Welcome to ENGLISH 101E
Believe me, if we could be meeting in a classroom on campus, we would be. I know it’s a disappointing way to start your first year at college. However, we must all do our part to keep each other safe, so we will be meeting via ZOOM this semester. With your help, I will do my best to be compassionate and to create an engaging class and quality learning experience for you.
English 101E: Writing Rhetorically is a class designed to help you become the kind of reader and writer you need to be 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 “Writing in Places,” connecting us to land, place, and society. In 2020, we have been experiencing a global pandemic, witnessing the acts of and the responses to the violence perpetrated on Black people. The demand for justice and equality is high. We also have concerns of the environment, the economy (and who holds wealth), education, and how the future looks for all of us. Yet it all begins as place-based: where we are located; on whose original lands; and how that place has shaped us. Thus, our ENGL 101E will focus first on the local and broaden out to global. We will engage in “critical imagination” (Royster and Kirsch) to assess, inquire, rethink and speculate.
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. Use your prior knowledge to help you understand situations based on your own experiences.
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 course, in conference with me and your writing tutor, and in public spaces if we can.
Believe me, if we could be meeting in a classroom on campus, we would be. I know it’s a disappointing way to start your first year at college. However, we must all do our part to keep each other safe, so we will be meeting via ZOOM this semester. With your help, I will do my best to be compassionate and to create an engaging class and quality learning experience for you.
English 101E: Writing Rhetorically is a class designed to help you become the kind of reader and writer you need to be 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 “Writing in Places,” connecting us to land, place, and society. In 2020, we have been experiencing a global pandemic, witnessing the acts of and the responses to the violence perpetrated on Black people. The demand for justice and equality is high. We also have concerns of the environment, the economy (and who holds wealth), education, and how the future looks for all of us. Yet it all begins as place-based: where we are located; on whose original lands; and how that place has shaped us. Thus, our ENGL 101E will focus first on the local and broaden out to global. We will engage in “critical imagination” (Royster and Kirsch) to assess, inquire, rethink and speculate.
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. Use your prior knowledge to help you understand situations based on your own experiences.
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 course, in conference with me and your writing tutor, and in public spaces if we can.
Photos from Past 101E
