While at Purdue, I have taught three different courses, which I will discuss below. Thanks to Introductory Composition at Purdue's teaching philosophy, I have been given the opportunity to determine textbooks, readings, assignments and themes for my two composition courses below, while discussing new ideas in a supportive community of faculty advisors and fellow instructors.
ENGLISH 106
Introductory Composition at Purdue allows instructors to choose from a number of approaches as they design their courses. I selected "Composing with Popular Culture," becoming the approach leader for a year. The goal of the approach is to have students both analyze, critique and produce pop culture texts in order to give them a rhetorical understanding of the kind of work they voluntarily engage with on a daily basis. My students produce a research paper in which they analyze one or more novels, short stories and/or memoirs we have read in class, a short video (either a documentary or a movie preview) and a website. The class is centered around a theme. I have had three versions: Heroes, Superheroes and Antiheroes, Utopias and Dystopias and Otherness. As we read, watch and create texts that relate to these concepts students learn to weave abstract concepts and research into different kinds of genres, and in the case of the videos and websites to collaborate with others in the creative process.
ENGLISH 108
I was one of the instructors who piloted the service learning approach for Purdue's accelerated English Composition course. We partner with Westminster Village, a local retirement home, in order to allow residents to tell their stories in multimedia venues. Students make short documentaries about a particular resident's life, filming not only interviews but meaningful objects and photographs from the residents' past and present. Students also make websites for the residents, researching aspects of the residents' life and adding what they find to the stories residents choose to tell, so that the websites provide a social and historical context for each story. The goal behind the project is to provide residents and their families and friends with a digital record of memories that can be accessed by anyone with a web connection. It allows students to create something that will have a function outside the classroom and interact responsibly with people from a different generation. Students to learn first hand about different historical events, such as women working and attending college during World War II and academia in the 1960s, widening their understanding of American and local history while they learn to rhetorically craft digital texts.
ENGLISH 286: THE MOVIES
Although for The Movies I do not select my own readings or the films we watch, I do write paper prompts, exams and extra credit assignments. I am also able to apply my teaching style and philosophy to the way the course is taught. What I found out as I began teaching The Movies is that although students have years of experience watching films and discussing them with friends and family, they think of films mostly as stories with special effects, being unaware of how films are crafted. As a way to develop their "film eyes," I ask students to break into small groups and examine a film's use of screenplay, cinematography, mise-en-scène, characters, sound and editing, and present their findings to the class for discussion. As they analyze a film through the individual aspects of its grammar, students begin to see film as a process and understand how the genre casts its emotional and intellectual spell on them. We complement this practice with watching clips in detail, so students can learn to see and hear like filmmakers as they engage with a new scene. The paper prompts and exams mirror this approach, asking students to validate their claims about a film's particular purpose or meaning by addressing how the film has been crafted from a technical point of view.