Composition Pedagogies and Rhetorical Theories for Diverse Teaching Contexts

Catalog description

This course will begin with a survey of historical composition theories and instructional approaches including Expressivist Rhetoric, which emphasizes personal voice and a developmental perspective; Social-Epistemic Rhetoric, which focuses on rhetorical perspectives and social contexts for writing; and Critical pedagogies, which encourage analysis based on race, queer, and feminist perspectives (among others), and Digital Rhetoric, which involves students in creating Web-based texts and in considering the affordances of digital and online reading and writing practices. After we conclude our general survey, we will deepen our focus on multimodality and the influence it's having on the field of composition studies. What impact, if any, have web-based changes in communication practices had on the fields mission and self-perception. What impact has the cultures current preference for designed visual texts that often include image, video, and sound had on pedagogy. We will also focus on the relatively new pedagogy of teaching-for-transfer, which aims to help students transfer rhetorical knowledge from one domain (such as a composition class) to another disciplinary domain (such as biology, art, physics or chemistry). These theories aim to place students within authentic rhetorical situations, to increase their awareness of how to make rhetorical choices based on the demands of audience and genre, and to articulate their understanding of key terms in composition studies so that they are equipped to apply what they learn to writing for their college courses and to their literacy practices at home, at work, and in their communities. Students will be asked to evaluate these pedagogical approaches based on their own experiences as readers, writers, college students, writing center tutors, and instructors. We will pay special attention to both the pedagogical theories and their…