Teaching
ENGL 1110: College writing I: Theme, From Community to College and Back
Central New Mexico Community College
Taught in the middle of the 2019 electoral season, this course asks students to find the issues that matter in their communities and learn to communicate them to people outside of their communities. Throughout the course, students develop evaluative critiques of these issues for different audiences, probe them through sustained inquiry, and re-purpose their arguments for help to form sustained communication within their communities about these issues. While national politics may have us thinking that all that matters it the outcome of an election, this class refocuses attention on community knowledge and community engagement. Taking a sociolinguistic approach to teaching writing, students begin by analyzing a discourse community that the belong to and developing a webpage about that community that introduces non-members to the language, values, and genres of their community. They then find examples of public figures misrepresenting their community and construct tweet thread arguments, demonstrating summary skills, argumentative moves, and counterargument constructions, to protect the integrity of their communities. Finally, by learning both how to conduct library research and how to ask strong open-ended questions, students conduct an inquiry research project on an issue facing their community, learning how to bring academic knowledge from the walls of the college into their community spaces. The objective of the course is to empower students through language and writing as well as to underscore the ways that academic and non-academic identities can improve on one another.
ENGL 1110P: Basic College Writing I
Central New Mexico Community College
This developmental writing course brings together writers from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and levels of writing proficiencies to explore topics of cultural and institutional literacy. An intensive writing course, ENGL 1110 P asks students to draw on and describe the discourse communities they belong to, analyze the kinds of controversies that arise within and about those discourse communities, and begin the process of academic inquiry in an aim to bring traditionally non-academic issues and knowledge to the attention of academic institutions of power. Throughout the course, students are prompted to critically reflect on their writing processes, their emotional labor, and their feelings of agency and control as writers.
ENGL 101: Academic Writing
University of Maryland, College Park
English 101: Academic Writing is the University of Maryland’s requires first year writing course. The course teaches students how to implement ideas from rhetorical theory—from stasis theory to rhetorical analysis to rhetorical stylistics—in order to inquire about, analyze, and produce rhetorically persuasive texts. English 101 has students work through a series of six scaffolded papers: a summary assignment, an inquiry assignment, a rhetorical analysis, a digital forum, a position paper, and a revision and reflection assignment. In completing the course, students should be able to demonstrate not only how to produce rhetorically persuasive arguments but also how to perform academic research on an exigent topic and enter into a conversation with members of an academic community who study that topic.
ENGL 101 C: Academic Writing for CIVICUS
University of Maryland, College Park
English 101 C: Academic Writing for CIVICUS is a section of the University of Maryland's required first year writing course that focuses on community engagement and leadership. The course takes as its focus issues of social justice and challenges students to imagine community change. Taught using an anti-racist pedagogy, the course uses students' individual community and cultural engagements to springboard discussions of civic duty, civic engagement, citizenship, and social action. The course culminates in a public remediation project that asks students to take their 10-page argumentative essays and reimagine them as social media campaigns, YouTube videos, poster campaigns, op-ed pieces for local newspapers, a series of protest signs and pamphlets, and letters to public officials. Throughout the course, students achieve the objectives of the standard ENGL 101: Academic Writing course but are encouraged to think about writing through the lens of community engagement, leadership, and diversity. As such, special attention is paid to issues of community identity and indexicality in varieties of English as these concepts relate to audience; the language and rhetoric of politics; and non-linguistic avenues of rhetoric, such as social media algorithms, visual rhetoric campaigns in urban settings, and rhetorical ecologies of places, both digital and analogue.
ENGL 280: The English Language
University of Maryland, College Park
This course aims to introduce students to the linguistic approaches to studying the English language. In doing so, we look at difference in written and spoken forms of English, how the language has changed over time, what differences there are between national and regional forms of English, and what some rules of English morphology, syntax, and phonology. In addition we look at the English lexicon, some basic kinds of semantic change, and aspects of the history of dialect formation and standardization historically and in contemporary world Englishes.
ENGL 281: Standardized English Grammar, Usage, and Diction
University of Maryland, College Park
Standardized English Language, Usage, and Diction is an introductory course to descriptive grammar. The course has two goals: the first is to teach the methods and metalanguage of grammatical analysis, and the second is to bring attention to differences between non-English languages and non-standard English dialects, so as to reinforce the fact that Standard English is a dialect of English and as such is no better or worse formally than any other dialect. In addition to teaching forms and functions of parts of speech, phrasal categories, and clausal categories, students use online corpora of historical and contemporary American English to investigate changes and patterns in language usage. Students are also introduced to more advanced grammatical features of English, such as it-clefts, pseudo-clefts, catinative constructions, and delayed right constituent coordination. The course requires daily homework and a final video group project on some aspect of a standard English construction of choice.
