Below are titles and descriptions of undergraduate and graduate courses I’ve taught, organized by subject matter in reverse chronological order. Each course where I served as part-time faculty was constructed around independently conceived and crafted curricula based on the prime learning objectives and types of essays required by the departments where I was teaching at the time. (The exception is Consumer Media Culture, which I “inherited” after serving as TA for the course for two years; aside from updated examples and a “reverse engineering” assignment I designed, I kept the material more or less the same.)
Select course materials are linked at the bottom of the page.
Disability Studies in Literature and Culture
This course explores the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies through literary representation and civic engagement. The disabled bodymind has been stigmatized as morally deficient, undesirable, dangerous, and/or infantile. Literary representations of disability both play into and reject what Dolmage has called “disability tropes,” which perpetuate these stereotypes and the social and medical insistence on curative or restorative interventions to eradicate disability. How is anomalous embodiment and disabled futurity reimagined in literature? Course texts will include literary and medical narratives and memoirs about and by disabled writers and activists. To fulfill the Civic Engagement requirement, students will document access issues around physical and virtual campus spaces and draft access guides and petitions for improvement.
Credit: Sins Invalid, 10 Principles of Disability Justice
Introduction to Literature, Culture, and Media
This course introduces students to the intersection of literature and media in the form of early cybertexts, interactive fiction, visual novels, and video games. It draws on a variety of methods and disciplines, like close reading, literary analysis, cultural studies, media studies, archival research, interface design, and the digital humanities. Combining methods from the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities, students consider what it means to be literate in the age of “new” media, examining how we consume analog and digital literature.
Introduction to Rhetorical History and Theory
This course examines foundational texts and classical concepts from the histories of Western and non-Western rhetorical traditions. Students learn to compare ideas about rhetoric and writing, as conceived by classical Greek, Chinese, and Indian rhetors, to assumptions about rhetoric and writing today, with special attention to how dis- and mis-information is read, received, and recirculated through technology and social media. Students review concepts ranging from the school of the Sophists to Advaita Vedanta and practice applying those concepts to instances in the contemporary rhetorical landscape.
Credit: Sergey Sosnovskiy (2008), Kairos. Turin Museum of Antiquities. CC BY-SA 4.0.
CORE WRITING
Pace University
Composition
This course emphasizes critical reading, writing, and thinking. Students write, revise, and edit well-organized, coherent, analytical essays through scaffolded tasks that help them develop strategies for effectively accomplishing each stage of the writing process.
Critical Writing
This course emphasizes analytical reading of and writing about non-fiction popular press and scholarly articles in well-developed, coherent essays. Students develop a clear and logical understanding of the principles of composition and conducting basic research, including library and Internet research.
Writing in the Disciplines
This course emphasizes writing effective research essays in disciplinary modes, using the principles of ethnographic research: primary research; and secondary research. Students learn to read and explain peer-reviewed articles and use citation styles appropriately.
University Writing
This course introduces incoming students to Columbia University’s core writing course, University Writing. It has been themed around code-meshing; cyberculture; gender, class, race, and sexuality; and the feminist snap.
Columbia University Academic Success Programs – Summer Bridge
Media Ethics and the Law
Media Ethics and Law is a required upper-level course in the Journalism and Media Studies major at Rutgers University. The goal is to introduce students to legal and ethical practices in journalism and provide a sense of journalists’ role in society. Students reason through real-world legal and ethical dilemmas in mass media and produce take-home essay exams and a creative-critical interactive fiction (using Twine) that reverse-engineers a journalistic quandary.
In 2015, I received a university grant to convert this course into a hybrid format, using online role-play, Panopto, Twine, Flipgrid, and Yellowdig to heighten interactivity during the virtual component each week. My sections focused on journalistic practice, virtue ethics, and propaganda, and were loosely structured like a role-playing game: students used 12-sided die to roll up Dungeons and Dragons-style journalist characters at the outset, and occupied these personas periodically throughout the class.
Journalism and Bullshitocracy
This course follows the basic curriculum in the Media Ethics and Law sections outlined above, but with a focus on post-truth rhetoric, bullshit, and propaganda. Course documents and assignment handouts were updated with new designs, and given the hybrid nature of the course, multimodality was encouraged more in all writing projects. We met once a week for 80 minutes, and virtually throughout the week via Canvas chat room and discussion board, Panopto webcast, Flipgrid, and Yellowdig. We also did an F2F group play of The Westport Independent in a flipped classroom module.
