Eastern Kentucky University
Graduate
ENG 863: Thresholds & Intersections in Writing & Teaching Writing (every Spring)
In Naming What We Know (UP Colorado, 2016), Linda Alder-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle define threshold concepts as “ideas, ways of seeing, ways of understanding that . . . .[don’t] just change what people know; they change how people know because they lead to different ways of approaching ideas by thinking through and with these concepts” (x). These five concepts draw upon a community of writers, teachers, and scholars to identify what we know and how to integrate this knowledge in our teaching. In ENG 863, we are (1) writers engaging sustained practices that challenge our thinking about ideas and relationships between ideas; (2) teacher-scholars examining the intersections between research in writing studies and approaches to classroom instruction across grade levels; and (3) community colleagues discussing the roles of process and reflection in writing and writing instruction.
ESE 743: Teaching of Language Arts in the Secondary School (every Fall)
We draw upon our prior experiences at multiple stages of our careers to consider questions about teaching and learning. Inquiry determines the trajectory of our course together. We examine our prior experiences; work together as teaching colleagues in a professional, collaborative, and supportive community; and apply theory to practice.
Undergraduate
ASO 100E: Student Success Seminar in English (Fall 2020 - 2024)
This course introduces first-year students to Eastern Kentucky University; the College of Letters, Arts, & Social Sciences; and programs offered by the Department of English.
ENG 452: American Romanticism (Spring 2021, 2024)
Nineteenth-century American writers rallied to publish works that portrayed America’s exceptionalism. Texts highlight frontier geographies and indigenous peoples, while narrating the importance of social positioning and interdependence in the new republic. Reading widely across genres and from voices included in and marginalized from the traditional American literary canon, 1820-1865, we examine relationships between texts and the historical, political, and/or social contexts that contributed to their production.
ENG 440: Young Adult Literature (Fall)
Literary representations in young adult texts often introduce us to the voices of marginalized characters so their stories might be heard. When we read (and teach) these texts, we challenge ourselves (and our students) to acknowledge the significance of these fictional representations. Through the lens of “marginalized voices in context,” this course invites critical considerations of ways of reading and intended readership.
ENG 303: Advanced Composition for Teachers (Fall & Spring)
In “A Principled Revolution in the Teaching of Writing” (English Journal, 2016), Nicole Boudreau Smith examines a process of cultivating critical awareness through both our own writing practices and the teaching of writing in the secondary classroom. In practice, we will consider connections between self-awareness, rhetorical awareness, and raising awareness through a trajectory of three writing projects. Each project focuses on a different writing genre, building upon previous content to construct and articulate an argument about writing and the teaching of writing.
ENG 201: Career Development in English (Spring 2024)
Organized in three units--career discernment, career preparation, and career exploration--this course provides information and strategies to guide students through a process of developing and pursuing career goals in English.
ENG 110: Introduction to Literature - "The American Experience" (TBD)
In the early 1800s, American writers and artists sought to demonstrate what was unique about the American experience. In this section of ENG 110, we examine perspectives on these experiences through representations of multiple voices across centuries, genres, and sociohistorical contexts. Organized in four units--“The Story of a Place”; “The Story of Labor”; “The Story of Women, Children, & Immigration”; and “The Story of Forced Migration”--and taught through reading and archival investigations, we analyze the complexities that emerge when we set aside the stereotypes of a single story.
ESE 543: Teaching of Language Arts in the Secondary School (Fall)
We draw upon our prior experiences at multiple stages of our careers to consider questions about teaching and learning. Inquiry determines the trajectory of our course together. We examine our prior experiences; work together as teaching colleagues in a professional, collaborative, and supportive community; and apply theory to practice.
HON 308W/312W/320W: Learning in Place (Fall 2021- 2022)
How we learn is inextricably linked to relationships between geographic and sociocultural spaces. In this course, we consider how geographic location informs what and how we learn, how narratives about region and education perpetuate disparity, and how revising these narratives (and how they are told) works toward amending disparities. Building upon discussions of readings from diverse authors, multiple genres, and disciplines, we examine the social injustices that limit educational opportunities and how to advocate for a re-envisioning of learning in place.
WGS 400: Feminist Theory & Practice (Fall 2019)
In this WGS capstone course, interdisciplinary students analyze feminist critical theory as a lens in historical, social, and political contexts, while engaging feminist research methodologies to contribute to feminist primary study initiatives.
WGS 201: Engaging Feminist Praxis (Spring 2019, 2020)
We examine Women’s and Gender Studies theories and issues to challenge our perspectives on societal expectations and our relationships with one another.