ENGL 282: How Rhetoric Works
University of Maryland, College Park
How Rhetoric Works takes a historical approach to teaching rhetoric, beginning in Pre-Socratic Athens, ancient East Asia, the precolonized Americas, and the various cultures in the ancient Indian subcontinent. Students are taught to think of rhetoric as both a methodology and educational tradition refined and debated in Western history, as well as a feature of human interaction in persuasive contexts. Canonical Western rhetorical theorists are covered, like Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Demetrius, Cicero, the author of the Ad Herennium, Quintilian, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Erasmus, John Locke, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, Stephen Toulmin, Chaim Perelman, and Kenneth Burke. Non-canonical figures and writings are also covered, such as the writings of the Confucian Analects and ancient Chinese Legalists, Arabic commentators on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, passages from the Vedas, formulary rhetorics by women, Western women’s conduct rhetorics, and writings by contemporary scientists on best-practices in science publication and communication. The course balances rhetorical analysis with rhetorical production, assigning multiple rhetoric exercises. The course also teaches some basic cognitive science in the form of cognitive biases, framing, and mental simulation to emphasize how rhetorical strategies influence reasoning processes in persuasive discourse irrespective of time, culture, and language.
ENGL 291: Intermediate Writing: Theme, rhetorical Style
University of Maryland, College Park
This course is a writing-intensive course centered on the persuasive use of style in writing. It asks students to approach writing with a sensitivity to rhetorical stylistic and linguistic stylistic qualities, teaching aspects of both. From the rhetorical standpoint, the course focuses on matching language forms to rhetorical situations and audiences. From the linguistic standpoint, the course teaches usage-based grammatical and Cognitive Linguistic features of language to bring attention to why and how certain language patterns are found in certain rhetorical situations. In addition to creating a portfolio of essays to various public audiences on a range of exigent issues, students take away the idea that style is not some special quality of language but the result of careful consideration of words, phrases, sentences, and discourse-pragmatic features that help readers to engage and imagine through acts of meaning-making. English 291 is designed to be a rigorous, challenging course, a foundation in analyzing and producing stylistic prose.
ENGL 385: english semantics and pragmatics
University of Maryland, College Park
(Note: taught from week 8 - week 16)
English 385: English Semantics and Pragmatics introduces both non-language specialists and undergraduate language scientists to the study of meaning. The first half of the semester surveys word meanings, sentence meanings, and predicate meanings, focusing in on topics such as sense and reference, truth-conditional semantics, the logical organization of semantic space in terms of hypernyms and hyponyms, processes of semantic shift, thematic roles and event structure, frame semantics, cross-frame mapping (i.e., conceptual metaphor), and construction grammar (CxG). The second half of the semester focused on pragmatics, as well as language in use. Topics covered included ambiguity and language ideology in contemporary American law, humor as analyzed through speech act theory and conversational and conventional implicature, figurative thought in popular culture and political discourse, and raciolinguistic analyses of moments of indexical bleaching. The semester culminated in group projects that addressed contemporary cultural or social issues using concepts and methods from linguistic semantics and pragmatics.
ENGL 489N: Special Topics in Language and Rhetroic, The Invention of 'Proper English'
University of Maryland, College Park
(Note: taught from week 8 - week 16)
English 489N: The Invention of 'Proper English' is a seminar course that traces the history and effects of the 'Doctrine of Correctness', the 18th century language ideology developed in the UK that both invented rules for 'correctness' based on privileged dialects of English and judged speakers of non-privileged dialects as 'incorrect', 'illegitimate'. 'undesirable', and 'unethical'. The course pays special attention to the relationship between the legitimated dialect of Standardized English--which is used to write dictionaries, laws, academic testing procedures, and national policies--as well as non-legitimized dialects and secret languages such as the dying Gay British cant language of Polari, varieties of African American Englishes, Appalachian Englishes, Latinx Englishes, and performative non-standard Online varieties of English popularized in the 21st century. The goal of the seminar is to discuss how the concepts of propriety and standardization arbitrarily exclude access to privilege. Special attention is paid to World Englishes and language testing procedures as they relate to standardization processes, regional identity, language for specific purposes, and the language ideology of violent monolingualism. In addition to weekly reflections, students engage with transcribing in IPA varieties of English, reading early dictionaries and cant dictionaries, using large corpora to analyze variation across World Englishes, and composing annotated bibliography reading guides on a topic of their choice related to the issues of standardization and language ideology.