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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shift to Online Consulting at Georgia Tech’s Communication Center, Part II

by Genny Onyiuke-Kennedy, Emily Nguyen, Stephanie Oliva, Raneem Rizvi, Rocio Soto, Sophia Tone, Jeff Howard, and Eric Lewis  This article is the second installment of a two-part series on the views of six peer consultants who have worked at the Naugle Communication Center during its transition from in-person/face-to-face consultations to online consultations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This installment focuses… 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

The Shift to Online Consulting at Georgia Tech’s Communication Center, Part I 

by Genny Onyiuke-Kennedy, Emily Nguyen, Stephanie Oliva, Raneem Rizvi, Rocio Soto, Sophia Tone, Jeff Howard, and Eric Lewis  This article is the first installment of a two-part series relating the views of six peer consultants who have worked at the Naugle Communication Center during its transition from in-person/face-to-face consultations to online consultations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This… 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