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Below, I list descriptions of select courses taught at various college levels. For a fuller overview and description of these and other courses, please consult my Curriculum Vitae.
Graduate and Professional-Level courses
Political Rhetoric in the Age of AI
I taught two graduate-level courses on political rhetoric at the University of St. Thomas. The first in 2020 introduced students to concepts and theories in rhetoric pertaining to political discourse and civic engagement. In 2025, I revised the course to focus on how technologies such as artificial intelligence are impacting political discourse online and materially. Student projects focused on pseudoparticipation in high school protests; social media technologies as political/posthuman agents; and AI as a biased actor in political discourses.
Teaching College English
Several kinds of students enrolled in the University of St. Thomas's Master's program take this course. Students range from those who are interested in literary studies but want learn more about writing pedagogy to those who are current high school teachers and would like to explore writing theory at the college level. There are also a select few who enroll in this course because they are curious about pursuing doctoral studies in Rhetoric and Composition.
As a result, I structured this course so that it introduced students to contemporary composition theory and theoretical work that has been influential in composition studies. Discussions center on the history of the field, approaches to teaching composition, teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students, and controversies in the field. Student projects have included conceptualizing the idea of “code-brokering” to introduce students to the idea of multiliteracy; arguing for a “digital place-based” pedagogy in an urban two-year college; applying a post-human lens to writing research protocols; and analyzing the disconnect between high school and college educators’ discussions of students’ use of technologies in the writing classroom.
Comics and Social Justice in TPC
In this intensive summer graduate-level course, I taught students how technical writers use comics to communicate technical information to marginalized audiences. Our class topics covered accessibility, usability, and narrative elements from readings in TPC as well as in comics studies. The final assignment in the course asked students to storyboard a comic that communicated conceptual or technical information to, for, with, or about a marginalized community. Student projects focused on explaining intersectionality to Latinx students enrolled in predominantly white institutions, portraying a graphic history of a local theater with the aim of producing content that amplifies voices of marginalized artists, and helping instructors of secondary education deal with traumatic incidents at at-risk schools.
Professional Writing and Diverse Publics
In this Master's-level course, discussions centered on the role of the technical communicator within the contexts of usability, localization, and research. Students also engaged with more recent scholarship on inclusivity, social justice, and globalization. Students produced article-length final projects, proposals for submission to conferences, and discussion forum posts which helped to facilitate meetings. Projects included looking at Beauty Boys’ deployment of YouTube videos as subversive tactical technical communication, rearticulating the role of the grant writer as activist, analyzing the language of the United Nations’ Human Rights document, and exploring the concepts of supercrips and user-writers in the production of a manual for one-handed individuals.
Professional Writing
In this concentrated course at Saint Mary's University of MN, I taught nontraditional students--many of whom were already in workplace environments that asked them to communicate professionally-- about business genres and practices. Students were encouraged to find topics that pertained to their workplaces and apply them to this course. For example, in the backgrounder assignment, many students opted to research a policy or procedural change that needed to be addressed at corporations or organizations that they belonged to and then craft an implementation strategy in their proposal assignments, which many students presented at their workplaces.
Undergraduate Courses in the PW Major
Visual Rhetoric and Design
In this summer course, I included a community-engaged partnership with the Metropolitan Council in the twin cities to help students understand design principles and participatory mechanisms when creating visual products. As the Met Council needed assistance with visually remediating an environmental vulnerability report for the region, students learned about visual semiotics as well as principles and methods of designing visuals. Students’ final project consisted creating visual prototypes to user test and writing a recommendation report for the Metropolitan Council with suggestions on what types of visuals to implement or avoid.
Race, Gender, and Technology
I developed this course as an intensive online offering during the pandemic and revised it in 2024 to incorporate an ungrading assessment model. In this course, I invite students to examine how marginalized communities intersect with technological systems and ask them to challenge assumptions about design, documentation, and user agency. My two goals for this class were to have students see 1) how technologies and policies about technologies impact communities and 2) how users creatively adapt tools for empowerment and connection. Major course assignments included inclusive design proposals and accessibility audits.
Grant Writing
In this course, students learn about the process of applying for a grant: where grants come from, the role of foundations, the importance of conveying an organization's mission and vision, the different types of grants that exist, the typical sections necessary to complete a grant, and how to assess the progress of their organization’s program. In the course, students learn how to implement qualitative and quantitative forms of data collection, conduct literature reviews, connect ideas through transition statements, and engage with constituents through professional forms of communication such as cover letters, memos, email, and presentations. I also included a community partnership in this course with an urban farm to give students real-world experience with writing grant proposals.
Introduction to Professional Writing
Shortly after I began offering this course for the first time at the University of St. Thomas, interest from across university departments began to rise. As a result, this course must remain nimble as it tries to meet the needs of several student and faculty stakeholders. Introduction to Professional Writing is a required course for Professional Writing students in the English Department as well as for Data Analytics Majors. In addition, STEM students who need to satisfy a WAC or English course requirement enroll for the course, as do Literature and Creative writing students who want to learn more about workplace writing situations.
With such varied groups of students, I have prioritized making sure that students understand the different written situations that they will encounter in their workplace. While students produce professional emails, proposals, progress notes, and a report throughout the course, the main focus here is on observing and researching a professional or technical process from their chosen fields and being able to describe its complexity. In this way, they gain a better understanding not only of how communication takes place in the wild, but also how processes might be susceptible to breakdowns.
