It’s that time again to post the classes I’m taking and what I’ll be reading and working on in the coming months. Classes don’t officially start until September 2nd but in reality they’ve already begun, as we had a mini-class for the teaching composition course and I have to have a book read for my other class that meets on Tuesday.

For readers not in the know, I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at UW-Milwaukee. This year I lucked out by landing a 25% Creative Writing Program Assistant job and a 25% Teaching Assistant position, which means I teach one composition class instead of two (that other 50% goes to finishing coursework) and I’m locked into the PA/TA position for the year. I’m also guaranteed an additional four years of TA funding.

The classes with brief descriptions and reading lists after the break:

ENG 701 - Teaching College Composition
ENG 813 - Fiction Workshop: Obstructions and Restrictions

Overall, this semester is somewhat daunting but doable.

ENG 701 - Teaching College Composition
All first-year TAs at UWM take this course while teaching one or two classes and also has a mentoring system built in so you have a support system if (or more likely when) the stress of teaching a new curriculum starts to fray the nerves. The topic is pedagogy with a focus on composition, naturally, but it applies to other kinds of teaching as well.

I wouldn’t say I’m excited for this class since it’s a lot of work and it’s a required class, which is always hard to get excited about. But after taking this class that means I’m eligible to teach Creative Writing and, after I take Professional Writing Pedagogy in the spring, some professional writing courses as well. Besides boatloads of student essays, here’s what we’re reading.

Anzaldúa / Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza / Pages 75-86 (File size=508K)
Anzaldúa / Entering into the Serpent (File size=774K)
Aune / Chapter 2: Catching the Third Wave: The Dialectic of Rhetoric and Technology / in At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies [Rosteck, ed.] (File size=769K)
Auten / A Rhetoric of Teacher Commentary: The Complexity of Response to Student Writing (File size=802.6K)
Baldwin / Stranger in the Village (File size=898K)
Bizzell / Power, Authority, and Critical Pedagogy (File size=892.8K)
Black / Between Talk and Teaching / Chapter 1: Conversation, Teaching, and Points in Between (File size=1485.9K)
Blair & Michel / Chapter 1: Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial / in At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies [Rosteck, ed.] (File size=2948K)
Chase / Accommodation, Resistance and the Politics of Student Writing (File size=482.2K)
Cooper / Developing Discourse Practice in Adolescence and Adulthood / Chapter 3: The Answers are Not in the Back of the Book (File size=1526.7K)
Flower & Hayes / Cross-Talk in Comp Theory / A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing (File size=1281K)
Fulkerson / Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (File size=1936.9K)
Fulkerson / Composition Theory in the Eighties: Axiological Consensus and Paradigmatic Diversity (File size=1048.1K)
Gee / Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction (File size=1402.7K)
Gould / The Panda’s Thumb / Chapter 9: A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse (File size=439.5K)
Hendricks / Resources for Teaching Ways of Reading / On Teaching Ways of Reading (File size=1247.9K)
Hull / Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts / Chapter 7: Acts of Wonderment (File size=1449.6K)
Hull & Rose / “This Wooden Shack Place”: The Logic of an Unconventional Reading (File size=605.8K)
Hull et al. / Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse (File size=1865K)
Johnson / Participatory Rhetoric and the Teacher as Racial/Gendered Subject (File size=650.0K)
Keith / Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement / Chapter 1: Origins of Speech Pedagogy (File size=1464K)
Kopelson / Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; Or, the Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered as a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance (File size=1612.2K)
Lu / Cross-Talk in Comp Theory / Professing Multiculturalism (File size=1011.2K)
Lynch & Jukuri / Beyond Master and Slave: Reconciling Our Fears of Power in the Writing Classroom (File size=1067K)
Lynch et al. / Moments of Argument: Agonistic Inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation / in On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays [Ede, ed.] (File size=959K)
Miller / Fault Lines in the Contact Zone (File size=1246.3K)
Nealon & Searls Giroux / The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences / Chapter 2: Author/ity (File size=K) NOT YET POSTED
Nealon & Searls Giroux / The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences / Chapter 3: Reading (File size=K) NOT YET POSTED
The New London Group [Cope & Kalantzis, eds.] / Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures / Chapter 1: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures (File size=K) NOT YET POSTED
Phillips / Houdini’s Box (File size=1551K)
Porter / Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community / Chapter 1: Introduction: The Problem of Audience (File size=K) NOT YET POSTED
Pratt / Arts of the Contact Zone (File size=791.3K)
Rankin / From Simple to Complex: Ideas of Order in Assignment Sequences (File size=555.5K)
Salvatori / Reading and Writing a Text: Correlations Between Reading and Writing Patterns (File size=697.9K)
Seitz / Eluding Righteous Discourse: A Discreet Politics for New Writing Curricula (File size=412.3K)
Silko / Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit / Fences Against Freedom (File size=613.8K)
Sommers / Between the Drafts / in On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays [Ede, ed.] (File size=588.0K)
Straub / The Concept of Control in Teacher Response (File size=1270.4K)
Trimbur / Cross-Talk in Comp Theory / Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning (File size=1016.9K)
Yancey / Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key (File size=1781.5K)
Welch / Sideshadowing Teacher Response (File size=1526.4K)
Williams / Phenomenology of Error (File size=947K)

My professor from last year’s awesome Visual Narratives class is teaching this one and, for once, I’m pretty stoked about workshop. I’m not a huge fan of the typical workshop format where everyone passes two stories around the group over the course of the semester, and this is most certainly not going to be that kind of workshop. This workshop builds off a lot of the movements we studied in the Visual Narratives class (Oulipo, Surrealism, Fluxus, etc).

We haven’t met so the mechanics of the workshop haven’t been explained yet (i.e. what we’re supposed to produce by the end besides a lot of experimental stuff) but we do have the book list. Besides reading and critiquing each others’ work, we’re reading:

•The Writing Experiment, Hazel Smith, ISBN 1741140153
•The Age of Wire and String, Ben Marcus ISBN 1564781968
•The Journalist, A Novel, Harry Mathews ISBN 1564781658
•Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, Marcel Benabou ISBN 080326139X
•How I Wrote Certain Of My Books, Raymond Roussel ISBN 1878972146
•The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien ISBN 156478214X

I’m excited to see Roussel as I wrote my final paper on him last year and discovered he was a bit of a loon, so I will probably be presenting his book as my in-class project.

And of course the professor is great, so if you add that up with interesting material you can’t hardly go wrong.

Current Mood: Fine |
Currently Listening To - The Hold Steady - “Stay Positive”