All of my materials are available for adaptation and reuse. If you would like to request a copy of a syllabus, you can email me at novotnmt [at] uwm [dot] edu.
Department of English, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Fall 2019 – Present.
ENG 712: Theories in Public Rhetoric and Community Engagement (Cultural Rhetorics-themed) (Spring 2020; Fall 2023; graduate-level course)
This course is a basic introduction to the theories and methodologies useful to practicing cultural rhetorics. Meaning, students enrolled in this course will gain general knowledge about the theories and methodologies that inform the study of cultural rhetorics. By the end of the semester, students will gain experience examining and practicing what it looks like to do cultural rhetorics scholarship. Two goals exist for this class. One, for students to be able to identify the practices and theories defining the field of cultural rhetorics. Two, to provide theoretical foundation for students to build a cultural rhetorics methodology in relationship to their individual scholarly areas of study. As such, this course asks students to think through both the how and the what of the field so as to practice a relational building/making that is central to creating a sustaining field.
ENG 755: Issues in Writing Research (The Social Justice Turn in Technical and Professional Communication) (Fall 2020; graduate-level course)
This graduate course will examine the theory, research, and pedagogy that comprises and informs the field of Technical and Professional Communication (TPC). “Professional writing” operates as an umbrella term to refer to the field of study that researches and practices writing—broadly construed to include textual, digital, and visual communication—in a variety of business, governmental, technological, scientific, medical, and public contexts. While this course will provide a foundation to the field of TPC, our focus will be examining professional writing theory and pedagogy through a social justice lens. Students in this course will read recent books and articles that comprise the argument for why the social justice turn is essential to TPC. Doing so, students will work on a final project that applies social justice to solve a technical and professional communication problem they have identified.
ENG 701: Writing Pedagogies (Spring 2024; graduate-level course)
This course will examine theories and practices that inform college writing pedagogies today. You will learn about the history of pedagogy in Composition Studies along with contemporary approaches to teaching academic, professional, technical, and public writing at universities. While this course will entail quite a bit of reading in the first half of the semester, we will also “practice what we teach” through individual and collaborative composing activities each week. We will examine how writing pedagogies can be shaped by diverse languages, cultures, abilities, genres, audiences, literacies, and modalities. We will question what it means to write, to compose, and to adopt a specific pedagogical approach. Whether you have taught for many years or are just beginning your teaching career, this course should help you get a sense of the research-informed practices and critical thought that can shape your philosophy as a teacher and your approach to writing pedagogy and practice.
ENG 749: Advanced Internship in Writing and Community Engagement (Spring 2024; graduate-level course)
Students from English 749 Advanced Internship in Writing and Community Engagement will be matched with a host (professional and/or community) organization for the duration of the semester. Each placement is a custom situation geared to the student’s stated interests in conjunction with available options. Once the student has a placement, the student’s assigned work (other than various forms and reviews) is through their host organization. It is important to maintain good communications with the host organization’s supervisor.
ENG 854: Seminar in College Writing Pedagogy (Community Literacies & Writing) (Spring 2022; graduate-level course)
ENG 854 is a seminar course on “Community Literacies & Writing.” As the sub-title suggests this course will examine the literacy practices of people and organizations that use writing to create social change in local and national contexts. As a class, we will (1) investigate what is meant by ‘literacy’ and how scholars have expanded its definition; (2) study how communities write themselves and how scholars study these communities; (3) examine how various writing and literacy practices are used as a tool for public awareness; (4) learn how community projects/organizations utilize writing and other literacy practices for expression, dialogue across difference, and community building; (5) and consider how the objectives of higher education sometimes counter community needs and consider the necessary changes needed community-engaged scholarship in order to address disconnects between institutional knowledge-making and community advocacy. In sum, this course serves as a survey to the many conversations and practices influencing the subfield that is Community Literacy & Writing.
ENG 713: Research Methods in Rhetorics, Literacies, and Community Engagement (Spring 2021; graduate-level course)
The title of ENG 713 is “Research Methods in Rhetorics, Literacies, and Community Engagement.” As such, this is a course about goals and means of knowledge production: how, who, and why knowledge gets produced, circulated, and consumed. An overarching goal of the course will be to practice and develop methodological thinking about qualitative research. This means the course invites you to think about research through two primary qualitative methods–ethnographic field research and interviewing–while considering their methodological limitations and affordances. Simultaneously, it’ll also invite you to become acquainted with other methods as they may become useful for your goals. The aim is not so much to learn a catalogue of possible “tools” (though those are certainly useful!) abstracted from their uses, but rather, to cultivate a methodological imagination: to acquire the habit of asking questions like “what questions are most interesting and relevant to problems I’m interested in addressing?” What is entailed in finding answers to those questions–or finding better questions?” “Which methods and strategies are most likely to help make the discoveries I hope to make?”
