ENGL 471 A: Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing

English 471: Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing: Embodiment and Accessibility

This class will be particularly of interest to those interested in teaching and writing-based careers, or who might work in educational environments from early childhood to adult learning programs. Students will have the opportunity to participate in community-engaged learning in this course.

What does it mean to write? How do people learn to write? And how, given our responses to these questions, might we approach the teaching of writing?

To respond to these questions in this class, we will read scholarship and work on teaching and learning that will push us to consider the role that our bodies and minds play in writing activity in considering embodiment and accessibility. We will particularly take up questions about the ways that power, identity, language, and difference matter to the ways we approach writing and learning to write. What does it mean to have a body? To compose a body? To use that body to make texts accessible to others? To invite others around you to create accessible texts? How do we use our bodies to perceive—using the full range of our sensory apparatus—relationships around us that matter to writing?

Many of our scholarly and creative readings will come from the fields of writing studies and education, but we will also work across disciplines to engage queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, digital composition, and writing assessment.

Assignments will include weekly response journals; a teaching case study (involving observation of a teaching context paired with research on a question motivating you); a curriculum design presentation; and a final culminating project (e.g., a teaching portfolio or creative/scholarly portfolio) that reflects your positionality and relationship(s) to the teaching of writing.