ENG 863: Thresholds & Intersections in Writing & Teaching Writing (every Spring)
In Naming What We Know (UP Colorado, 2016), Linda Alder-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle define threshold concepts as “ideas, ways of seeing, ways of understanding that . . . .[don’t] just change what people know; they change how people know because they lead to different ways of approaching ideas by thinking through and with these concepts” (x). These five concepts draw upon a community of writers, teachers, and scholars to identify what we know and how to integrate this knowledge in our teaching. In ENG 863, we are (1) writers engaging sustained practices that challenge our thinking about ideas and relationships between ideas; (2) teacher-scholars examining the intersections between research in writing studies and approaches to classroom instruction across grade levels; and (3) community colleagues discussing the roles of process and reflection in writing and writing instruction.
ESE 743: Teaching of Language Arts in the Secondary School (every Fall)
We draw upon our prior experiences at multiple stages of our careers to consider questions about teaching and learning. Inquiry determines the trajectory of our course together. We examine our prior experiences; work together as teaching colleagues in a professional, collaborative, and supportive community; and apply theory to practice.
Undergraduate
ASO 100E: Student Success Seminar in English (Fall 2020 - 2024)
This course introduces first-year students to Eastern Kentucky University; the College of Letters, Arts, & Social Sciences; and programs offered by the Department of English.
ENG 452: American Romanticism (Spring 2021, 2024)
Nineteenth-century American writers rallied to publish works that portrayed America’s exceptionalism. Texts highlight frontier geographies and indigenous peoples, while narrating the importance of social positioning and interdependence in the new republic. Reading widely across genres and from voices included in and marginalized from the traditional American literary canon, 1820-1865, we examine relationships between texts and the historical, political, and/or social contexts that contributed to their production.
ENG 440: Young Adult Literature (Fall)
Literary representations in young adult texts often introduce us to the voices of marginalized characters so their stories might be heard. When we read (and teach) these texts, we challenge ourselves (and our students) to acknowledge the significance of these fictional representations. Through the lens of “marginalized voices in context,” this course invites critical considerations of ways of reading and intended readership.
ENG 303: Advanced Composition for Teachers (Fall & Spring)
In “A Principled Revolution in the Teaching of Writing” (English Journal, 2016), Nicole Boudreau Smith examines a process of cultivating critical awareness through both our own writing practices and the teaching of writing in the secondary classroom. In practice, we will consider connections between self-awareness, rhetorical awareness, and raising awareness through a trajectory of three writing projects. Each project focuses on a different writing genre, building upon previous content to construct and articulate an argument about writing and the teaching of writing.
ENG 201: Career Development in English (Spring 2024)
Organized in three units--career discernment, career preparation, and career exploration--this course provides information and strategies to guide students through a process of developing and pursuing career goals in English.
ENG 110: Introduction to Literature - "The American Experience" (TBD)
In the early 1800s, American writers and artists sought to demonstrate what was unique about the American experience. In this section of ENG 110, we examine perspectives on these experiences through representations of multiple voices across centuries, genres, and sociohistorical contexts. Organized in four units--“The Story of a Place”; “The Story of Labor”; “The Story of Women, Children, & Immigration”; and “The Story of Forced Migration”--and taught through reading and archival investigations, we analyze the complexities that emerge when we set aside the stereotypes of a single story.
ESE 543: Teaching of Language Arts in the Secondary School (Fall)
We draw upon our prior experiences at multiple stages of our careers to consider questions about teaching and learning. Inquiry determines the trajectory of our course together. We examine our prior experiences; work together as teaching colleagues in a professional, collaborative, and supportive community; and apply theory to practice.
HON 308W/312W/320W: Learning in Place (Fall 2021- 2022)
How we learn is inextricably linked to relationships between geographic and sociocultural spaces. In this course, we consider how geographic location informs what and how we learn, how narratives about region and education perpetuate disparity, and how revising these narratives (and how they are told) works toward amending disparities. Building upon discussions of readings from diverse authors, multiple genres, and disciplines, we examine the social injustices that limit educational opportunities and how to advocate for a re-envisioning of learning in place.
WGS 400: Feminist Theory & Practice (Fall 2019)
In this WGS capstone course, interdisciplinary students analyze feminist critical theory as a lens in historical, social, and political contexts, while engaging feminist research methodologies to contribute to feminist primary study initiatives.
WGS 201: Engaging Feminist Praxis (Spring 2019, 2020)
We examine Women’s and Gender Studies theories and issues to challenge our perspectives on societal expectations and our relationships with one another.
University of South Florida
Most course titles link to syllabus.
