2020

I taught English 3080: Persuasion as a Civic Writing course, and students followed bills under discussion and debate in the state legislature. Students joined me on a site visit to the Georgia State Capitol building one time before the COVID-19 lockdown moved our course fully online. Our course also had a partnership with Georgia Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, and students worked in groups to review and copyedit public manuals on school-based behavioral health for this non-profit organization. 

2018

As part of an Honor’s 3260 course I taught titled “Civic Engagement and Writing for Social Change,” students joined me on a few site visits to the Georgia State Capitol building, just a few blocks up the road from our classroom on GSU’s campus. On one of our visits, C-SPAN happened to be visiting and encouraged the students to explore their interactive media on the bus.

2018

As part of the Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference (GSURC), several students from the Visual Rhetoric course I taught presented their visual analysis papers.

2017

For my Fall 2017 section of English 3135: Visual Rhetoric, I coordinated a street art walking tour, which was led by Alex Santos, a GSU student and muralist. As an urban campus, GSU makes it easy for us to walk out onto Edgewood Avenue and view a number of murals; we ended our tour at Krog Street Tunnel. Students selected murals to examine in more detail for a visual analysis project.

2017

Another component of the Visual Rhetoric course I taught was a collaboration with the community-based research project Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern, students selected visual artifacts from the walls of Manuel’s Tavern for which to conduct research and visual analysis and to compose multimodal projects. Linked below are a few of the student projects featured on the website:

2016

 For this section of English 1101 in Fall 2016, I required students to conduct 6 hours of direct service with our community partner Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a home that serves terminally-ill cancer patients free of charge. The site is located right next to Turner Field. The photo below is from our first site visit, which we made as a class, to tour the facility and learn more about volunteer needs and procedures. Several of students’ major writing projects, such as an observation report using the IMRaD format and a public letter, drew on their experiences from service learning and they wrote reflections each time they visited.

2014

I taught an Honors 3260 interdisciplinary seminar titled Literacy, Community, and Public Schools that partnered Honors College students as mentors with middle school students at Inman Park Middle School for bi-weekly mentorship meetings throughout the semester. These service learning experiences resulted in student reflections, as well as mentorship projects and research essays. GSU students (as pictured above) would meet one-on-one with their mentees in an outdoor courtyard on Inman Middle’s campus.

2014

Stop Telling Women to Smile + GSU

I collaborated with a number of GSU faculty, departments, and student groups to bring Tatyana Fazlalizadeh and her public art project Stop Telling Women to Smile (STWTS) to GSU and the Atlanta area April 3-5, 2014. STWTS addresses gender-based street harassment by wheat pasting drawn portraits of women paired with phrases that speak back to offenders in urban spaces.

2013

Community-Based Projects: Digital Writing & Publishing

In Fall 2013, I designed English 3120: Electronic Writing and Publishing to have a signature service-learning experience where students partnered with 5 community non-profit organizations to collaborative, in groups of 4-5 students, create digital writing projects ranging from videos to websites.