This page has the course syllabus for the Fall 2023 Semester

Course Description:

In short, this class aims to get you excited about writing, connect you to a meaningful topic from your life that you can explore in the class, teach you how to write without a teacher, and allow you to think more like a writer than a student.  More specifically, we will examine language, writing, and composition as a happening; and further, what happens when we are able to write ourselves as ourselves.  As we will see, writing in the academy–especially in the writing classroom–is mostly treated as overdetermined, meaning that students are expected to produce writing that is reflective of the texts that are assigned to them.  For reference, think back to the kind of writing you practiced as a high school student.  How did you come to understand the practice of composition?  What rules did you learn, either explicitly or implicitly?  With all that and more in mind, this semester we will focus on studying thinkers, methods, and mediums that can help us imagine new ways of writing and communicating that work to resist the overdetermined nature of college composition.  

We will engage with composition and college writing as a happening: as language that occurs in-the-moment, is not required to have a reference point, and does not compromise a writer’s ability to have a voice (and thus, identity) as a writer. (So, literally, the way that language happens, first intrinsically and then extrinsically, when we think, speak, write, read, and watch.)  As Gloria Anzaldúa puts it, we will use happenings as opportunities to stitch together “what’s out there” in our own lives, communities, and epistemologies.  In order to do this, we will become interdisciplinarians working at the intersection of multimodal, queer, feminist, Black, and sonic frameworks.   
We do not need to exchange ideas in the flat, hegemonic language of the academy.  (So, if you refer to a party as a “kegger,” or use “deadass” to communicate your seriousness, or if there is a word in your cultural/ethnic language that you believe describes an idea better than its Standard English counterpart, then you should use that word.) We will bring our full selves into the classroom, allowing for our identities and embodied experiences to guide our conversations, our writing, and our learning.  Above all, we will learn that writing does not have to look or sound a specific way in order to be effective.

What We’re Going to Read, What (and How) We’re Going to Write:

We will be interested in a range of scholars, thinkers, and musicians, and we will interact with a range of mediums, too.  This will allow you to notice that composition as a happening can manifest in many different arenas that rely on different materials to communicate through different mediums.  In other words, as a class, we will disrupt the idea of composition as happening only on the “space of the page” by interacting with different spaces and different “pages.”  We will consider what we can learn – and what we risk – by disrupting traditions of writing.
In attending to those questions, we will explore serious issues—particularly politics, race, class, pedagogy, and gender as well as other aspects of identity—through the rhetoric and social commentary of writers, essayists, and academics. Our readings—ranging from Socrates to Donald Glover—will explore the nature of various purposes and presentations of writing and the ways in which practicing composition both employs and distorts exposition and argumentation.    

Please Note:

1) I cannot tell you the right way to express an idea. Our job this semester, as a class, is to allow ourselves to be surprised by the happenings in the phenomenon of language and, as such, we will try our best to challenge assumptions of correctness, appropriateness, or sophistication as they present themselves in our discussions and our work.  That said, I also encourage you to challenge the thinking that presents itself in the readings and talking points we will encounter: you all are more than welcome to introduce new texts and thinkers that you feel approximate to the course objectives and the semester-long discussion that we will engage in. 

2) It is never my goal to personally offend anyone through the texts we discuss in this class.  It is my intention that students from all backgrounds will be well-served by this class and that the diversity that students bring to this class will be viewed as a resource and a strength. It is my intention to present materials and activities that are respectful of diversity in gender, sexuality, ability, socioeconomic status, faith, ethnicity, and race. I welcome your suggestions at any point on how I can do this better. Like many people, I am still in the process of learning about diverse perspectives and identities. I urge you to discuss with me any concerns you might have about what we see certain writers and thinkers doing – you may find that this is often a generative site for valuable discussion about important areas of research.

3) You don’t have to be interested in writing at all to succeed in this course.  We’re not here to learn how to mimic “good,” fool-proof writing; instead, we are here to learn about the practice of composition, what methods work well for us, and how to organize our thinking into a larger research project. That means that part of the challenge in this course is to identify the pressure points at which counterwriting–the resistance of overdetermined writing in composition by prioritizing voice, style, and embodied experience–becomes viable for us. While I do imagine a fruitful project centered around composition and happenings and hope we have a good time doing so, we’re going to be focusing on our research writing skills as well.

Course Goals:

Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to:

1. Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
2. Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.
3. Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, trope, genre, audience, and purpose.
4. Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
5. Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.

