Teaching Materials

In this 7-week half-semester course, I expose first-year writing students to foundational professional writing genres, including memos, emails, and short presentations. For their final assignment, students choose their own community issue to write about, then communicate with stakeholders and conduct academic research to create a change proposal. Emphasis is placed on clear, concise communication for ethical community engagement.

In this semester-long required first-year writing course I introduce students to academic research genres. First, the class examines differences in audience and authorship by comparing academic and non-academic texts. Then, I teach students how to construct a feasible research proposal. Finally, students research and write an academic contribution paper related to the course theme of Critical Race Theory.

I created this document to provide first-year writing students with key sources for researching policy, change making, and current issues affecting their communities. Some resources listed are specific to CMU and Pittsburgh, while others can be broadly applicable. This resource has been utilized by other instructors of 76-108. It has also been shared with the CMU library liaisons in developing the library research guide for the course.

I recorded this walk-through of the library database for students to view asynchronously. In the video, I describe how to conduct basic searches using the CMU library catalogue to find a book and scholarly article, then describe how to use the specific database Policy File Index to find a report/white paper. Students complete a form as they follow along with the video and learn about secondary research in preparation for writing an annotated bibliography.

This course examines rhetorical theory, practice, and tradition to give graduate students solid foundational knowledge to situate your own scholarship in relation to the long and varied history of the discipline. The course is intended as a focused, representative, and systematic study of rhetorical history, but it cannot claim to be comprehensive. Instead, we will focus on the shared history of law and rhetoric to study key concepts, representative and influential names reflecting a diversity of thought and experiences, intellectually as well as socio-politically impactful texts, and major questions or debates. We will look at how rhetoric has been intertwined with legal reasoning, argument, and persuasion from its origins in the ancient Middle East through the Western Renaissance. We will situate the texts of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Confucius, Quintilian, and others in their historical and socio-legal contexts to understand ongoing conversations about the role of words in the negotiation of meaning-making and structuring of society. In the process, we will discover how perennial arguments of justice in classical rhetoric play out around us today. As scholars continue to nuance the critical project of rhetoric, we will ask what is at stake in histories of rhetoric, why certain concepts and figures persist in the field, what we can learn, and why we should care.

Access to reproductive health care, including abortion, remains one of the most contested political, legal, social, and cultural issues. This course will focus on understanding US laws governing reproductive health care through rhetorical and cultural analysis. We will examine arguments presented in landmark legal cases concerning reproduction and reproductive rights, as well as ongoing legal and policy debates. Given that this area of law is constantly evolving, the specific topics we cover may vary but will likely include eugenics and sterilization, access to contraception and abortion, pregnancy and the legal status of the fetus, intimate partner violence, and assisted reproductive technologies. We will use court documents, legislative statutes, and scholarly texts to understand the rhetorical framework governing reproductive care. Our explorations of law and justice will be conducted from a Reproductive Justice (RJ) framework, defined by Black women activists as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent children in safe and sustainable communities. This introductory course, open to all undergraduates of any major and background, will explore various rhetorical, critical, and cultural approaches to the study of reproductive justice and law in the United States. A key focus of the course is to enhance your analytical skills and persuasive academic communication. You will cultivate these skills through class discussions, reading responses, peer workshops, and a substantial research project on a case of your choice related to RJ.

This seminar course explores fundamental questions about our national story and the role of legal communicative practices in histories of racialized differentiation, subordination, expropriation, and exploitation. Grounded in the recognition that legal rhetorics have functioned to not only regulate race but also construct and police its boundaries, this course will provide students with a rich historical framework for understanding contemporary crises. Beginning with the histories and discourses of colonial settlerism, native dispossession, and Black bondage, this course will interrogate the racial character of capital accumulation. We will continue through emancipation, racial segregation, and selective migration/immigration to understand the rhetorical traditions that created racialized patterns of socio-economic inequality. We will examine major civil rights issues such as affirmative action, voting rights, and mass incarceration to highlight the limitations and affordances of communication, persuasion, and law. Students are encouraged to make connections and introduce questions on issues that concern them in our current legal, political, and societal moment.