- This section pertains to courses where I have served as the instructor of record. For each course, I have included a brief course description, essential course documents, links to fully developed course websites with more detailed course material, brief descriptions of my takeaways from student evaluations (in addition to the raw evaluations), and links to my in-depth course reflection statements. Together these materials provide a snapshot of my teaching practices and a detailed trajectory of my growth as an educator.
Current Courses (Binghamton University and SUNY Geneseo)
WRIT 312 – Surveillance and Social Media (2 sections taught)
Course Description: The more we critically engage on social media platforms, the more important it is for us to critically examine the algorithms that maintain these online spaces. In addition to collecting and processing our information, platform algorithms influence how we connect and communicate with other people and obtain the information necessary to form our sociopolitical views. This course considers the rhetorical impacts of social media platform algorithms and the surveillance practices they enable. Students will explore the theoretical and ethical aspects of algorithmic rhetorics and surveillance, rhetorically analyze legal documents, collect and examine social media platform information, and write data-driven arguments.
Reflection: In Progress
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
WRIT 211 – Intro to Professional Writing (5 sections taught)
Course Description: In this course, students will analyze and produce several common forms of professional communication, such as emails, memos, letters, job search materials, reports, proposals, and presentations. Throughout the course, students will work on practicing writing processes, developing an appropriate style, learning professional problem-solving, and integrating oral and written communication. Because much of the communicative work produced in the workplace is collaborative, some of these assignments will require that you collaborate with others in the class to complete them. As you complete these individual and collaborative assignments, we will work together toward understanding how to think critically, analyze, and react to rhetorical situations each genre and writing scenario presents, including issues of audience, organization, visual design, style, and the material production of documents.
Reflection: In Progress
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule |
WRIT 212 – Writing Academic Arguments (3 sections taught)
Course Description: WRIT 212, a writing course for transfer students, addresses argumentative writing in academic contexts. This course emphasizes research-driven writing in keeping with Binghamton University’s commitment to writing as central to academic inquiry. It treats writing and research as a process, emphasizes revision, and gives students the opportunity to investigate how to write research-driven texts in disciplines and contexts that interest them. Through a process of practice, observation, and reflection, students also learn how to plan and deliver effective oral presentations.
Reflection: In Progress
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule |
Real World Geneseo
Course Description: I have co-developed and co-facilitated the winter retreat for the Office of Multicultural Affairs’s Real World Geneseo Program for the past seven years. This four-day intensive retreat consists of diversity workshops and training for undergraduate students and counts as the first half of a credit bearing course continued in the Spring semester.
Student Evaluations: Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2023 (unavailable).
Past Courses (Colgate University, Syracuse University, SUNY Geneseo, and SUNY Potsdam)
WRIT 370 – Surveillance Rhetorics (4 sections taught)
Course Description: The more we critically engage with each other on social media platforms, the more important it is for us to critically examine the algorithms that maintain these online spaces. In addition to collecting and processing our information, platform algorithms influence how we connect and communicate with other people and obtain the information necessary to form our sociopolitical views. In WRIT 370 students will consider the rhetorical impacts of social media platform algorithms and the surveillance practices they enable. Students are asked to explore the theoretical and ethical aspects of algorithmic rhetorics and surveillance, rhetorically analyze legal documents, collect and examine social media platform information, and write data-driven arguments.
Reflection: In Progress
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
Students Evaluations: In Progress, Spring 2021, Fall 2021
WRIT 103 – Rhetoric and Writing (4 sections taught)
Course Description: WRIT 103 explores writing and its relationship to cultures and communities, identities and ideologies, and technologies and media. Writing will serve as both a subject of inquiry and the primary activity. You will write, revise, edit and reflect across a range of genres and media. You will also engage critically with the opinions and voices of others, as you develop a greater understanding of how your writing can have an effect on yourself and your audiences. Rather than learning rigid rules that you can take from class-to-class, you will learn how to package and repackage your work as well as how to craft arguments and analyses to suit a range of rhetorical situations.
Reflection: In Progress
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
Students Evaluations: In Progress, Fall 2020, Spring 2021
WRIT 250 – Kairos: The Art of Rhetoric (1 section taught)
Course Description: As an introduction to the history and theories of historical and contemporary rhetoric, WRIT 250 examines what rhetorical terms, concepts, principles, and practices can tell us about how we communicate in online and offline spaces today. This course is about how rhetoric (originally conceived by Aristotle as the ability to recognize “the available means of persuasion”) adapts to the circumstances of particular time and place. The larger inquiry of the course asks: What do we need rhetoric to be today? Moving through various periods in the rhetorical tradition, we can begin to recognize the ways that historical ideas about rhetoric apply (or do not apply) to the present.
Reflection: In Progress
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
Students Evaluations: Fall 2020
WRT 302 – Digital Writing (1 section taught)
Course Description: WRT 302 focuses on the rhetorical and literate practice used to engage in digital spaces. The course exposes students to foundational digital writing skills such as image-editing, screencasting, audio/video production, and web design. Students create their own website and then devise and implement a content strategy for it. Students also explore the overlaps between their “digital” and “actual” lives, the ethical and rhetorical implications of digital technologies. They critically examine how web-based genres such as blog, websites, social media, and content curation impact their everyday thinking and communicating. These inquiries culminate in a multi-media digital project of their own design that responds to a contemporary technological issue of their choosing.
