Prompt #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? My name is Kyllikki Rytov, and I earned my PhD from Florida State University in English with a speciality in classical and digital rhetoric. I’m an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of English at Baruch; I’m currently teaching ENG 2150 asynchronously, but I’ll be teaching it synchronously in the spring, ergo my interest in this seminar. I had fairly extensive experience designing online async courses during my PhD, but I haven’t had any experience with a sync course.

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? ENG 2150 is essentially a genre and research composition course, and I design my sections with an emphasis on the socially-situatedness of rhetoric–we read about rhetorical ecologies, rhetorical listening, and the white supremacy of standard academic English as students pursue a topic of their choice throughout the course, beginning with a rhetorical analysis and ending with a research project.

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!). Based on the learning goals from the department, mine are as follows:
After completing ENG 2150, you should be able to: 

• Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as genre, audience, purpose, and conventions; 
• Apply rhetorical knowledge in your own composing using the means of persuasion appropriate for each rhetorical context, including academic writing and composing using digital platforms; 
• 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 own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose; and 
• Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, revision and editing.
  
  What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them? I want to revamp my syllabus, both in terms of one of the projects and in terms of class session structure, so as to encourage community in an online sync class taking place during a pandemic. This semester, I opted to only use Blackboard’s tools, thinking that keeping things centralized for students would keep things easy, but I’m really dissatisfied with the discussion boards and other tech constraints–there’s just not a lot of collaboration or sense of community. Next semester, I want to bring in other tech, such as a discord and maybe these blogs–my only hesitation concerns how much of a learning curve it’ll be for students to learn these new platforms.