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

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

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

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

Life after the Brittain Fellowship: Rebecca Weaver

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 questions and more. The interview… Continue reading

7 Brittain Fellows Reflect on Antiracist Pedagogy

A memorial mural for reonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd.

In response to the protests for racial justice during the summer of 2020, we here at TECHStyle discussed steps we could take to promote antiracism and antiracist pedagogy in higher education. As we noted in our call for submissions from August, “Black people have experienced systemic racism for as long as… Continue reading

Being a Part of the Picture: Using Visual Rhetoric to Re-See Black Girls

Introduction While the senseless deaths of Black men have gained national attention, Black women are often excluded in the national debate concerning this topical issue of state violence. There is minimal coverage in the mainstream media of Black women’s bodies, and often the maltreatment of Black women by police goes… Continue reading

Teaching in All Seasons: Poetics, Ideal Tendencies, and Food Literacy

In November 2020, the Georgia Tech community experienced a tragic loss: the passing of Dr. Darcy Mullen, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and a faculty member in the Writing and Communication Program. Darcy was a scholar, teacher, writer, musician, colleague, and friend to many of us; we miss her… Continue reading

Thoughts and Strategies for Teaching Outside during the COVID-19 Pandemic

I’ve always wanted to teach outside, and the COVID-19 pandemic practically forced me into it. As an environmental humanist who teaches courses on settler-colonialism and the Anthropocene, being outside seemed like an opportunity to engage with nature and have students be able to relate our work to a more immediate… Continue reading

Overcoming (My) Attitude: Creativity, the Common First Week, and the Legend of George P. Burdell

As a teacher, I crave autonomy. I want to produce material that reflects my persona, my research background and interests, and my learning objectives. I admit I have difficulty delivering lesson plans and assignments I did not create. No doubt a teacher’s attitudes show, and students perceive enough, I believe,… Continue reading

TECHStyle 2020-21 Call for Proposals: #BLM & Teaching During a Pandemic

Black Lives Matter protest

The editors of TECHStyle (TS) invite multimodal articles and reflections from teachers and scholars during the 2020-21 academic year. TS is one of the public wings of the Writing and Communication Program (WCP) and exists to provide a public humanities platform for scholars and their thoughts on academic research and… Continue reading

Resilience and Environmental Justice in a time of Crisis

A burned field with the fire still burning in the background

My English 1102 class this semester, “Sovereignty, Energy, and Settler-Colonialism,” examined the historical relationship between Native Americans, American politics, and the demand for energy through the lenses of settler-colonialism and environmental justice. In other words, we investigated the ways energy and fuel have been a rationale for the marginalization, removal,… Continue reading

“ethical issues that may arise…”: Scaffolded Ethics in CS 3311/LMC 3432 & ENGL 1102

This article is a collaboration with Dr. Dori Coblentz, third-year Brittain Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. It is the third part in a series on the development and implementation of an interactive ethics training module for Georgia Tech’s first-year composition and computer science students. See the… Continue reading

Nine Questions on Identity, Multimodality, and Poetry with Caroline Dowell-Esquivel

This article is supported by a 2020 Poetry@Tech Pedagogy Grant. In my introductory writing and communication course “On Becoming a Writer,” students read Alexander Chee’s 2018 essay “The Autobiography of My Novel.” The central concept of the essay is what Chee calls a “prosthetic voice.” Unable to write the autobiographical… Continue reading

Multimodal English Class: Elements of Eighteenth-Century Science

When asked if I would incorporate the Periodic Table into my classes as part of an institute-wide celebration of the International Year of the Periodic Table, I eagerly undertook the challenge of designing an ENGL 1102 course considering 18th-century rhetorics of science for Summer 2019. I also decided to include… Continue reading

What Do You See?—Making Podcasts About Visual Art

Making podcasts about visual art presents a challenging multimodal question: How can a podcast, an entirely oral medium, account for all of the complexity, subtly, and abstraction in a painting or sculpture, an entirely visual medium? Producing a podcast about a single piece of visual art—this was my students’ task—would… Continue reading

Multimodal Assignment Design Series: Comics Creation

This is the first post in an ongoing series on multimodal assignment design created by the lecturers and postdoctoral fellows in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. Several committees have come together to work on this project: Professional Development, Curriculum Innovation, and TECHStyle. Our goal is to produce… Continue reading

Toward a Scaffolded Ethics in the Writing Classroom

This article is a collaboration with Dr. Dori Coblentz, third-year Brittain Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. It is the second part in a series on the development and implementation of an interactive ethics training module for Georgia Tech’s first-year composition and computer science students. See the… Continue reading

Supporting English Language Learning Students at Georgia Tech

This article is a collaboration, featuring Jeff Howard (who also compiled and edited this article), Dongho Cha, Hyeryung Hwang, Alok Amatya, and Ben Bergholtz. For more information on World Englishes at Georgia Tech, visit the World Englishes Committee website, World Englishes: Linguistic Variety, Global Society. Howard’s introductory Prezi on World… Continue reading