Musical Listening Resounding: Sonic Rhetorics in the Technical and Professional Writing Classroom

By: David Measel Musical Listening  “Musical Listening” is a pedagogy that applies the theory of musical expectation to patterns in text. It helps students to analyze media and consider their own reading and composition choices. As a pedagogy, it puts course curriculum in the context of a discussion about pattern recognition… Continue reading

Integrating AI into College Writing and Communication Classes

Integrating AI into College Writing and Communication Classes  AI (Artificial Intelligence) platforms like ChatGPT and Dall-E2 have galvanized higher education, particularly for those of us who teach college writing. The full potential of AI is not yet realized, and the AI platforms are limited. ChatGPT and DALL–E2 cannot comprehend the… Continue reading

With ChatGPT, We’re Missing an Opportunity to Rethink Grading

  By Shane Snyder ChatGPT, the Political Situation, and the Classroom ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) trained to respond convincingly to language inputs, has dominated headlines since December 2022. Stories and editorials come replete with catchy headlines, some of them designed to elicit fear, like Time Magazine’s unscrupulous use of… Continue reading

Teaching STEM Students Communication through the Lens of Science Fiction

Science Fiction’s Potential in the Communications-Classroom As an instructor who teaches introductory English communication courses (ENGL 1101 and 1102) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a leading institution in the fields of engineering and computer science, I was confronted by the challenge of engaging STEM majors in the communication course… Continue reading

Supporting Students’ Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Classroom–Short Essays

During the pandemic, university instructors, staff, and students have faced numerous challenges within the context of higher education, and mental health and wellbeing have emerged as key issues in discussions relating to equitable student support and classroom learning. We asked Brittain Fellows to share their experiences with making student mental… Continue reading

“My Name Is…”: Modifying the “Syllabus Day” Template in Technical Communication

Introduction For many teachers, the following “Syllabus Day” template might sound familiar: Introductions. Syllabus. Course calendar. Please mask up for class. Any questions? No? All right, email me if anything comes up. Looking forward to working with you this semester. Have a great day! There is nothing inherently wrong with… Continue reading

Applications Open for 2022-2023 Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship

Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship: Composition, Business/Technical Communication, and Digital Pedagogy Applications are being accepted through February 14, 2022, for a new cohort of Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows. The advertisement appears below. Here on TECHStyle, you can find out more about the innovative teaching and research being done by Brittain Fellows. If you… Continue reading

Teaching, Coping, Living: A Collection of Six-Word Memoirs

Anxious campesina grasping peaceful power, struggling. Rocio Soto, fourth-year undergraduate, LMC major Educators and scholars lead stressful personal and professional lives, and, knowing that, we at TECHStyle wanted to create a space for self-expression in addition to our usual scholarly and pedagogical fare. To achieve this goal in an accessible… Continue reading

Life after the Brittain Fellowship: Stephen Addcox, Part 2

What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions?  The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these and other related questions. The interview below — with Stephen Addcox, a teacher and administrator at The Westminster… Continue reading

Life after the Brittain Fellowship: Stephen Addcox, Part 1

What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions?  The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these and other related questions. The interview below — with Stephen Addcox, a teacher and administrator at The Westminster… Continue reading

Pandemic Pedagogy – Short Essays

At the beginning of last year we asked for reflections from Brittain fellows on teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in instructive articles from “The Shift to Online Consulting at Georgia Tech’s Communication Center” by Jeff Howard et al. to “A Sense of Belonging in the Archive and the… Continue reading

Perusall: Building Community and Confidence in an Online Classroom through Annotation, Part 2

By Kendra Slayton (Continued from Part 1) Closing Distances In addition to helping students close the distance between the premodern and the modern, Perusall has been an invaluable tool for building a sense of community in my remote classroom. Students quickly begin to form comment chains, debating the meaning of… Continue reading

Perusall: Building Community and Confidence in an Online Classroom through Annotation, Part 1

By Kendra Slayton As a medievalist, I have always felt moved by Chaucer’s optimism in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales when he describes how into a inn came “nyne and twenty in a compaignye / Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle / In felaweship” (“nine and twenty in… Continue reading