ENG 427: Writing for Nonprofits (Social Media Content) (Fall 2019; Fall 2021; undergrad/grad-level course)
Students from English 427 Writing for Nonprofits will create a social media content strategy for a designated community partner. As a service-learning course, groups of two to three students will be partnered with a local non-profit, government, or education organization. This course will challenge students to follow through on actual technical communication tasks while completing a portfolio of documents detailing a social media content strategy for a nonprofit organization.
ENG 443: Grant Writing (Fall 2022; undergrad/grad-level course)
In this course, students will develop skills essential for successful grant writing by focusing on the rhetorical genre of a grant as well as the fostering of relationships — necessary when seeking a grant. Such a dual-focus is essential given the multiple stakeholders involved in the grant-seeking and grant-reporting process. To facilitate experiences with grant writing students will work in teams and be assigned to a community partner. They will work as a team to research, propose, draft, and present potential grant opportunities to the real-life community partner.
ENG 444: Technical Editing (Fall 2019; Fall 2021; undergrad/grad-level course)
This course offers a series of experiences to investigate, practice, and reflect on the necessary skills of an editor. Whether or not you will ever have the job title of “editor” in the future, chances are strong that editing will be part of you are hired in a professional writing/technical communication position. This course will prepare you to be adaptable to the ever-changing demands of professional writing/technical communication. As students, you will learn the foundations of editing, including both copyediting and comprehensive editing practices. Copyediting focuses on the editing of minor grammatical and usage errors; while comprehensive editing includes attention to “fix” minor errors, it also asks editors to re-envision and reshape a document from a rhetorical perspective. Example assignments that will give you practice editing include the creation of a style sheet and a memo detailing your decisions, copyediting a document for a client, and a comprehensive editing assignment. As a course that also acknowledges how copyediting is changing due to technology and commitments to diversity and inclusion, a series of reflections with a small research component will also be assigned. The goal of this course is to provide students with concrete skills to edit and also provide further insight for how editing is shifting in the 21st century.
ENG 449: Advanced Internship in the Humanities (Spring 2024; undergrad-level course)
Students from English 449 Advanced Internship in the Humanities will be matched with a host (professional and/or community) organization for the duration of the semester. Each placement is a custom situation geared to the student’s stated interests in conjunction with available options. Once the student has a placement, the student’s assigned work (other than various forms and reviews) is through their host organization. It is important to maintain good communications with the host organization’s supervisor.
ENG 430: Advanced Writing Workshop (Health Decision Aids) (Spring 2021;Spring 2023; undergrad-level course)
This section of English 430 will focus on advanced writing practices related to the health professions, broadly, and more specifically the moments when patients encounter health writing. As students living in a global pandemic, who are consumers of health, this class will introduce you to the multiple genres the construct and shape how we consume, understand, and rely on written health information to make health-based decisions as patients.
ENG 207: Health Science Writing (Summer 2021; Summer 2022; Summer 2023; Summer 2024; undergrad-level course)
English 207 introduces the theory and practice of health science writing. While it will prove interesting and useful to students from many majors, its target audiences are students in the College of Health Sciences, the College of Nursing, Pre-Medicine, Dental, and other medical fields.
Department of English, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 2017-2019.
Cultural Rhetorics (Fall 2018; undergrad-level course)
This course focuses on rhetoric as culture. Meaning, we will explore how cultures have their own rhetorical practices. Class time and assignments will reflect on the relationship of rhetoric to race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, embodiment, and so on. We will investigate these relationships by exploring how culture is frequently described as an object and push back against this by reorienting culture as a practice. For example, culture often is created through rhetorical practices like language, performance, text, and other material practices. We will look at these scenes and investigate them through research. Building on the concept of culture as practice, this class will examine how cultural communities get constructed and invite students to consider their own cultural communities, the dominant narratives that get produced about their communities, and respond to these misconceptions by creating a multimodal counternarrative.
