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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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