LEARNER. TEACHER. WRITER.
ENGL 102
During my final semester at UofL, I taught two sections of ENGL 102. This course was different from ENGL 101 in that there was a strong focus on the research process. Students had four major assignments – a video, single-source analysis, annotated bibliography, and research proposal – that lead to the research paper. For their final, they will curate an ePortfolio (somewhat like this one) where they will reflect on their writing process and what they have learned.
One of my coworkers and I teamed up to design the general course so that we could learn from each other. We decided to use a theme for our classes so that students could have something to ground them in their research and to make their projects more specific and original. Throughout the semester, my classes read from Andrea Lunsford's The Everyday Writer to learn about writing and researching strategies and from Jeff Ousborne's Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology to see examples of scholars and other authors writing about issues in pop culture. In addition, I brought short short articles, commercials, and videos to class for students to analyze and practice creating research topics. I received some positive feedback from the students about the class' focus because students were interested in the reading and knew that I wanted them to think about these issues and come to their own conclusions, not to figure out what I believe and write to please me. Having a broad topic like pop culture allowed students to write about almost any issue that interests them – e.g. female characters in films, body image and Instagram, and how the media represents police brutality – and hopefully caused them to be more invested in their work.
You can find links to assignments below. Currently, however, the research proposal, research paper, and ePortfolio are not available.