Reform & Recovery in American Women's Literature (Cross-listed with the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Spring 2018)
In response to the success of nineteenth-century American women writers in the periodical marketplace, Nathaniel Hawthorne (now famously) wrote to his publisher that “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.” And yet, while the tradition of American women’s literature can be traced to the nation’s beginnings, many of these writers are no longer read. Despite efforts from interdisciplinary scholars, the recovery and inclusion of American women’s literature remains an ongoing effort. This course examines relationships between reform and recovery. We examine the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts that both enabled and inhibited women writers between the 1600s and late 1800s. We consider the process of literary production—from narrative decision to audience and reception. We analyze why some writers disappeared from literary history, and how social categories (gender, race, sexuality, class) may have contributed to this marginalization. And we engage in recovery projects of our own.
Professional Writing (Spring 2018)
Repurposing the Sentimental Tradition (Cross-listed with the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Fall 2017)
In a collection of essays about the role of sentimental literature in the nineteenth century, The Culture of Sentiment (Oxford UP, 1992), Shirley Samuels argues that “sentimentality is not a genre but an operation or set actions . . . that affects connections across gender, race, and class boundaries” (6). First published in periodicals as serials, sentimental novels garnered a popular readership to become the nation’s first best sellers. We begin by reading one of these best-selling novels as a model for critiquing how a set of actions conveys relationships between boundaries, connections between texts and bodies, and representations of women. Then, we examine other nineteenth-century texts to analyze how writers (re)fashioned a sentimental tradition as resistance and/or a call for social reform.
Resistance, Depravity, Survival: Negotiating Climates of Oppression (Fall 2017)
In Adrienne Rich’s poem, “What Kind of Times Are These,” the speaker compels readers to listen, so that we might hear the voiceless and see the invisible—the stories of the “persecuted,” who “disappear into the shadows.” This course examines literary representations of figures in the shadows—the mill worker replaced by automated machinery, the sharecropper struggling to feed his family, the mother desperate to save her children, and the moonshiner who blurs the distinctions between lawful and lawless. We will think critically about how characters negotiate climates of oppression and whether these negotiations constitute resistance, depravity, and/or survival. In doing so, we will consider who is telling this story, how this story is told, and why the telling of this story matters, as part of our relationship with the human experience.
Standing in the Middle: An Ocean Perspective (Spring 2017)
In Marianne Moore’s poem, “A Grave,” the ocean is depicted as an indifferent collector, a reminder that “it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, / but [we] cannot stand in the middle of this” (3-4). This course draws upon a tradition of nautical fiction to examine an ocean perspective, as depicted in Moore’s poem—not a perspective belonging to the ocean but a perspective obtained when we can no longer stand in the middle but must find new ways of seeing and interpreting. We read a variety of genres between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, in which the ocean serves as both a fluid and static boundary. We think critically about how these texts do (or do not) reflect nautical fiction’s reoccurring themes, and, most importantly, we will examine how perspectives are constructed, perpetuated, and/or resisted through literary representations.
Representations of a Body Politic (Fall 2016)
In response to an early nineteenth-century accusation that the United States was incapable of producing distinctive literature, writers rallied to publish works that would illumine America’s exceptionalism. Texts highlighted frontier geographies and indigenous peoples, while portraying the importance of social positioning and interdependence between men and women in the new republic. In the process of constructing a literature, the nation fashioned its identity. The inquiry trajectory of this course could be applied to any nation, but we will focus on literature produced in America between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Robert Montgomery Bird’s depiction of an early nineteenth-century American body politic in Sheppard Lee (1836) will serve as a foundation for discussing how literary depictions of the American body politic change, expand, and/or remain static. By examining a sample of texts from multiple genres and authors over more than two centuries, we will identify presences and absences of bodies in texts; how these bodies are positioned by race, class, and gender; and how writers seek to maintain or revise prescribed sociopolitical roles. This course invites you to think about relationships between constructions of literary representation and a nation’s evolving body politic.
Reading about Reading: How We Evoke Meaning (Spring 2016)
We all have been reading for a long time, constantly decoding and encoding combinations of letters, words, phrases, and sentences in order to relate to the world around us. But how often do we think about our process of reading and the ways in which that process produces a certain reading or enables us to evoke individualized meaning? This course privileges a process of reading through observing, listening, deconstructing, reconstructing, and connecting. We learn through reading and rereading texts from several genres, including autobiography, prose, poetry, drama, visual art, oral history, and musical performance.
Introduction to Literature, Asynchronous Online (Fall 2015)
Composition II: Visual Rhetoric* (Spring 2014)
Composition I: Academic Writing* (Fall 2013; Fall 2014, workshop method)
*I served on the collaborative design team for this course in Summer 2014. Additionally, as part of the Summer 2014 First Year Composition Team, I also solely designed and integrated curriculum maps for the Common Reader Experience (CRE) into First Year Composition courses: Curriculum Maps for ENC 1101 and ENC 1102
In response to the success of nineteenth-century American women writers in the periodical marketplace, Nathaniel Hawthorne (now famously) wrote to his publisher that “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.” And yet, while the tradition of American women’s literature can be traced to the nation’s beginnings, many of these writers are no longer read. Despite efforts from interdisciplinary scholars, the recovery and inclusion of American women’s literature remains an ongoing effort. This course examines relationships between reform and recovery. We examine the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts that both enabled and inhibited women writers between the 1600s and late 1800s. We consider the process of literary production—from narrative decision to audience and reception. We analyze why some writers disappeared from literary history, and how social categories (gender, race, sexuality, class) may have contributed to this marginalization. And we engage in recovery projects of our own.
