ENGL 106Y (Online): First-Year Composition, Academic Writing + Research Approach
Purdue University, Fall 2018
This online version of Purdue’s standard first-year composition course is a pilot for the 16-week version of a previously offered 8-week online course. Focusing on academic writing and primary and secondary research, students reflect on ways they communicate in and with scholarly communities and disciplines. Using a multimodal and access-driven approach to teaching online, students engage with texts, videos, podcasts, visuals, and other online materials in order to explore communication within their chosen disciplines. The four major writing projects for the course include an informational interview report, an analysis of a scholarly article, an argumentative research paper, and a digital research poster.
ENGL 106: First-Year Composition, Documenting Realities Approach
Purdue University, 2017-2018
This particular course uses the “Documenting Realities” approach to teaching first-year composition, and focuses on how rhetoric shapes reality as we know it. Students in this course use primary and secondary research methods, journaling, media, and formal writing as a way to understand the ways in which reality is constructed, understood, and documented. In order to approach the concept of reality, the class concentrates on place and space – both real places (hometowns, Purdue, the Wabash valley) and constructed spaces (disciplines, institutions, society). By understanding how these places and spaces that define our lives are rhetorically constructed and how they can in turn be documented, students will leave the class with the rhetorical knowledge to compose in a variety of genre and media for a variety of purposes and audiences. Major writing projects for the course included a place narrative, an access report, an interview podcast, and a research project.
ENGL 106: First-Year Composition, Digital Rhetorics Approach
Purdue University, 2015-2016
ENGL 106: First-Year Composition, Writing about Writing Approach
Purdue University, 2014-2015
Beth Towle 