Digital Rhetoric in Health & Medicine (Fall 2017; undergrad/grad-level course)
This course focuses on digital rhetoric in health and medicine and takes up two questions: (1) what is digital rhetoric and (2) why does digital rhetoric matter to health and medicine? Students will study rhetorical theories of technology and analyze health informational technologies across race, gender, and sexuality. Methods of digital rhetorical research, ethics, project management and information design will be learned. These skills will support students in completing a final project that informs a public audience about the intersections of digital technologies in health and medicine. Understanding the rhetoric behind technologies and theories of health and medicine will propel you later, as professional writers, to become effective technical communicators.
Grant Writing Foundations (Spring 2018, scheduled for Spring 2019; undergrad/grad-level course)
In this course, students will develop skills essential for successful grant writing, focusing on the rhetorical genre of a grant as well as the fostering of relationships, necessary, when seeking a grant. Such a dual-focus is essential given the multiple stakeholders involved in the grant-seeking and grant-reporting process. As such, students will: (1) practice analyzing the rhetorical practices and moves made by different grant seeking organizations, examining the texts they produced for various grant funders; (2) practice creating a grant proposal of their own; (3) learn grant writing concepts and jargon associated with creating and coordinating the multiple types of documents, gaining hands-on experience preparing effective proposals; (4) practice identifying and selecting funding sources; and (5) conclude this course by drafting a grant proposal. Through these tasks, students will leave this course with a foundational understanding of the genre of grant writing and an aptitude of skills that apply to the process of grant funding.
Visual Rhetoric & Document Design (Fall 2018; undergrad/grad-level course)
This course examines the rhetoric of visuals in professional and digital writing texts. All texts carry meaning and convey information, including visuals. In this class, then we will broadly explore how visuals communicate and are rhetorical. We will experience how new media and technologies can assist professional writers and digital rhetoricians in telling a particular story; simultaneously we will critically examine how these technologies can also do harm. This class weaves in critical perspectives while providing structured experiences in document design. To sum it up, this class builds upon the philosophy that professional writers are designers. We can design visuals to influence minds around the world. It is our job as global citizens then to make stuff that matters.
Advanced Writing (Fall 2017, Spring 2018; undergrad-level course)
This undergraduate writing course is designed to reflect on your prior experiences in the liberal arts at UWO, develop skills necessary for success in producing academic research, and provide moments of practice with forms of advanced writing that you will be exposed to after this course – either in your major and/or future career. As someone who has spent the last six years as a student higher education, I have learned that to be a researcher requires planning, understanding when you need to revise your plan, how to navigate or find sources, and how to assess source content. This class then is structured to provide you these experiences. In sum, we will learn that doing research and writing for different audiences and in different mediums is not always cut and dry: it evolves, is revised, and, ultimately, changes.
Web Authoring & Design Course
This course provides a rhetorical foundation for web authoring and design in professional writing settings. Students will learn basic principles of writing for the web, coding for accessibility, and usability testing. The production-oriented component of the course provides instruction in writing valid code and practice with web- and graphic-editing software tools. *I developed this course during the summer of 2018 from a faculty development grant that I received from UWO. It has yet to be taught, but will be offered in rotation as the minor develops.
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University, 2011–2016.
Research Methods in Rhetoric & Writing (Spring 2016; grad-level course; teaching intern with Dr. Julie Lindquist)
The title of WRA 870 is “Research Methods in Rhetoric and Writing.” As such, this is a course about goals and means of knowledge production. Our goal this semester will be to practice and develop methodological thinking: with this as our primary objective, the course won’t so much take a “coverage” approach, in which an array of methods are introduced and given equal time. Rather, it will invite you to think through two primary methods–ethnographic field research and interviewing–while considering their methodological affordances. However, it’ll also invite you to become acquainted with other methods as they may become useful for your goals. Our aim is not so much to learn a catalogue of possible “tools” (though those are certainly useful!) abstracted from their uses, but rather, to cultivate a methodological imagination: to acquire the habit of asking questions like “what questions are most interesting and relevant to problems in the field?” What is entailed in finding answers to those questions–or finding better questions?” Which methods and strategies are most likely to help make the discoveries I hope to make?” Our conversations about research won’t necessary assume that each of us will take on a project directed to literacy practices in educational contexts–though we’ll read examples of such work, and that is certainly a direction you can choose to take. A premise of this course is that any inquiry into cultural values, practices, or scenes can yield knowledge relevant to the educational mission of rhetoric and writing studies. (Part of our work, in fact, will entail discovering which forms of research have most commonly been put in the service of that mission.)
