Welcome to ENGLISH 101E
English 101: Writing Rhetorically is a class designed to help you become the kind of reader and writer expected at the college level and beyond. To my mind, that goal is better reached through context, so I teach around a theme; this semester the theme is “Making Meaning in Different Communities.” Making meaning is how we make sense of things—how we see ourselves, others, and what happens around us and in the communities we inhabit. We will be reading, writing, and thinking about how we identify ourselves and how we interact with our communities. So, welcome to ENGL 101!
The course includes reading, writing, speaking, and listening as these activities go hand-in-hand. You are all readers of texts and writers of a variety of texts and other materials as we will discuss. As a human being, you engage in many kinds of communication each day. You also observe things in everyday life. Whether you are aware or not, you are constantly taking in, assessing, and interpreting things every day. You use prior knowledge to help you understand situations based on your own experiences. So, we will begin there by mapping and exploring these rhetorical situations you engage in daily and others that affect us in a global sense.
Not only is this course is designed to help you build upon and improve your reading and writing skills for a particular class, it is also designed to move you into critical literacy. To engage in critical literacy means you are an active participant in your learning and understanding of a subject; critical literacy points out ways of looking at written, visual, and spoken texts/”things” and to question the attitudes, values and beliefs that lie beneath the surface. Having critical literacy means you have the ability to recognize, analyze, employ and, when necessary interrupt discourse conventions within particular discourse communities (that is home, school, church, clubs, work, and so on). As we move through the semester, you will come to understand these concepts more fully. In short, we will enter the conversations as we talk, read, respond, and write about learning and ways of knowing, and we will talk about how we make sense of the world.
This is YOUR class and as such I do not hold the key to all the "right" answers, but rather I encourage you read and engage with pieces that invite you to think about the possible meanings and interpretations and write about them. Among our goals for this course are to develop strategies toward becoming strong(er) readers and writers while gaining confidence in our abilities. We will be working in small groups, with individual peers, with folks outside our classroom, in conference with me and your writing tutor, and in public spaces.
English 101: Writing Rhetorically is a class designed to help you become the kind of reader and writer expected at the college level and beyond. To my mind, that goal is better reached through context, so I teach around a theme; this semester the theme is “Making Meaning in Different Communities.” Making meaning is how we make sense of things—how we see ourselves, others, and what happens around us and in the communities we inhabit. We will be reading, writing, and thinking about how we identify ourselves and how we interact with our communities. So, welcome to ENGL 101!
The course includes reading, writing, speaking, and listening as these activities go hand-in-hand. You are all readers of texts and writers of a variety of texts and other materials as we will discuss. As a human being, you engage in many kinds of communication each day. You also observe things in everyday life. Whether you are aware or not, you are constantly taking in, assessing, and interpreting things every day. You use prior knowledge to help you understand situations based on your own experiences. So, we will begin there by mapping and exploring these rhetorical situations you engage in daily and others that affect us in a global sense.
Not only is this course is designed to help you build upon and improve your reading and writing skills for a particular class, it is also designed to move you into critical literacy. To engage in critical literacy means you are an active participant in your learning and understanding of a subject; critical literacy points out ways of looking at written, visual, and spoken texts/”things” and to question the attitudes, values and beliefs that lie beneath the surface. Having critical literacy means you have the ability to recognize, analyze, employ and, when necessary interrupt discourse conventions within particular discourse communities (that is home, school, church, clubs, work, and so on). As we move through the semester, you will come to understand these concepts more fully. In short, we will enter the conversations as we talk, read, respond, and write about learning and ways of knowing, and we will talk about how we make sense of the world.
This is YOUR class and as such I do not hold the key to all the "right" answers, but rather I encourage you read and engage with pieces that invite you to think about the possible meanings and interpretations and write about them. Among our goals for this course are to develop strategies toward becoming strong(er) readers and writers while gaining confidence in our abilities. We will be working in small groups, with individual peers, with folks outside our classroom, in conference with me and your writing tutor, and in public spaces.
