Course Theme: Investigating the Corporate World Platforms: Blackboard, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox (for file sharing) Mode: Fully Face-to-Face view syllabus (pdf)
ENG 2150 is the second required writing class at Baruch. The purpose of this course is to improve your ability to read, write, and think critically, and to communicate your written ideas to others, especially through extended research. In groups, you will pick a company or nonprofit to investigate over the course of the semester. The end goal will be a substantial report on the organization of your choice with clear responsibilities assigned to each group member. You will research the history and development of the entity you are writing about and learn as much as you can about its efficiency, innovative practices, profitability/success, environmental sustainability, and labor practices, among other things. You will conclude with an evaluative section in which you explain why a potential investor/donor should or should not support this company/nonprofit. You will employ a number of hopefully familiar research methods (Newspapers, library databases, etc.) and learn about some less common ones (using public tax documents, financial reports, public court records, etc.). You will also attempt to set up an interview with at least one person who works in/worked at the organization you are investigating (this can be over email, phone, zoom, or in person). We will therefore have to think carefully about what it means to do research with real living, breathing human beings.
In this sample course hosted on Blogs@Baruch’s WordPress platform, you will find the syllabus, lesson plans, learning activities, handouts and guides, assignment sheets and rubrics, student testimonials, and miscellaneous blog posts. As you can see in the course site, the Writing Program’s three major assignment sequence is followed. Assignment sheets are provided, each contributing toward a number of the course goals. Under course materials, you are welcome to click on any handout of interest and download its Google Drive file to adapt any of the learning activities for your class. You’re also welcome to copy anything else you may wish to adapt. The blog page can also be used to create summary/responses for readings, having students comment and reply to each other, or ask students to write summary/responses for the content of any lessons they may miss to count for attendance. In addition to the Blogs@Baruch course site, Google Drive (Dropbox or Microsoft Teams are alternatives) is used for in-class writing, drafting, and assignment submission. Grades are submitted on Blackboard. Zoom is used to teach the class synchronously online, but the course functions similarly in an in-person environment as well.
Chris Campanioni, Spring 2021
CourseTheme: archives, personal texts, social media Platforms: Blackboard, Google Docs, Twitter Mode: Fully Online—Synchronous view syllabus (pdf)
This course bridges composition and rhetoric with social media analysis and studies of media ecology, while constellating six major topics: narcissism; shaming and empathy; interactions and intimacy, memory and experience, re-appropriation and representation, and privacy. In tasking my students to think critically about the unconscious processes of socialization and the norms and social scripts we follow because of them, and by structuring my course around four guiding principles—self-reflexive, processual, interactive, and collaborative—this class also gives them the opportunity to act as cultural producers, with assignments that include digitally-centric critical-creative essays, as well as the responsibility of shaping the direction of our ever-changing syllabus by sourcing material for discussion. Class texts that include essays by Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Linda Alcoff alongside digital articles like Gay Magazine’s “#WeToo,” D. Watkins’s “Too Poor for Pop Culture,” and Nathan Jurgenson’s “Pics and it Didn’t Happen” allow students to collectively evaluate what they’ve been told about writing (and literacy), what audiences they want to reach with their writing, and how to communicate in innovative ways.
Ian Singleton, Spring 2021
Course Theme: Ho(o)dology—Walking and/or Moving through Space and Writing Platforms: Blackboard, Blogs@Baruch, ArcGIS, Social Explorer, KnightLabs, YouTube Mode: Fully Online—Synchronous view syllabus (pdf)
My course is called Ho(o)dology. Inspired by the novel Open City by Teju Cole, I became inspired to use the metaphor of walking as a way of describing the writing process. We think about texts as maps. I ask students to use a wide definition of “space” in their choice of topic. Digital spaces are included, for instance. Being aware of moving through a space, such as their neighborhood, is a way of helping them to use their experience in their writing. It’s also a way of helping them become more aware of genre. The final, multimodal project and portfolio are digital spaces. Students can maintain these spaces throughout their careers.
Chris Campbell’s course focused on articulating the assignments clearly and methodically as a way to also enter into course material, as well as building out interactivity in an asynchronous course using a well-articulated peer group setup. Campbell integrated “peer roles” that rotate out for students to keep each other informed and acknowledged, and sent out “tip sheets” with each of the assignments to offer continuous assistance. He met with his students in conferences by group. His course assignment sequence really ties together a full arc for the 2150 curriculum:
(1) he split a critical analysis into two papers, one based on a genre (flash fiction) and another that’s more student-driven and expansive;
(2) he had students share and consider research in groups, which had topics for students to build on individual sub-topics from;
(3) he had students peer review partial drafts so that the conversation is always about where to go next and how to evolve a work; and
(4) he had students in the multimodal remix project collaborate on creative exercises that then turned into critical perspectives on each other’s work.
Campbell’s efforts here created a space where students felt heard and read, while they also connected with each other and treated each other like scholars—even to the level of analyzing each other’s work collaboratively. He carried out daily conversations and group coordination on the Slack, and let students run a #random Slack channel for general chatting. He held optional live sessions once per week as check-ins for about an hour, and then met with groups in scheduled live conferences.
Seth Graves’ course streamlines most of the content into one platform: Blogs @ Baruch. The primary mechanism of his course was a regular weekly rhythm of deadlines. Given it was a summer course, these deadlines were generally daily and repeated themselves in a cyclical pattern:
(1) finish the module (read the content on Blogs@Baruch);
(2) write a blog;
(3) leave comments;
(4) join a check-in session—or watch it later and fill out a “Missed Meeting” form within 48 hours;
(5) turn in a Core Assignment by Monday at noon.
Each course module—a collection of content in multiple pages, with buttons that “linked” pages together—launched at 8am Monday each week (consistency was very helpful for them). Each week culminated in a Core Assignment, with the Blog as a means of working towards it in the writing process. He additionally used Slack for daily communication and announcements—often also sending those announcements by Email if he couldn’t get a hold of a student on Slack.
The first week of his class onboards students to each platform (Blogs, Slack, Email, etc.) and has them do exercises to demonstrate they are setup. The primary function of “attendance” in the course is leaving comments on each page of the multi-page module.
The assignment sequence moves from a rhetorical analysis of a music video (something they can find easily online, with lots of variation); to a research paper on a topic they extract from the music video (so that the third assignment can capitalize on a through-line); to finally a multimodal remix project where they generate a pitch for a film (with research and style notes) and make an Animoto (free video software) video advertising the film (with a cover note about the rhetorical approach of the video).