Professional Writing (Spring 2018)
Repurposing the Sentimental Tradition (Cross-listed with the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Fall 2017)
In a collection of essays about the role of sentimental literature in the nineteenth century, The Culture of Sentiment (Oxford UP, 1992), Shirley Samuels argues that “sentimentality is not a genre but an operation or set actions . . . that affects connections across gender, race, and class boundaries” (6). First published in periodicals as serials, sentimental novels garnered a popular readership to become the nation’s first best sellers. We begin by reading one of these best-selling novels as a model for critiquing how a set of actions conveys relationships between boundaries, connections between texts and bodies, and representations of women. Then, we examine other nineteenth-century texts to analyze how writers (re)fashioned a sentimental tradition as resistance and/or a call for social reform.
Resistance, Depravity, Survival: Negotiating Climates of Oppression (Fall 2017)
In Adrienne Rich’s poem, “What Kind of Times Are These,” the speaker compels readers to listen, so that we might hear the voiceless and see the invisible—the stories of the “persecuted,” who “disappear into the shadows.” This course examines literary representations of figures in the shadows—the mill worker replaced by automated machinery, the sharecropper struggling to feed his family, the mother desperate to save her children, and the moonshiner who blurs the distinctions between lawful and lawless. We will think critically about how characters negotiate climates of oppression and whether these negotiations constitute resistance, depravity, and/or survival. In doing so, we will consider who is telling this story, how this story is told, and why the telling of this story matters, as part of our relationship with the human experience.
Standing in the Middle: An Ocean Perspective (Spring 2017)
In Marianne Moore’s poem, “A Grave,” the ocean is depicted as an indifferent collector, a reminder that “it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, / but [we] cannot stand in the middle of this” (3-4). This course draws upon a tradition of nautical fiction to examine an ocean perspective, as depicted in Moore’s poem—not a perspective belonging to the ocean but a perspective obtained when we can no longer stand in the middle but must find new ways of seeing and interpreting. We read a variety of genres between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, in which the ocean serves as both a fluid and static boundary. We think critically about how these texts do (or do not) reflect nautical fiction’s reoccurring themes, and, most importantly, we will examine how perspectives are constructed, perpetuated, and/or resisted through literary representations.
Representations of a Body Politic (Fall 2016)
In response to an early nineteenth-century accusation that the United States was incapable of producing distinctive literature, writers rallied to publish works that would illumine America’s exceptionalism. Texts highlighted frontier geographies and indigenous peoples, while portraying the importance of social positioning and interdependence between men and women in the new republic. In the process of constructing a literature, the nation fashioned its identity. The inquiry trajectory of this course could be applied to any nation, but we will focus on literature produced in America between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Robert Montgomery Bird’s depiction of an early nineteenth-century American body politic in Sheppard Lee (1836) will serve as a foundation for discussing how literary depictions of the American body politic change, expand, and/or remain static. By examining a sample of texts from multiple genres and authors over more than two centuries, we will identify presences and absences of bodies in texts; how these bodies are positioned by race, class, and gender; and how writers seek to maintain or revise prescribed sociopolitical roles. This course invites you to think about relationships between constructions of literary representation and a nation’s evolving body politic.
Reading about Reading: How We Evoke Meaning (Spring 2016)
We all have been reading for a long time, constantly decoding and encoding combinations of letters, words, phrases, and sentences in order to relate to the world around us. But how often do we think about our process of reading and the ways in which that process produces a certain reading or enables us to evoke individualized meaning? This course privileges a process of reading through observing, listening, deconstructing, reconstructing, and connecting. We learn through reading and rereading texts from several genres, including autobiography, prose, poetry, drama, visual art, oral history, and musical performance.
Introduction to Literature, Asynchronous Online (Fall 2015)
Composition II: Visual Rhetoric* (Spring 2014)
Composition I: Academic Writing* (Fall 2013; Fall 2014, workshop method)
*I served on the collaborative design team for this course in Summer 2014. Additionally, as part of the Summer 2014 First Year Composition Team, I also solely designed and integrated curriculum maps for the Common Reader Experience (CRE) into First Year Composition courses: Curriculum Maps for ENC 1101 and ENC 1102
Virginia Commonwealth University
Inquiry and the Craft of Argument (Fall 2012, Spring 2013)