Teaching

Over the course of my academic career, I’ve taught at a variety of institutions: community colleges, private liberal arts institutions, and public universities with extensive research activity. At these institutions, I’ve taught first-year writing within diverse curricular frameworks: some emphasized rhetoric, some composition, some writing about literature. I’ve also designed and taught graduate-level and advanced undergraduate courses in rhetoric and writing. You can find syllabi, assignment sheets, and other pedagogical materials in the subsections below. For many of my courses, I use an assessment system called The Learning Record.

I welcome other teachers making noncommercial use of these materials. To that end, all materials on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Advanced Rhetoric and Writing Courses

At Middle Tennessee State University, I have designed and taught a number of rhetoric and writing courses for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. You can download sample syllabi for all of those courses below.

Undergraduate Syllabi
Graduate Syllabi

As part of my research on the history of rhetorical education, I study the progymnasmata, a series of exercises that was a long-time staple in schools of rhetoric. I frequently adapt those exercises for my own courses, inspired by versions from Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee’s textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. Below, you can find progymnasmata sequences from Advanced Composition, Rhetoric and Recorded Sound, and RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Irony, a course I taught at UT-Austin. I’ve included the syllabus for the latter course as well.

First-Year Writing

In addition to the upper-level undergraduate courses I teach at Middle Tennessee State University, I teach first-writing courses. MTSU has a two-semester sequence. The first course, ENGL 1010, takes a genre-based approach to writing and literacy. The second, ENGL 1020, emphasizes research-based argumentative writing. Syllabi for recent sections of my ENGL 1010 and 1020 courses are available below.

Before coming to MTSU, I taught first-year writing courses at five other institutions, including The University of Texas at Austin. You can find my syllabus for UT-Austin’s first-year writing course, RHE 306: Rhetoric and Writing, below.

Literature

I’ve taught literature courses at both Middle Tennessee State University and UT-Austin. At MTSU, I teach a general-education course called Video Games and/as Literature. At UT, I taught E 314L: Banned Books and Novel Ideas. Syllabi for both courses are available below.