Scansion Redux, or Doing Data Viz in the Poetry Classroom

By Lizzy LeRud In my first few years of teaching poetry, I quickly grew to expect my students’ slightly sick expressions when words like “iamb” and “trochee” came up in class. Many students were weary from memorizing these Greek words for poetic meters, a necessary task for getting by in… Continue reading

A Sense of Belonging in the Archive and the Remote Classroom

By Danielle Gilman Is it possible to feel a sense of belonging to a place you’ve never been? I grappled with this question quite often last summer as I prepared to teach three sections of my “Archival Narratives” course to a cohort of students who had, by and large, never… Continue reading

Technically Pop: “Normal People and Ireland in Film and TV”

This week, Molly Slavin, Eric Lewis, and Corey Goergen discuss depictions of Ireland in two 2020 properties: the film Wild Mountain Thyme and the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. We discuss why so many Irish-set fictions seem like period pieces and what, exactly, a “balletic millennial bedtime” is. Then, we… Continue reading

Why So Toxic? Teaching Feminist Ethnographic Methods in the Composition Classroom

By Shane Snyder Introduction: A Glaring Omission  Two months into my Fall 2020 composition course, “Possibility Spaces and Rhetoric in Video Games,” I realized something was wrong. Within sixteen weeks, I had scheduled only one lesson on the LGBTQ+ video game narratives Gone Home and Dys4ia, two discussions about predatory corporate capitalism and environmental destruction in The McDonald’s Videogame, and one week on violence and nationalism in Undertale. Most… Continue reading

Technically Pop, “Disney+”

Elizabeth Olsen (as Wanda Maximoff) and Paul Bettany (as Vision) sit together, smile, and pose for the camera. The photograph is in black and white, to mimic the style of 1950s sitcoms.

This week, Alex Edwards, Eric Lewis, Josh Cohen, and Corey Goergen talk WandaVision, the second season of The Mandalorian, and Disney+. What do we want from televised depictions of our favorite properties? How will Disney’s early success with these shows change the television and film landscape? Why is Kat Dennings the best?… Continue reading

Life After the Brittain Fellowship: Kellie Meyer

Image of Kellie Meyer

What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions?  The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these and other related questions. The interview below — with Kellie Meyer, a teacher at TMI Episcopal School of Texas, and a former Brittain Fellow  — is… Continue reading

Technically Pop, “Bridgerton”

The cast of Bridgerton pose in full costume against a background of a lavish, carefully maintained garden.

Technically Pop is back at the tail end of the semester with a 4-episode miniseries! For our premiere episode, Eric Lewis and Corey Goergen welcome special guest Courtney Hoffman, a Brittain Fellow and the Assistant Director of Writing and Communication. Together, we talk the ‘ton–Bridgerton, that is. Released on Christmas day,… Continue reading

Life after the Brittain Fellowship: John Harkey

What does life after the Brittain Fellowship look like? What opportunities within academia or in other sectors do Brittain Fellows pursue? And how does the postdoc prepare Brittain Fellows for these positions? The Professional Development Committee reached out to former Brittain Fellows and other experts to find out the answers to these and other related questions. The interview below — with John Harkey, a teacher at Brookstone School in Columbus, GA, and… Continue reading

Applications Open for 2021-2022 Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship

Applications are being accepted for a new cohort of Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows through March 15, 2021. The advertisement appears below. Here on TECHStyle, you can find out more about the innovative teaching and research being done by Brittain fellows. If you would like to know more about the… Continue reading

Students, not Consumers: Rethinking Our Assignment Sheet Design, part 2

By Jill Fennell and Jeffrey Howard (Continued from Part 1) Technical Communication and Information Design Techniques in Assignment Design Extant scholarship on technical communication, information design, and user experience design (UX) provides many ideas that instructors can implement to enhance the effectiveness and expand the purpose and usability of assignment… Continue reading

Students, not Consumers: Rethinking Our Assignment Sheet Design, part 1

By Jill Fennell and Jeffrey Howard “We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.” ~ Stephen Dunn, “A Little Essay on Form” Introduction In his “Little Essay on Form,” noted writer Stephen Dunn argues that even when writers work within the constraints of generic conventions, they also can reshape… Continue reading