This page hosts example syllabi I’ve created for courses lead at the University of Florida. These are all lower-division, general education writing electives.
ENC 1145, Topics in Composition: HIV/AIDS Art + Literature
Syllabus: ENC1145 Spring 2021
This was a juried course proposal accepted for Spring 2021 and conducted long-distance via Zoom and Canvas. HIV/AIDS Art + Literature focused on works by queer and trans organizers, activists, theorists and artists responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis, including Samuel Delaney, Essex Hemphill, David Wojnarowicz, the ACT UP Oral History Project, and Oli Rodriguez, among others. This course was also notable for me in that I chose to design our major writing assignments collaboratively with my students; my documentation of that process is available here.
ENG 2300, Film Analysis
Syllabus: ENG 2300 Fall 2020
Film Analysis serves as an introduction to film studies and is a prerequisite for the upper level film history and theory courses UF offers. For my film courses, I developed a storyboarding assignment, wherein students choose one film from our course and break down a sequence into a storyboard of 10-30 beats, paying attention to the formal qualities of that sequence. Once the storyboard is completed, they write a paragraph analyzing the visual components of the scene and their choices in translating it into a storyboard. I’ve found even the students who are afraid of drawing respond well to working in a visual medium. The syllabus above was designed for Zoom and a partially asynchronous schedule.
AML 2410, Issues in American Literature: Life Writing in the Margins
Syllabus: AML2410 Fall 2019
This was a juried course proposal accepted for Fall 2019. Life Writing in the Margins took a “dual” approach to American autobiography, considering both autobiographical texts by marginalized creators and autobiographical texts outside of the traditional memoir format. Texts included James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain, confessional poetry by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and perzines from the Travis Fristoe Zine Archive.