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

Transdisciplinary Collaboration: An Interview with a Computer Science Junior Design Team, Part III

Introduction   The Infinite Woman is an interactive poetry platform that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of remix and erasure. As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, it remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex (1949). An n-gram algorithm… Continue reading

Feminist Computational Poetics and Experimental User Interface Design: An Interview with a Computer Science Junior Design Team, Part II

Introduction   The Infinite Woman is an interactive poetry platform that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of remix and erasure. As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, it remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex (1949). An n-gram algorithm… Continue reading

Course Delivery and Contingency during COVID-19

GT students lay on the ground in a COVID-19 'die-in' protest

by Alexandra Edwards, Corey Goergen, and Kent Linthicum We wrote this article before the fall 2020 semester to show the disparity between non-tenure-track faculty and tenure-track faculty in our school at Georgia Tech. In addition, we hoped the method we outline below would be one other faculty could use to… 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

Creative Coding: An Interview with a Computer Science Junior Design Team, Part I

Introduction The Infinite Woman is an interactive poetry platform that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of remix and erasure. As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, it remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex (1949). An n-gram algorithm procedurally… 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

Archives as Instructional Environments at Georgia Tech and Emory University

Teaching with Primary Sources at Georgia Tech and Emory University: An Introduction Teaching with primary sources is central to my pedagogy as an instructor at Georgia Tech, where I’m a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, and Emory, where I’ve taught as Visiting Faculty in the Creative Writing Program. I’m fortunate… 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

The Office Hour: MetaPod

In this episode of the Office Hour, Tobias Wilson-Bates and Jonathan Shelley discuss their experiences of integrating podcasting inside and outside of the classroom. Has the revolutionary energy of podcasts dissipated with the influx of corporate projects like Mark Zuckerberg’s Tech & Society Podcast? Or do they still serve unique… 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

The Spring 2019 CS Junior Design Capstone Expo: a Recap and Interview with Amanda Girard and Alyshia Jackson

This is the seventh part in a series on the intersections of technical communication in the tech industry and the academy. Read the series introduction here. Recently the College of Computing and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) sponsored the Spring 2019 Computer Science Junior Design Capstone Expo…. Continue reading

Picture This: Infographics in English Class–Part Three: Teaching the Teachers

This post is the third in a series about our class project in “Teaching Composition.” Read Part One and Part Two.  When I designed an infographic assignment for students in my “Teaching Composition” class last semester, I hoped it would be directly applicable to the careers of the students in… Continue reading

On Teaching Computer Science: an Interview with Bob Waters

Shot from the second floor of students beginning to set up table displays on the first floor at the Spring 2019 Expo.

This is the sixth part in a series on the intersections of technical communication in the tech industry and the academy. Read the series introduction here. As I have written about in an earlier post, many of Georgia Tech’s Computer Science and Computational Media majors are required to take our… Continue reading