Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Fall Teaching
I have yet to start full-on prep for the course I'm teaching in the fall, but I did learn the other day that I'll lead a section of WRT307: Advanced Writing Studio: Professional Writing. Just the one course for teaching this fall, plus taking two or three (I have an elective yet to elect, either fall or spring).
WRT307 is relatively familiar, although among the bazillion comp courses I've taught, a professional writing course, per se, isn't among them. I've been through the repository of syllabi from recent semesters, scanned a select few of them into PDFs for later reference. A gross curricular generalization about the course as read through quick glances at the heap of course documents: lead with generic forms (a resume and cover letter assignment); follow with a study/analysis of workplace information flow, rhetorical analysis of a specific document or document set, or interview with a professional on writing practices; follow with a simulation-project with emphases on design, usability, ethics. Collaborative and presentational dimensions are inscribed in the course outcomes, I think.
I still have about two weeks before I'm obligated to order books. For now, I'm leaning toward a course pack--a collection with a chapter or two from The Social Life of Information, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Porter and Sullivan's essay, "Repetition and the Rhetoric of Visual Design," a chapter from Dias et.al.'s Worlds Apart (on the notebooks of architects or academe/workplace transition). Much of the other stuff I can come up with online (perils of blogging, perils of powerpoint) or perhaps by bringing in a chapter from a text book (recommendations?). Frankly, for now I'm trying to think of ways to breach some of the constraint I find in the conventional genre approach (a resume is always only x, y, z). I understand convention, and I'm not trying to squander my students' futures. Just the opposite, in fact. I'm actually interested in doing more than filling compartments with autoblandography. Workplace templates are so pervasive and so deeply systematized that we can teach to them be-damned the specific situation? The simulation approach (let's be a business) presents some interesting possibilities and challenges, too, but I have to give it more thought. If it will be done well, it will be done with a different sort of joint involvement. Certainly all of this will ripple and shift when we convene this fall (and so the sim performances might be held off until the last chunk of the course). But it's one of the things I've been working through in recent days, besides reading and responding to work from students in the two (soon-to-end) courses I'm teaching, besides putzing with CSS and MT plugins on breaks from reading student work, besides crying (tears? sweat?) about the unbearable heat and humidity (mid-sixties overnight tonight though...finally, some sleep).
Any thoughts about what's missing from this developing plan?
Posted by dmueller at