Curriculum Overview & Teacher Rationale

By Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez and Cara Campbell 

This three week unit invites students into a critical and creative exploration of Sinners, a film by Ryan Coogler that centers music, movement, horror, and visual storytelling as forms of resistance, remembrance, and liberation. Designed for first year writing or ethnic studies courses, the unit draws from cultural studies, critical pedagogy, linguistic justice, and multimodal composition to honor expressive forms of communication that have often been marginalized in academic spaces.

We approach Sinners through the imaginations and legacies of bell hooks (1995) and Robin D. G. Kelley (2002). hooks positions art as a radical act of care, self definition, and spiritual resistance, values reflected in Coogler’s reverence for the Blues and embodied knowledge. Kelley’s call to “imagine otherwise,” to treat dreaming as a method of political struggle, resonates in the film’s layered soundscapes and speculative imagery, where grief and joy coexist as portals to freedom.

Grounded in linguistic justice scholarship (Baker Bell, 2020), the unit challenges the dominance of so called “standard” academic English and affirms students’ home languages, vernaculars, and embodied rhetorical traditions as legitimate forms of knowledge making. Following this work, we treat language as shaped by racialized histories and power rather than neutral convention. Sinners becomes a rich site for examining how sound, Blues music, silence, breath, dialect, and even the scream, functions rhetorically and politically. Students compose across languages, registers, and modalities, recognizing that meaning extends beyond alphabetic text.

Our pedagogy is further informed by multimodal composition scholars (Shipka, 2005; Selfe, 2009), who resist print centric definitions of writing and advocate for visual, sonic, gestural, and spatial rhetorics as intellectually rigorous forms of expression. Rather than treating film as supplemental, we position Sinners as a primary text that models complex rhetorical design through image, rhythm, editing, and movement. By analyzing how Coogler choreographs sound and silence and remixes horror conventions to narrate racial terror and survival, students come to understand composing as embodied, multimodal, and socially situated work.

Students also engage Sinners through the lens of Black horror, drawing on thinkers such as Tananarive Due (2019) to explore how horror operates as both genre and metaphor for naming and surviving racial terror. By examining the intersections of fear, memory, and the supernatural, they consider how genre can disrupt dominant historical narratives and surface suppressed truths.

Ultimately, this 3 week unit invites students to see writing as more than thesis driven prose. Through linguistic justice and multimodal composition, they explore how sound, silence, movement, and visuality function as intellectual labor. Their analytical, reflective, and creative projects center protest, healing, and collective memory, expanding what counts as academic knowledge and who gets to produce it.