Business Writing
In this community-engaged course, students worked with a local transit organization to document their recent organizational change via historical documents and interviews with stakeholders and impacted staff. Student produced client briefs, meeting minutes, progress reports, white papers, and a final narrative for our community partner. Because this course was taught in the Spring of 2020, much of the initial plans for the course needed to be modified; thus my main goal for this class was to help students cultivate their comfort with ambiguous writing situations.
Introduction to English Studies
I have have been privileged to have had the opportunity to teach the intro to the English major course at the University of St. Thomas several times. Because I see value in moving students to think of English broadly and not just encompassing the literary, my course explores how several sub disciplines of English approach theory, pedagogy, research, and practice. That is, students learn the connections and clashes in epistemological priorities among the fields of Rhetoric and Composition, literary studies, professional writing, creative writing, and second language studies. Topics covered include: the history of English, literary theory, writing pedagogy theory, social justice in PW, getting published in CW, and the digital humanities.
Throughout the semester, students craft a theory of English by regularly completing "What is English Studies" reflections in which they revisit their definitions of the field of English. In several iterations of the assignment, students must include a visual that helps to portray how they are conceptualizing the field along with a textual reflection that explains their visual.
Research in Professional Writing
In Purdue's professional writing major, students were introduced to research methods in the field. Topics focused on ethics in research, workplace studies, and implementing qualitative methods. Students produced research proposals, annotated bibliographies and presentation reports.
Political Rhetoric and Policy Making
The first half of this course, taught syncronously at the University of St. Thomas, centered on teaching undergraduate students about politics and technology and how rhetorics circulate from online to physical spaces. The second half of the semester included a community-engaged project with a planning commission wherein students synthesized the sustainability practices of various local community planning documents into accessible and persuasive Fact Sheets aimed at nearby municipalities that had not implemented any sustainable policies. Students' Fact Sheets centered on how Solar Energy, Electric Vehicle Usage, and Climate Vulnerability Assessment have been implemented locally and could be implemented by peer municipalities.
First Year English and Core Courses
Intensive Writing
Eligible and interested first-year students enroll in the University of St. Thomas' basic writng course where they are introduced to concepts of literacy, discourse communities and academic writing before they take the FYW course. Prior to 2023, this course required a paired course with colaboratively-designed integrated assignments; in 2024, pairs were removed, so I redesigned the course to focus more on helping students develop their AI literacy.
FYE: Critical Thinking and Writing
This course integrated literary and rhetorical concepts to teach students about rhetorical situations, producing surface/depth statements, and connecting close readings of texts to social relevance and historical contexts. Assignments included a rhetorical analysis of students’ digital communication; close reading of contemporary issues; and a literary analysis. In Spring 2025, I revised the course to focus on graphic storytelling and included a community partnership with a sustainability organization to produce storyboards depicting various sustainability practices and volunteers.
Social Media and Its Discontents
In this themed FYW course, I ask students to consider social media's affordances allow for new engagements between individuals, while also keeping in mind what might be foreclosed on via digital communication platforms. For example, students read texts such as Twitter and Tear Gas (Tufekci) and So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Ronson) to get a broad scope of the promises and perils of technology in terms of protest and shaming in online spaces. Afterwards, students read pieces on circulation to help them theorize how social media enables ideas and images to not only spread but create new connections among individuals.
Sim Cities: Maps, Places, Power
In this themed FYW course, the class uses SimCity to think critically about the design of spaces and consider the users of urban places. Students begin by creating a city in the game, and then using that as a springboard to investigate wicked problems that arise in their cities. Stemming from Rittel and Webber's (1973) conceptualization, wicked problems have no definite solution and because they are embedded in social and environmental webs, attempting to solve them can lead to new problems. Students study the implications that wicked problems have not only on cities but also in their own potential fields of study. Students end the course with an ethnographic project in which they triangulate data from observations, visualizations, and textual write ups of a place to begin to determine the contentious meanings that a place holds for various individuals.
Literature and Writing I and II
At the University of St. Thomas, I taught two comp-lit course in AY 2010-2011. English 111 focused on having students learn different literary genres (memoirs, short stories, novels), appreciate diverse cultural perspectives, engage in written discourse with texts they read by constructing well thought out theses, and practice different types of high and low-stakes writing (journal entries, formal papers, cover letters).
English 112 asked students to engage in close reading and analysis of various poems (in terms of rhythm, meter, metaphor, etc). Students also learned the language of stage production; conducted academic research; and used textual evidence to support their claims.
Introductory Composition
I taught 3 sections of this first year composition course as a graduate student at Purdue, utilizing Writing about Writing (WaW) and Digital Rhetorics (DR) approaches. For example, students used Tumblr posts as invention material for composing literacy narratives and also composed websites to describe discourse communities that they belonged to to students in other sections of the course. Peer review consisted of providing their peers advice on writing and design choices.
I taught another section as a Writing Across Contexts course in which students developed a language for genre and rhetorical situations through prose and academic sources. Their final assignment pulled from their research project and consisted of asking them to remediate their project into 3 different genres of their choosing (podcasts, videos, speeches, brochures, etc) to be disseminated among different types of audiences. Students also kept and revised a journal on their theory of writing, changing it as their ideas of what it means to be a writer and how writing works evolved with each new reading and assignment.
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