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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Audience through Early Modern Literature

First-year college students often come into literature-focused composition classrooms predisposed to fear “old books.” However, my students this past semester quickly overcame that fear as they tackled the writings of John Milton. Teaching “old books” is an excellent way to help young adults contextualize themselves in their contemporary world. Jeffrey… 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

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

Rethinking Instructional Scaffolding

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 first 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. When… Continue reading

7 Brittain Fellows Reflect on Summer Pedagogical Experiments in First-Year Writing

Frankenstein in alternative genres, freshly redesigned periodic tables, poetry and digital archives, feminist editorial interventions in Wikipedia, sustainable futures, pop culture, and crisis—these are the Writing and Communication course topics that Brittain Fellows experimented with in the 2019 summer semester at Georgia Tech. The compressed six-week course schedule and opportunities… Continue reading

Learning to Teach in the Anthropocene

How do I teach while the world burns? How can I teach in the Anthropocene? I thought one night while washing dishes. In the face of the Anthropocene and its harbinger, climate change, teaching seemed futile. At the time, I was also listening to a video essay by Oliver Thorn… Continue reading

Picture This: Infographics in English Class–Part Four: Visualizing the Writing Process

This post is the fourth in a series about our class project in “Teaching Composition.” Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.   In addition to learning about theories of rhetoric and writing, the future English teachers in this fall’s “Teaching Composition” course needed to think about how to apply… Continue reading