Writing 160 Multimodal Composition
These courses emphasize an individualized approach to writing in a small seminar setting with frequent student-teacher conferences. They are designed to give you practice communicating in a variety of social situations and media; you will have opportunities to explore your own interests and ambitions as a writer. These courses will prepare you to adjust to new communication challenges you’ll encounter in your college courses, work, and life. In Writing 160 courses, you’ll address key features of college writing, including developing major compositions through multiple stages (planning, drafting, and revising); analyzing and composing a range of texts in more than one medium (papers, podcasts, videos, etc.); conducting research and integrating it into your compositions; and learning to use your own languages (multilingualism, varieties of English, and dialects) as valuable resources in your compositions. You will improve your ability to read critically and compose in a variety of media. At the end of the term, you will submit a portfolio of your compositions, prefaced by a reflection on your development as a writer.
Writing 160.001 - Deconstructing Travel
What does it mean to travel? Is a traveler the same as a tourist? Is a migrant, immigrant, or refugee a “traveler”? Is study abroad “travel”? Is it responsible to travel in the face of a global pandemic, climate change, and increasing economic inequity? Do the benefits of travel outweigh its negative impacts?
The benefits of travel are often framed in terms of personal enrichment, but travel can also have positive impacts on destination communities. Travel can bring financial incentives in the form of job formation, increase travelers’ awareness of global inequity, and promote understanding, education, and collaboration between cultures. However, overtourism can have severe negative consequences on travel destinations. Citizens of Barcelona have long lashed out at increasing tourism in their city, complaining of overcrowding, vast amounts of waste, and high noise levels, among other concerns. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, national parks in the US were overrun with record levels of visitors, leading to damage to natural landmarks and overflowing garbage receptacles. People who choose to travel during global pandemics and natural disasters may put residents and hospitality industry employees in the travel destination at additional risk, but also contribute financially to economies that could use a boost from tourism dollars in times of crisis.
In an increasingly globalized and digital world, physical travel is becoming less necessary for commerce, education, and communication. Is there still value in travel despite issues of sustainability and harm done to destination communities? Students in this section of Writing 160 will develop their college writing skills by exploring the definition of travel, the benefits and negative impacts of travel on the world, the inequities inherent in travel, and the ways travelers seek to mitigate those impacts. They will also inquire whether travel can be undertaken responsibly in the modern age.
Writing 160.002 - Small Wonders
Writing 160 will provide you with ample opportunities to practice composing in a variety of modes that will serve you well in college and beyond. We will consider composition from the persona of a curious tinkerer. Our course will be an experimental lab where you will encounter different types of texts and try your hand at composing your own. You will learn how to summarize, analyze, research, and argue, and how to approach composition as a practice that requires deliberate attention. You will also have ample opportunity for regular personalized writing instruction in 1-1 meetings with me.
This 4-credit course will be a making-centered class where we will explore the “bug world” as a framework from which you will respond to and create multimodal compositions. We will investigate these small wonders as both embodied material beings and as rich symbolic figures, in an abundance of different mediums and modes, like children’s books, comics, zines, podcasts, memes, infographics, and more! This course is designed with an antiracist focus: one aspect of that focus is that we will consider our positionality and biases as well as larger systems and institutions by interrogating the human/nonhuman hierarchy, and links between racism and speciesism.
Writing 160.003 - If Clothes Could Talk
You wear clothes every day, but how often do you think about what they say? How – and how much – do personal style choices communicate about our social identities, our values, and the world we live in? What does our relationship to clothing reveal about histories of climate devastation, socioeconomic inequality, gender oppression, and racism? To what extent can paying more attention to what we wear contribute to their solutions? And what might clothes teach us about writing – yes, writing – for different purposes and social situations?
We will explore these questions (and more!) by critically analyzing the rhetoric of clothing itself, as well as of writing and media about clothing: from “outfit of the day” videos to fashion journalism to social histories of clothing. We will take an intersectional, anti-racist approach to the topics we study, as well as to the practices we engage in the classroom and in your compositions. Major writing projects will likely include a rhetorical analysis of a “look”; a researched, multimedia deep dive into the social and cultural significance of a single article of clothing; and a personal style project in a format of your choice.
Writing 160.004 - DIY Cultures
In the course, we will explore how some Do-It-Yourself (alternatively DIO, or Do-It-Ourselves) practitioners and subcultures value sustainability, community, expressiveness, and critiquing unchecked consumerism, among other DIY ethics. DIY subcultures include communities of practice like civic scientists, punks, and cyclists, who compose in multiple ways to exercise DIY values. In this course, we will explore DIY values as a framework from which you will respond and create multimodal compositions that include zines, literature reviews, infographics, presentations, and other media of your choice.
It is impossible to untangle race, ethnicity, and discrimination from the context in which DIY subcultures emerge and DIY multimodal work is created. This course meets the Race & Ethnicity course requirement because we will engage with DIY/DIO ideas and work that explores: a. The meaning of race, ethnicity, and racism, b. Racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality as it occurs in the U.S., and c. Comparisons of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, social class, gender identity/expression, ability/disability status, and sexual orientation.
Writing 160.005 - Identity Creation and Autoethnography
This course is about speaking for yourself. Instead of traditional ethnography, where often an observer records cultural traditions and values from an outside point of view, autoethnography is all about hearing a voice from the inside. What happens when a person becomes the speaker, the artist, and tells their own story? What traditional molds and boundaries must the artist break with in order to insert their own narrative? Does the artist invent new ways of using language and storytelling to create a sense of self? And how might their art challenge the story of the world we were previously told? This course will explore questions like these by looking at how artists create identities across mediums, telling stories grounded in or inspired by personal and generational experience. This course takes an antiracist approach by examining the possibility of identity creation outside of dominant narratives, as well as by positioning our understanding within the systems of power artists are creating into.
This first-year writing course will guide you through writing as a process, including conferences with me to discuss your ideas and peer review and writing labs to better know the community you are writing with. In this way, you will find methods to locate your personal voice and push it to its ultimate potential, not only gaining you the skill necessary to communicate with academic audiences, but the tools to apply the urgency and power of your voice across social situations. This course welcomes you to enter with your full and complex identity, because somewhere along the way you will begin to view yourself as a writer and artist in your own right, applying your personal leanings and the subcultures you are a part of to the art you will analyze, the multimodal autoethnographies you will get to produce, and your reflective final portfolio, an autoethnography of your identity creation as a scholar and artist in Writing 160.
Writing 160.006 - Food for Thought
Claire Saffitz is on a quest to make the best desserts on the planet. Binging With Babish has cracked the Krabby Patty formula. The Bear takes a surreal dive into Chicagoland kitchens. Food-related content is in a golden age, often being about more than cuisine.
Does a loved one’s memory live on through a recipe? How do our families, friends, cultures, and languages celebrate nourishment?This section of Writing 160 will grant you opportunities to write and make digital works surrounding food—preparing it, eating it, and gathering around it. We’ll focus on multimodal composition, meaning we’ll study and express ourselves through a variety of different art forms. You can expect to watch TikToks about New York City bodegas, read poems about food sensitivity and essays about the Filet-O-Fish, or discuss comedy sketches where the customer is never right. We’ll break bread, crafting creativity and arguments that will prepare us for the rest of college and outside of it.
