The Laboratories for My Experiments Teaching with Technology
Filed in Teaching with Technology Portfolio
I've compiled my teaching examples for this portfolio from the following courses I've taught at Penn State. Reading a little bit about each of them will help you contextualize the examples.
ENGL 15: Rhetoric and Composition
Seen in:
- Course Web Space: Minimal Canvas
- Discipline Specific Links: Doing Research
- Example Class Presentation: Dynamic Slides
- Multimedia File: Peer Reviewing on Word Instruction Set
- Electronic Communication: Canvas Announcements
- Your Choice: Peer Review File Management
English 15 is Penn State's first-year, intensive rhetoric and composition course. It is impossible for students to avoid taking English 15; students can't replace it with credit from AP exams or for courses taken from other institutions. It is probably a freshman student's smallest first-year courseāevery section of English 15 is capped at 24 students. English 15 is intensive because of the amount of writing it asks students to do; I was trained to teach five major projects, and as time and teaching went on, I settled on four major essays plus graded peer review. Students in English 15 practice becoming astute rhetorical detectives, gleaning the necessary evidence from any rhetorical situation to respond appropriately and powerfully. I taught eight sections of ENGL 15 over six years, which is why I draw so many examples from it.
ENGL 202C: Technical Writing
Seen in:
The English department at Penn State offers various ENGL 202s (A, B, C, and D) that cater to particular disciplines, and students take the 202 aligned with their major once they are further along in their degree program (usually in their junior or senior year). ENGL 202C is a course in technical writing that serves students who are studying and preparing for careers in the sciences and applied sciences, including engineering. This course is structured to train students in the kind of writing they will do as professionals in the workforce; they learn how to compose materials that are common in that setting, like memos. In doing so, they learn the fundamentals of good technical writing, such as usability and readability. As the follow-up to ENGL 15, ENGL 202 also provides students with another environment to deepen their rhetorical skills.
ENGL 200: Introduction to Critical Reading
Seen in:
ENGL 200 can be thought of as the standard introduction to literary theory and criticism, which usually forms an essential part of an English major. English majors at PSU, however, are not required to take this course (they can either take this or ENGL 201: What Is Literature?). The two dozen students who took my section of 200 were a mix of majors, which provided a rewarding diversity of perspectives. As my syllabus described, this course offered students two main things: (1) disciplinary knowledge, in introducing the history of and the approaches collected under the field of literary theory; and (2) interpretative dexterity, in equipping students with critical tools to analyze and interpret cultural texts, including but not limited to literature. Additionally, my course put a heavy emphasis on theorizing the act of reading itself, and on the reflective processes that get bound up in reading and theorizing and that often provide the groundwork for insights.
ENGL 191: Artificial Intelligence in Science Fiction
Seen in:
There are as many ways to design and teach ENGL 191 as there are thought experiments in science fiction (SF). I decided to focus my ENGL 191 section on interrogating artificial intelligence (AI), since that term had, by 2025, already been transformed in the cultural domain by the advent of large-language model chatbots and their integration, still ongoing, into the mundanity of the internet. Thus, while I did give my students some crucial grounding in SF studies, I focused primarily on contemporary engagements with AI in SF, and I prioritized treatments that imagine AI as a second brain or consciousnessāas an entity of human-like intelligenceāsince this kind of imagination is what current AI companies heavily invest in producing today. As I worded it in my description for the course, I designed the class as a kind of live, critical autopsy on our contemporary reality.