Holly Burcham
English Teacher and Customer Experience Manager for Cult of Pedagogy
Please click here to see my online portfolio.
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ENGL 1101
Composition
ENGL 1102
Composition & Literature
The semester begins with This I Believe, a short, personal writing assignment to help bridge the gap between high school and college. We then move onto their first argumentative paper for which they can choose their own TED Talk. Their second paper requires them to form an argument around a visual--advertisements, paintings, sculptures, etc.--and the two come together in their research paper.
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"Uncovering Truths" is a research paper in parts and requires each student to choose a topic, formulate an argument through research, and include visuals representing both sides of the argument. The first time I assigned this, I decided to "dogfood" the paper, a strategy I am highly fond of.
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We end the semester by reading a graphic novel, which, again, merges argument with visuals. ​
I have to admit:
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It's easy to focus more on the literature component than the composition component of this course since 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 keep killing off the characters we grow 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 course 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, applied the theory of adaptation to the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and finished out the semester with a "creative" final.
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:
The first time I held a creative final, we met for 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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