Course Description and Learning Goals
Welcome to English 299! ENGL 299 - Writing in the Natural Sciences is a small writing seminar linked with both ENVIR 240 - The Urban Farm and NUTR 302 - Food Systems: Harvest to Health. If you are enrolled in EITHER ENVIR 240 or NUTR 302, then you are eligible to take ENGL 299!
ENGL 299 is a small (21 students max) seminar that earns either C or W credit, whichever you need. In the writing course we will take inspiration from the two linked lectures and do research on our own to develop projects on topics of your choice related to food production and its myriad interrelated issues. These projects will ask you to read, think, and write about foodways, communities (urban and otherwise), food policy and justice, and all the ways that various systems can sustain or inhibit nutritional health.
Our learning goals are both inspired by the Program for Writing Across Campus Principles of Learning, and by the lecture courses we are linked with. These goals include:
- Understanding that writing and communication is a reflection of the ways knowledge is created in different settings (we “know” and learn differently depending on whether we are in a garden or in a lecture hall)
- Exploring that “good writing” looks different in different settings, and there’s no such thing as one single type of “good writing”
- Practicing with and getting used to the fact that writing is always a process, and learning to write is never complete
- Understanding that writing has power: power to lift people up, and also to harm them. In this course we will analyze the ways that writing can liberate and oppress people in different ways, and use our own writing to empower ourselves and others
- Reading, composing, and writing related to the topics of ENVIR 240 and NUTR 302 so we can learn and communicate about those concepts better
- What are your goals for this course?