Required Text:

So, there is one required text for this course, First-Year Writing at Baruch College: Join the Conversation; however, there are two ways to access that text: you can either access the course online or you can purchase it straight from the bookstore.  Here are the instructions for accessing it online: 

• Create a Perusall account at perusall.com
• The onboarding process will ask you for a course code.
• Enter the following course code: HARRIS-NUNGQ
• Go to “Library” and click Join the Conversation.
• There will then be an option to purchase it there. It costs $27.99.
  • However, you can also purchase the textbook through the bookstore here: https://baruch.bncollege.com/shop/baruch/page/find-textbooks. The price may be different.

All other readings will be made available as PDFs or links via the syllabus course schedule or Slack channel.  It is your responsibility to read or listen to all course texts before class discussion days.  Please let me know if you have any concerns regarding accessing these materials.

Course Assignments (the following are brief descriptions—separate assignment sheets will be provided):

Playlist Journal Entries (100 words each); 10 points each; 100 points total

Most Sundays by midnight, you’ll turn in a discussion post that includes a song that you believe relates to that week’s texts along with a description of that relationship.  In preparation for our discussion, I will compile all of your songs into a weekly playlist that you can listen to in order to get a sense of how you and your classmates relate to the assigned readings.  I will also provide the opportunity for some students to briefly present the song that they’ve chosen (though it is not required).  This assignment is assessed on pass/fail criteria; specifically, I’m looking for a good-faith effort to make rhetorical connections between texts. Don’t worry about having a fully fleshed-out idea every week.  The goal is to start tracking your thinking on the course materials, so while there is no specific argument you need to make in any particular journal entry, you will be keeping a record of your response(s) to the course material.   By composing these weekly entries you will be tending to the soil of your research paper – it’s very likely that your research agenda will emerge from these assignments.  We will also use them for class discussion purposes.  

Literacy Narrative (750 words minimum, Times New Roman font 12, double spaced); 100 points. 

This assignment asks you to think about and investigate how it is that you’ve come to use language in the way that you use it today.  Who/what taught you how to read and write?  What language(s) were present when you learned to read and write?  What cultural influences and forces were at work when you learned how to write the way you write?  The main purpose of this assignment is to provide me with a narrative construction of how you’re using language.  We will discuss all of this in detail in class so that you can get a concrete understanding of what I’m looking for from you all in this assignment.

Critical Analysis (750 words minimum, Times New Roman font 12, double spaced); 100 points.

This assignment asks that you engage with a particular text we have covered in class and construct an argument that attends to the rhetorical work you see significant to it.  The two main purposes of this assignment are to demonstrate your understanding of argument and critical perspective.  By critical perspective, I mean your ability to discover something you want to call attention to and question in your chosen text.  For example, you can wonder: did the author of your text leave something out of their argument? This requires careful attention to the rhetorical theory we will read in order to frame your interpretive argument. 

Research Proposal (500 words minimum, Times New Roman font 12, double spaced); 50 points

In this assignment, you will formally propose your research agenda for the research paper.  Locating your chosen primary text among its relations to your secondary text, you will make a case for writing the research paper you want to write.  This will include establishing a literature review (a list of the secondary texts related to your primary text and main interests for the paper) as well as outlining a potential line of argument for the research paper itself.  For example, if you want to write about A Tribe Called Quest’s album The Low End Theory, then you will have to identify the secondary sources you plan to use, how they relate to what you want to examine about Tribe’s music, and a potential argument you hope to follow into your first draft (which could, and probably should, change as you start writing the actual paper).

Research Project (1500 words minimum, Times New Roman font 12, double spaced); 100 points.

This assignment is the accumulative work of this course over the semester.  Most (if not all) of our discussion will be calibrated to help you think about what text and which modality you want to examine and how to begin the process of organizing your research agenda, drafting, and editing processes.  In short, this assignment is an in-depth examination of a text (and, if applicable to your project, its modality) of your choosing and the ways in which its rhetorical construction contributes to the concerns of the course.  The last few weeks of the semester will be devoted specifically to addressing the research process and the drafting of the research paper.  Everyone will have a chance to conference with me one-on-one as you prepare and finish this assignment.  

Cover Letters (500 words minimum, Times New Roman font 12, double spaced); 50 points each, 100 points total.

Cover letters will accompany your critical analysis and research papers.  Your cover letters will examine two primary areas: 1) the construction of your argument (for example: how do your main claims relate and point to your overall conclusion?  What evidence did you select for your argument and why?)  And 2) a self-assessment of your paper.  Where are your strengths?  What do you need to work on?  What did you revise?  Be specific.  

IMPORTANT NOTE: All assignments will be turned in to me as Word doc email attachments or shared Google Docs.  If you are sharing a Google Doc with me, please be sure to set my permissions to “Commentor” or “Editor.”  I will not grade shared PDFs – only Word docs that are turned in to me as email attachments or Google Docs that have been shared with me with the appropriate permissions granted.  If you are unable to submit a Word doc or share a Google Doc for some reason, please let me know and we will work to find a solution together.

