Throughout my years at Penn State, I have had the opportunity to teach several courses in literature, rhetoric, and composition. For each of these classes, I provide a brief description below, along with a copy of the course syllabus. To view a PDF of a particular syllabus, just click on the course number in the section heading.
ENGL 443/499: City and Country in Early Modern English Literature
In the summer of 2014, I was selected to co-lead a Penn State study abroad program in London. In addition to organizing individual events, managing the group’s budget, and facilitating the success of the overall program, I was able to design a literature course of my choosing for the four weeks of the trip. I decided to construct a course in Renaissance literature around the topics of “city” and “country.” After reading about the history of London’s development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, my fifteen students and I focused on texts that engaged the literary traditions of pastoral and city comedy. This course theme allowed me to take advantage of our London location while also bringing my own dissertation research on pastoral literature into the classroom.
ENGL 129: Shakespeare
ENGL 129 is a Shakespeare course for non-majors. When I taught this class in fall of 2013, my students came from a wide array of major and departments, including Education, Journalism, Philosophy, Agricultural Science, Law Enforcement, and many more. Students also ranged from first semester freshmen to graduating seniors. Consequently, we were able to draw on a wide range of diverse skills, experiences, interests, and opinions in our course discussions. My primary goals were to help the students understand the significance of Shakespeare’s plays and poems for their original English audiences and to more fully appreciate the ways in which those works were relevant to their own lives as twenty-first century Americans.
ENGL 221: British Literature to 1798
ENGL 221 is a required course for all Penn State English majors, and it surveys English literature from Beowulf to the beginning of Romanticism. Students in are expected to become familiar with key movements, authors, and forms in English literary history. They are evaluated on their retention of the material and their ability to close read texts and respond to critics in their own essays. The course is typically taught in a lecture format with up to 150 students. When I acted as a teaching assistant for 221 in fall of 2011, I lead discussion based seminars for two sections of 25 students every Friday afternoon. I also delivered one class-length lecture on Edmund Spenser to the full group of students, and I was responsible for all grading for the students in my sections. The syllabus for this course resulted from collaboration by the faculty instructor and the teaching assistants.
ENGL 202C: Technical Writing
I have had the opportunity to teach 202C, an advanced course in technical writing, many times as a graduate student instructor at Penn State. 202C is a required course for students in the sciences and applied sciences, including engineering. Over the years, I have been able to adapt the course to take advantage of my own strengths as a teacher and make the class as useful and educational as possible for my students. We spend a considerable amount of timing analyzing examples as a class to identify principles of effective technical communication in action. I then encourage the students to apply these principles in their own writing, as they take their documents through multiple drafts to accomplish their intended rhetorical goals for an appropriate audience in as clear and concise a manner as possible.
ENGL 015: Rhetoric and Composition
I composed my own syllabus for the first time in fall of 2010 for a section of ENGL 015, the introductory rhetoric and composition class at PSU. The class predominantly consists of Penn State freshman, and it is a requirement for students of all majors. English 015 is an intensive, rhetorically based course in reading and writing.
For this course, I constructed my own reader through the Norton publishing company called The Norton Mix.