Graduate coursework in instructional design and assessment combined with several years of higher ed teaching experience have made me a confident builder of curricula at the course level. The revisions I’ve initiated and implemented since I started teaching at JCC include the following.
–New Courses–
Alternative Spring Break: This service learning course designed to fulfill the experiential learning requirement for the honors program is also open to any student interested in spending their spring break engaged in local, hands-on service work. I designed and taught this course in 2011, and it’s been taught several times since by both me and other faculty.
Irish Arts & Cultures: In this interdisciplinary course, students examine how the issues and events pivotal to Ireland and Irish cultures are both represented and shaped by texts. Throughout the course, students interrogate what makes someone or something “Irish.” In 2018, the course will include a travel component.
College Reading & Writing: This course integrates what had been taught as two separate developmental courses in reading and writing. Students explore how text signifies in their lives and begin to consider the various roles of texts in the college setting. Students read a variety of texts and work with various modalities to explore self-selected topics in depth, and they become acquainted with the writing process. This course was co-developed with two colleagues.
Life Writing: This one-credit course asked students to examine several genres of life writing, including memoir and journaling, and to select one genre for their own work. Invention exercises were the focus of the course, as was the value of reflective writing.
Technical Writing: This introduction to the field and discipline of technical writing and communication takes a rhetorical approach to developing technical documents, recognizing the process as a social one that requires us to examine and compose for specific exigencies, purposes, audiences, modalities. Collaborative writing, document design, and usability are emphasized. The course is offered online only and is being taught for the first time in Spring 2019. It is being co-developed with a colleague.
–Revised Courses–
Develop Reading Versatility: Revised to be taught as contextualized reading instruction when paired with a reading-intensive, content-area course. This course was revised with a colleague.
Composition I Workshop: Revised to remove focus on sentence-level correctness and to reorient emphasis on non-cognitive behaviors and peer-to-peer collaboration.
Composition I: Revised to better emphasize process-oriented writing practices, three standard assignments were designed: discourse community analysis, rhetorical analysis, and comparative textual analysis. High stakes final exam replaced with portfolio assessment. Full on-campus implementation was reached in Fall 2017, and dual-enrollment sections implemented the new curriculum in Fall 2018. Course revision included the development of both a steering committee and a pilot group, and involved intensive collaboration with full- and part-time faculty.
–Forthcoming New and Revised Courses–
- Intro. to Literature
- Intro. to Creative Writing
- Language, Literature, and Writing Capstone