman students who perhaps only recently learned that there are more than five paragraphs in a typical essay. This article discusses using multimodality as a strategy to teach coherence. Continue reading “Picture This!”
A Lesson Plan for Rhetorical Analysis
In his 1988 article, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the English Class,” James Berlin considers the ways that society’s changing ideologies have informed composition pedagogy. In response, this lesson plan offers a series of exercises designed to help illuminate the underlying ideas that structure educational experiences. Ultimately, we hope that these four steps encourage writers to attend to the ways all cultural products are shaped by ideology, in order to strengthen rhetorical analysis and critical and analytical writing. Continue reading “Ideology and Education”
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on reflective writing. Every English course includes some sort of in-class writing, and for the past three years teaching at Baruch, I’ve been developing and workshopping the personal writing component of my course. First in FYW and now in Great Works, I’ve included some form of journaling, tweaking it for each new semester. At first, personal writing was more of an occasional, informal mode of writing about course material. But in the past semester, I’ve extended and expanded personal writing to be the ultimate class foundation.
Continue reading “The Potential of the Personal Writing Journal”
Twenty years ago, I majored in English at Baruch. To say that I loved my major would be a grave understatement. English courses gave my life meaning. I joyfully grappled with the multi-headed hydra that is the English language. I delighted in discovering new texts and meeting people passionate about literature. Class discussions were stimulating intellectually and emotionally, and my favorite place to be was the Newman Library.