Grading Criteria:

Playlist Journals………………………….………..……………………………100 points

Literacy Narrative………………………….………..…………………………100 points

Critical Analysis and Cover Letter…………………………..…………………..150 points

Research Paper and Cover Letter….……………………………………………150 points

Research Proposal…………………………………………………………………50 points

Research Presentation……………………………………………………………100 points

Participation…………………….……………………………………………….100 points

Total amount of points…………………………………………..………..…….750 points

Your final grade will be the percentage of points you earn out of 750.  (And will be adjusted accordingly with the attendance policy).

A: 95-100% B+: 88-90% C+: 78-80% D+: 68-70%

A-: 91-94% B: 84-87% C: 74-77% D: 60-68% B-: 81-83% C-: 71-73% F: 60% or below

Course Policies

Participation:

Participation will be graded holistically at the end of the semester.  This course is heavily dependent on discussion as a class (e.g., workshop days).  That said, I expect everyone to be in class on time, prepared, and ready to go when we have class.  I understand “prepared” and “ready to go” can look different for everyone, but I am looking for engagement with the material and your peers.  Some examples of this are 1) having a submission turned in for a playlist journal, 2) verbally participating in class discussion, and 3) engaging with one another in the Slack channel.  Moreover, participation isn’t just about speaking in class – it’s also about responding respectfully to your peers and listening actively.  So be aware: lack of respect for your peers will affect your participation grade negatively.  If you have concerns about your participation grade at any point over the course of the semester, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me to discuss it.  Do the work, ask questions when you have them, and participate in an active classroom environment and you will succeed.  Please note: this grade is worth as much as a major paper.

Conferences:

As you get on with the work of the semester, you may find that meeting one on one to discuss ideas, confusion, or simply following up on discussions from class becomes necessary.  That’s what office hours are all about – and I’ll work with your schedule if my posted hours don’t work with yours.  Please use office hours.  Talk through what you’re thinking.  Everyone will be required to meet with me at least once over the course of the semester.  Failure to do so will result in losing ten points from your overall participation grade.  I reserve the right to request conferences.

Attendance:

As a collaborative, discussion-based class, we are trying to develop a learning community.  A community implies participation, as your input is necessary for other folks’ learning process.  Thus, attendance is important.  In this class, you are permitted two absences before your grade is affected.  For every absence after three, your final grade will be lowered by half a letter grade.  (For example, if you earn a B in the class and you were absent four times you will receive a B-).  If you are absent six times (or more) you will fail the course.  Contact me regarding each absence and let me know what’s going on; this policy is binding (barring extenuating circumstances, of course).  All latenesses do impact your participation grade as I expect you to be in class in order to participate. 

Lateness and Late Assignments:

All assignments are due on the dates indicated on the course calendar. All due dates are both binding and subject to change – so keep up on Blackboard (I will try to keep it up to date and have it reflect any changes we discuss during class).  Generally, late assignments aren’t a good look.  That said, if you are experiencing problems or have a legitimate reason for requesting an extension, please talk to me before the due date to see if something can be arranged.  Do not hesitate to contact me before due dates.  Discussions after due dates generally aren’t productive. 

Technology in the Classroom: 

We live in a world where digital technology is nearly ubiquitous.  I don’t have anything against the use of technology in this class, as some of the course material can only be accessed using smartphones, tablets, or laptops and I will need to use digital technology to conduct class sometimes.  If it becomes a distraction for you, or you generally get on fine without having to use technology, I will not fault you if you refrain from using it during class.  If you have complications with technology, please let me know and we can make arrangements around that.  Additionally, I want to address Artificial Intelligence (AI) and writing.  This semester, we’ll learn what it means to engage with AI in productive, responsible, and ethical ways (specifically, how to use AI as a research and writing organization tool so that it can help you in the process of crafting a project instead of doing the work of crafting for you).  We will learn about and use AI as a tool like any other technology we have in our possession to help us during the research writing process, and we will investigate what advantages and disadvantages we are afforded when we rely on AI. 

Baruch College Academic Honesty Policy:

Baruch College expects that students will give credit to the proper sources for their work, meet their professors’ expectations when doing group work, and prepare for and take examinations without the assistance of prohibited sources or tools.  Baruch’s policies are a reflection of the expectations set forth by the City University of New York.Penalties for academic dishonesty may include academic sanctions, such as failing the course(s) in question or otherwise receiving reduced grades, and/or disciplinary sanctions, which include suspension or expulsion from the institution.  To review the College’s specific policies and sanctions, please visit: provost.baruch.cuny.edu/academic-affairs/teaching-and-learning/academic_honesty

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