Blog Post #1

Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects? 

Hi everyone! My name is Molly Mosher, I teach in the English Department, specifically Baruch’s first-year writing program. I also teach in the same department at City College, so I read a LOT of student essays and talk a LOT about rhetoric and research. I love teaching in the hybrid model because I think it gives the opportunity to teach during in-person time and have students apply the techniques/lessons during asynchronous time. Also… I am sure I am not the only one but I especially love smaller classes. The smaller the class, the more time I am able to get to know each student personally and through their writings.

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

I will be working on my ENG 2100T class as well as preparing materials for the future, 2150T. These classes cover first-year writing (Writing 1 and Writing 11) for Baruch students who are (predominately) non-native English speakers. I want them to feel comfortable sharing in class, but I find they are shy (could be language related, could just be the pressure of being an 18 year old first-year!!).

What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).

Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.

Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.

Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, trope, genre, audience, and purpose.

Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.

Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.

What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I want to develop a series of low-stakes asynchronous discussion board posts. I want to love these (I don’t currently) because I think they are a great way for students to engage with material and with each other in a casual and conversational way. I would like to develop a series of topics / questions that are engaging and interesting so that the students overflow with responses!

I want to determine a) how much weight these should carry and b) basic rules of engagement. It would be great to develop the actual discussion questions too. My goal would be to use these developed discussion board posts in the spring.