Teaching and Course Development:
As a specialist in composition pedagogy and curriculum development, I work with a team of dedicated colleagues to develop courses, learning outcomes, and pedagogy for the Composition Program, which we regularly assess and revise. I have worked to develop courses, teach them and assess across all levels of composition, from Foundations In Writing to Intermediate Writing and beyond. Below are links to course sites for four of the composition courses I’ve developed, along with a brief description and rationale for each course.
Navigating Course Sites:
- Course Blog Posts – As you click through to each course site, you can get a sense for the day-to-day lessons and operations of the class by scrolling down through the course blog posts (these will go in reverse-chronological order, from the last day of class back to the first).
- Course Documents – Navigating the course site menu will allow you to view course documents, such as the syllabus, and all of the project assignments.
- Course Schedule – On each site, clicking on the “Schedule” tab will show the schedule of assignments, homework and in-class work for each course.
- Course Support – Pages on each course site such as “About,” “Resources,” and sometimes “Peer Mentors,” will show various ways I have made individuals (such as myself or peer mentors), websites and other documents more available to students to act as references and friendly, helpful points of contact.
Courses:
APEX Writing-Foundations in Writing
APEX is a bridge program at Wayne State University that helps students who otherwise would not be admitted to the school based on grades/test scores, to participate in a summer college-readiness program. Students attend college-level courses taught by faculty (like myself), live on campus and attend workshops to help them prepare for college in the Fall semester. My APEX writing course is based on a common syllabus that I helped to revise for the summer bridge program of 2015.
ENG 1020-Ecological Model of Writing
This curriculum was developed in response to several research questions that became the heart of my dissertation project. I hypothesize that a composition course that explicitly instructs students in reflection practices, in the concepts of discourse community and a literate ecology, and that asks them to research and write reflectively about these concepts will help students grow in the mindful abstraction that Salomon and Perkins point to as essential for “high-road transfer” of knowledge. This course was developed to support composition students’ transfer of writing knowledge beyond FYC and into future writing contexts. This research is currently in progress.
ENG 5010-Advanced Expository Writing
The development of this course builds an advanced non-fiction writing curriculum around multi-modal approaches to process, delivery and rhetorical strategy. Students are asked to examine expository writing strategies in light of both alphabetic text (“traditional composition”) and digital composing modes. Students examine what it means to write about self and others, to explain tricky subjects to particular audiences, and to compose for multiple modalities, using the strategies of expository composition in new ways.
Nicole Guinot Varty, PhD. 