Introduction to Digital Communication and Culture
This course is meant to introduce students to the critical methods, policy issues, and creative forms involved in contemporary digital media in the United States and across the globe. Combining methods from the fields of media studies, political economy, visual culture, and cinema studies, the course examines a variety of historical case studies and technological platforms in order to explicate the industry structures, textual forms, and audience practices associated with contemporary digital media.
STUDIES IN ELECTRONIC MEDIA
This course examines electronic media like radio, television, and digital technologies. Topics addressed include economic and regulatory history, the impact of technological change, and the role of electronic media in American society. The course begins with biological electricity and progresses through the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computing, and virtual/augmented reality, examining technology and the body, social use heuristics, and the side-by-side entangled development of the technical and the social. Media is presented as “always-already new” by corporations, “expert” programmers, advertisers, and pop culture. This course considers this fact along with the role of gender, race, and class in the social construction of electronic media systems, approaching electronic media from non-Western perspectives as well to consider issues of accessibility and exclusion.
Photo: Amstrad 6128, Computissimo
Digital Media Ethics
This graduate course is offered through the Master of Communication and Media (MCM) program at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. The main objective of the course is to provide students with the theoretical underpinnings of ethical problems and applied case studies specific to digital media. I taught a fully online section using Canvas, supplemented with Panopto, Flipgrid, and Yellowdig. Course readings ranged from classical theories about character and virtue to modern ethical quandaries in mass communication.
Writing for Media
Writing for Media is a required course that seeks to teach students the fundamentals of writing across media platforms. By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to write in a variety of journalistic and media-based styles, as well as have basic familiarity with the disciplinary techniques of the field, such as inverted pyramid news writing and AP style. Course readings include James Stovall’s Writing for the Mass Media and added a “handbook,” Frank Cioffi’s One Day in the Life of the English Language Students also engage in writing exercise “flash challenges” a la Inkmaster or RuPaul’s Drag Race, complete with a leaderboard and course-related incentives like extra credit, and creative exercises to foreground basic writing skills, such as using Jim Woodring’s “Frank and the Sugar of Vengeance” to practice concrete detail in reporting or pieces from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology as the basis for sensitivity towards subjects.
Consumer Media Culture
This conceptual course offered at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information aims to improve students’ critical understanding of advertising’s role in society. In it, students examine the history of advertising, the commercial and social aspects of the messages conveyed by ads, and advertising’s influence on institutions and spaces.
I “inherited” this large lecture course in 2015 after serving as its TA for two years. Class size ranged from 90 to 300. I used the curriculum developed by Dr. Jack Bratich, with the addition of iClicker for pop quizzes, attendance checks, and low-stakes multiple-choice discussion questions, and a creative reverse-engineering product design assignment to assess student understanding of advertising history and techniques of persuasion.
Geeks, Hackers, Trolls: The Politics of Transgression and Spectacle
This special topics elective course, designed and incorporated into the Communications major at Baruch College, focuses on the culture, practices, and representations of techies, phone phreakers, Internet geeks, hackers, hacktivism, and trolls. We examined forums ranging from Usenet to 4chan and began with theories of cunning intelligence and kairos as formulated by the Sophists. We also looked at scholarship on craftsmanship, the hacker ethic, and affect theory and manipulation. Students are asked to produce a final project in which they select a contemporary case of digital transgression, explain it, and interpret it using the theories at hand.
Social Media and Participatory Culture
This course takes a critical approach to understanding new media environments, especially concerning “social media,” “participatory culture,” “convergence,” and “interactivity.” Students learn to situate these ideas in broader social, political, and historical contexts. We examined the role of social media and Web 2.0 in aspects of cultural life like friendship, intimacy, labor, celebrity, power, gender, race, sexuality, activism, and surveillance. Modes of delivery include live Tweeting with the #smc15 hashtag to Tumblr use to in-class Vines and hands-on CV dazzle parties. I also incorporated multimodal composition into class assignments.
Photo: CV dazzle party
Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Media
This course considers the content, treatment, and effects of women and minority group coverage in TV, newspapers, magazines, popular music, and film. This section was offered online as a six-week summer course, and sought to help students become more critical consumers of media, with a better understanding of how media shapes culture and society, as with the psychological and political effects of stereotyping and consequences of economic structuring of the media. We also discussed the kinds of actions and policies that might encourage more diversified representations of women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, and other historically underrepresented populations.
For an archive of selected teaching materials, including some syllabi, please refer to the links below.
Writing Studies
Media Studies
ESOL
All curriculum materials designed by me are held under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for non-commercial use, modification, and sharing. Materials I’ve adapted have been appropriately credited.