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ENGL 1101

Composition

This is a classic "freshman comp" class...according to the college's catalog.

 

     Enter: Mrs. Burcham

 

I have created this course to follow the idea (task) of "uncovering truths" in order to help my students realize not everything is what it seems with the goal of turning them into critical consumers of information. 

 

To do so, I designed the class to follow four units:

  1. TED Says--Utilizing TED Talks

  2. The Antics of Visual Rhetoric

  3. "Uncovering Truths" Research Paper

  4. Fun Home: Should it stay or should it go?*

 

The semester begins with a bit of a review of high school skills, and then we jump right in with a This I Believe essay.

 

From there, each unit is designed around the skills necessary for each paper. We move from the argument made in their choice of TED Talk into visual rhetoric which then merge together to create the research paper.

 

Their research paper is lengthy but is written in parts, an idea I got from an article in JSTOR I read while I was in college. I also "dogfooded" the assignment so my students can see a finished product, a strategy I am very fond of. 

 

We finish with a controversial graphic novel which, again, merges the argumentative aspect from the TED paper and the visual rhetoric skills from paper #2.

 

*I taught Persepolis in past semesters instead of Fun Home.

ENGL 1102

Composition & Literature

I admit:

It's easy to focus more on the literature component than the composition component of this course. I love talking about literature with my students, especially when they "get it."

 

My first three semesters teaching this course were focused on stories of the macabre, stories that just kept killing off the characters we'd grown to love. We began with John Green's Looking for Alaska, moved on to short stories such as "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe and "Chickamauga" by Ambrose Bierce, spent a decent amount of time analyzing and explicating poetry, and then transitioned into Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.

 

While I and my students (I believe) enjoyed these works immensely, I completely scratched that thread and redesigned the course to read, teach, and analyze To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. 

 

My students read both novels, apply the theory of adaptation to the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and finish out the semester with a "creative" final.

 

The first time I held finals this way, we ate student-made treats inspired by the books, saw presentations by students who visited the Scottsboro Boys Museum in Alabama, and got to hear about one student's trip to Harper Lee's hometown, 5 hours away from the college!

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