Medical Rhetoric & Science Writing (Spring 2016; undergrad-level course; co-taught with Dr. Bill Hart-Davidson)
Medical rhetoric and science writing skills are valued within a variety of professions including (but not limited to) health, medicine, the environment, engineering, law, as well as journalism and professional writing. Given this scope, The American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) describes two types of medical and science writers: scientific medical writers and non-scientific medical writers. Scientific medical writers typically are tasked with communicating scientific information to professional medical or scientific audiences within scientific journals. Non-scientific medical writers typically are tasked with communicating less-technical content to a lay audience via newspapers, magazines and patient education materials.
This course then recognizes the interdisciplinary purposes (and audiences) of medical rhetoric and scientific writing. Specifically, this course will examine theories, methodologies, and ideologies that undergird medical and scientific writing with an eye towards both critique and imitation of scientific writing styles. As such, this course is designed as a survey course in medical rhetoric and science writing. The course will be structured around the following units:
- The Genre of Medical and Science Writing
- The Rhetorical Construction of Medicine and Science
- Medical Narratives
Writing Center Theory & Practice (Fall 2016; undergrad-level course)
Writing Center Theory and Practice is designed to examine the techniques and theories that inform the practice of tutoring writing. In particular, this course will train you to tutor writing in The Writing Center at MSU, as well as other tutoring spaces across campuses, ages, identities, and communities. The course will focus on the practical components of writing center work and how these methods can be applied across settings. Specific topics will include collaborative learning, consultation approaches, consultant roles, grammar instruction discussions, consulting strategies for a variety of clients (on campus and in the community), technology use in the writing center, composition & learning theories that influence writing center work, and resource development.
Intro to Professional Writing (Fall 2015; undergrad-level course)
In Introduction to Professional Writing, students will be exposed the theories and practices guiding conversations in the field of professional writing. Six central concepts of professional writing will guide our inquiry in this course. (1) Professional writers build and maintain relationships. (2) Because professional writers build and maintain relationships, their social abilities and curiosity are just as important as their ability to construct coherent prose or communicate in multiple media. (3) Professional writers write, edit, and design on behalf of others. (4) Writing is a practice that involves more than the command of words. (5) Economic and cultural changes have made professional writing a viable area of study. (6) Study and practice with professional writing builds skills that allow you to pursue a variety of areas of inquiry outside of the university. These six central concepts of PW will be explored through a series of projects, readings, viewings, and in‐class activities.
Writing: Race & Ethnicity in America (Fall 2012; undergrad-level FYW course)
This course will explore how you understand race in America. Every assignment will ask you to critically question America’s understanding of this race as well as your own understanding of race. This mode of inquiry will be based around the concept of stories. We have all been told different and ranging stories about race – from our family, popular culture to academic and professional disciplines. These different stories have then impacted our approach and attitudes about race in America. This class will then attempt to uncover those stories and critically question how the rhetorical act of telling a story can impact larger American values and perceptions of race. Additionally, you will be asked to critically inquire about the individual stories you have been told and evaluate how they have influenced your understanding of race.
Writing: Women in America (Spring 2013; undergrad-level FYW course)
This course will explore what it means to be a woman in America and in the 21st century. Often times when a course is titled “Women in America” historical references come to one’s mind. Some may think of the women’s suffrage movement of the early 20th century. Others may think of bra burning and feminist protests of the 1960s and 1970s. This course, however, will ask you to explore, analyze and discover what it means to you individually and as a community –to be female in 2013. Please note, this theme does not privilege solely the female perspective. Members of this class come from different backgrounds, locations, and even different genders. As such, we will work as a class to facilitate discussions that attempt to incorporate various understandings of what it means to be female and how it is defined as a society in 2013.
Writing: The Evolution of American Thought (Fall 2011, Spring 2012; undergrad-level FYW course)
In this course we will examine, as a class, where literacy “lives” in the multiple and diverse communities where we reside. From this, we will write from, write to, write for, write about, and write with the community you select to work with throughout the semester. To do so, we will work with these communities and reflect upon our relationship with them as we progress throughout the semester. In addition, all of the projects that we create in class will be revised and anonymously published in our class blog. The goal of this class is to bring your outside communities into our classroom. These projects will then expand the classroom walls and invite your community and the general public into your writing. As such, each blog entry that is produced will then be advertised by a group of students in order to attract a larger, more public audience. As a class, we will work on honing our skills as writers who objectively engage and inquire about the communities we live in and our relationship to the greater world. In addition, we will examine the writing process and develop a thorough understanding of what it means to use rhetoric in writing and the world. As such, we will strive to develop writing skills that will not only be of benefit to your academic career but overall role as engaged, public citizens.