Reflection: WRT 302 Reflective Statement
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
Students Evaluations: Students commented that they felt I made the material fun and engaging and that they learned skills that they would take into other digital writing situations. While the vast majority of students felt I was supportive, some students felt that the pacing of the second unit project (a sustained blog) should have been introduced sooner. [Fall 2019]
WRT 307 – Professional Writing (2 Sections taught)
Course Description: WRT 307 prepares students for the writing they will engage with in the workplace. Students compose in common workplace genres and develop competency in professional formats and writing contexts. Students become project managers for their own learning: they plan projects, revise drafts, devise deadlines, develop and manage team dynamics, compose memos to update various audiences, and co-construct project assessment standards (largely through group designed rubrics). Additionally, students consider their position as ethical technical/professional communicators who design and compose reader-centered documents with accessibility and usability as core values driving their rhetorical choices.
Reflection: WRT 307 Reflective Statement
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments |
Unit Project Rubrics: Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3
Students Evaluations: Students commented that I was fair, open, and professional and that they would take another course with me if provided the options. While many commented that they learned a lot from the course, several pointed out that the second project needed more incremental feedback to measure their progress against and a tighter project trajectory (to which I have modified the project sequence to provide more specific opportunities to build the targeted skills). [Fall 2018]
WRT 205 – Critical Research and Writing (3 sections taught)
Course Description: WRT 205 is the second and final course in Syracuse University’s writing core requirement. Students design and develop an extended research inquiry project that integrates various sources and is written in multiple genres. Past iterations of this course have addresses writing and technology as an interest inquiry, issues concerning dataveillance and techno-ethics. This most recent version of the course is taught asynchronously online. It addresses the writing and the arts interest inquiry theme and examines popular culture and intertextuality as an analog for the academic research process. Regardless, this course is process driven with all student work culminating in a polished, digital portfolio that includes revised versions of their major writing projects. This course offers practical research genres that practice source collection, critical summarizing, source evaluation, and content curation. It also explores academic and popular sources as different kinds of “knowledges” with different purposes, different ways of knowing and sharing information complete with different assumptions, priorities, and credibility standards.
Reflection: WRT 205 Reflective Statement
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
Students Evaluations: Students commented in my first section that they appreciated the feedback they received and my knowledgeability of the interest inquiry (technology), but they also wanted more time in class to work on projects. With my second iteration of the course, students felt my feedback was helpful but several commented they wanted it to be more timely (I have since built in more 1:1 project conferences into my courses). Students did not have an issue with group work, something I built in more time for, but they did feel that Spring Break was a disruption to completing group projects (something I will take into consideration when making course schedules). [Spring 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2020 [online] (current)]
WRT 105 – Practices of Academic Writing (5 sections taught)
Course Description: WRT 105 explores the relationship between literacy, cultures, and communities. Writing is the primary subject of inquiry, and students write, revise, edit, and reflect across various genres and media. Students develop their audience-awareness through their writing and critical engagement with the ideas and opinions of others students. Students also investigate their intellectual influences, identify their composing process, and learn how to adapt their writing across a range of rhetorical situations as well as how to craft arguments and conduct rhetorical analyses for a range of writing contexts.
Reflection: WRT 105 Reflective Statement
Links: Course Website // Course Development Reflective Log
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
Ongoing Informal Feedback: Student Semester Check-In
Students Evaluations: Across every section, many students commented that my course changed the way they looked at writing, that they felt writing could be something interesting and relevant to their lived experience. Students also appreciated the variety in assigned materials and the timely and helpful feedback they received (many felt that I was committed to their success in the classroom). What some students wanted in the first iteration were better ways to assess their standing in the course, to which I have added more structured 1:1 conferences, project rubrics, and more granular grading breakdowns to future iterations of the course. [Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Summer 2019]
WRT 104 – Introduction to College Level Writing (1 section taught)
Course Description: WRT 104 focuses on the development of critical reading, thinking and writing skills. This six week summer course helps students understand college writing in terms of genre, audience, and academic writing conventions. Students complete projects that allow them to practice paraphrasing and summarizing texts, conducting rhetorical analysis, creating arguments, and honing digital literacies.
Reflection: WRT 104 Reflective Statement
Links: Course Website
Current Course Files: Syllabus | Schedule | Major Assignments
Students Evaluations: While I do no have access to the actual evaluations, I do recall students commenting that they appreciated my approachability and consistent interest in their work in addition to the variety of materials the course offered. I also know from the frequent informal feedback conversations I had with the class that the article summary project was too much to cover in a week (and that I could have selected a more approachable article). [Summer 2017 (unavailable)]
INTD 240: Student Development
Course Description: I designed and taught a section of an intermediate level leadership course required for all first year Resident Assistant student staff. Course focused on leadership and student development theory in addition to approaches for interpersonal communication and community development for undergraduate students. Later developed course into a hybrid-online section used by the department in future offerings of the course.
Student Evaluations: Fall 2014 (unavailable)
First Year 100: First Year Success Seminar
Course Description: I designed and taught two sections of an introductory seminar course that focused on expanding discussions and topics students explored in their summer orientation programs. Course content included collaboration with various campus offices and centered around a common read novel and included the supervision of a teaching assistant.
Student Evaluations: Fall 2012, Fall 2013 (unavailable)