Media Policies and Media Reform

Course descriptions for the Fall 2006 semester are due tomorrow, which meant I had to commit myself to a topic for the Composition II class that I'll be teaching. It's been a few semesters since I've taught comp, and I plan to do quite an overhaul on the way I organize the course. I'll be cutting down on the reading (which is hard to do since most students generally come with less background knowledge than one would hope) and placing more emphasis on the writing. I'm hoping that my daily use of rhetorical templates, as advocated by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein in They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing will help students to process the course material more thoroughly and enable them to generate ideas and structure their thoughts more coherently.

I'd like to have my students maintain blogs for the class, but will not do so unless I can get my class moved to a computer lab.

In my opinion teaching composition is the most difficult assignment one can get working in an English Department. Naturally, then, the task is generally passed along to graduate students and adjunct faculty, whom we all know are not well compensated for their efforts.

Strike up the band: "No-body said it was ea-saaaay..."

Course # 22418 ENGL 161 TR 11:00-12:15
Instructor: Rasmussen, Eric Dean
Course Title: Media Policies and Media Reform

The disciplinary focus of this class is media studies, with an emphasis on analyzing contemporary U.S. media policies and practices. We will be examining how the media system works in the United States and why, in the interest of democracy, academics and activists are calling for citizens to play a greater role in shaping the corporate dominated media sphere. To learn more about the course topic, visit mediaproblem.org and www.freepress.net.

I’ve designed this class to teach you to conduct college-level research and to write intelligently about your findings. At the macro level, you will focus on learning the basics of the craft of research, or writing analytically. That is, having surveyed a range of material on a general topic, media studies, you will then select a narrower sub-topic and independently conduct research on it. Your research project will require you to frame a relevant research question, locate source materials, marshal evidence, construct arguments, and craft a polished 10-page report.

At the micro level, you will focus on mastering the rhetorical forms that structure strong academic and argumentative writing. For each class reading you will be asked to identify the rhetorical moves that the text’s author uses to organize his or her argument. Then, with the aid of templates, you will deploy these same rhetorical moves in your own writing. With regular practice and concentrated effort, you will find that an awareness of these rhetorical moves enables you not only to comprehend better the texts you read but also to generate new ideas and enter into ongoing conversations. In short, you will become a more sophisticated reader, writer and thinker.

Students in this class will need to access and print out online materials regularly. To enroll, you must have daily access to the Internet and a printer.