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WELCOME TO ENGLISH 1010

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Essential Details

Section 036 (Spring 2020)

Seminar meeting: Tuesdays and Thursdays 8:00 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. (Gentry 203)

Studio meeting: Alternating Fridays 8:00 a.m. to 9:50 a.m. (Austin 245)

Instructor: Gabe Morrison

First-Year Writing Course Description

The University of Connecticut’s First-Year Writing (FYW) seminars are characterized by collaborative, student-driven inquiry. As a general education course, FYW prepares students for future compositions both within and outside of the university by asking them to use writing to contribute to active conversations across various media. The FYW instructor and student work collaboratively to compose through engagement with a semester-long inquiry, developing and asking questions through a shared area of exploration. Through cycles of creation, feedback, and reflection, students work on projects in which they select and define places where they might advance the class conversation. Your work this semester will introduce you to the kinds of processes, choices, and moves you will make throughout your life as a writer and creator of content. The work of this class will include reading and responding to those texts in substantive, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and productive ways through multiple modes of communication and representation.

Writing Across Borders

Writing is always an act of crossing. Writing is a medium—literally, an in-betweenness that must be crossed to connect authors to audiences. Yet from another perspective, writing is the crosser; it moves, blends, and connects persons, meanings, identities, languages, locations.

 

In this class, we'll consider what it means to write across media, languages, and borders. We'll do this by considering writing's role in one of the most contentious crossing points in contemporary American discourse—the US-Mexico border. We'll have the opportunity to practice writing for translation, and we'll experiment with what happens to writing in digital spaces as it interacts with other media. We'll analyze the rhetoric surrounding contemporary debates surrounding immigration, and we'll enter our writing into the conversation. And we'll have the chance to use writing-as-activism as we partner with a nonprofit dedicated to migrant rights.

 

In this class, we'll write. And then we'll think about what that writing does. And then we'll write some more.

A bird's-eye shot captures the Rio Grande snaking down a strip of brown and green border landscape.

Writing for Migrant Justice

APPROACH COMPOSITION AS A COMPLEX PROCESS

  • Practice composing and writing as creative acts of inquiry and discovery through written, aural, visual, video, gestural, and spatial texts

  • Consider projects and problems from multiple ways of knowing

  • Develop new methods for all forms (including digital) of textual analysis, synthesis, and representation

  • Formulate strategies for the conceptual, investigative, practical, and reflective work of writing

Sticky notes overlapping on a wall represent a brainstorming process.

COURSE MATERIALS

All texts will be available as PDFs or links to online content through Google Classroom.

CONTACT ME

Office:

Austin 151

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Office Hours:

Tuesdays, 9:30-10:30

and by appointment

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