In this project, I demonstrate my writing capabilities in the creative non-fiction genre. In addition, I contextualized this writing project by providing a mock book proposal and writer's statement. In "Another Barrack," I initialize an ongoing family research project. This project was completed for Dr. Unal's Creative Nonfiction course during Fall 2023.
In my reflective writer's statement, I state, "Rather than writing over the subject (a positionality of an all-knowing and absolute narrator), writing under the subject (a positionality of vulnerability and co-construction of a story with your subject) gave me the mindset needed to begin a process of exploration" (1).
In this project, I blend two of my courses, "Ekphrastic Poetics" and "Teaching First-Year Comp," into a transfer study. Using student examples in my ekphrasis course, Professor Maya Zeller's introductory lessons, and my own ekphrastic writing prompts, I teach a mock audience of undergrad non-writing majors about ekphrasis while challenging writing preconceptions. After the mock lesson, I wrote a report on how my student's perspective of writing changed.
In this project, I produce a few genres of text around the same topic using literacy criticism theories to help contextualize and analyze a pop-culture text, Avatar the Last Airbender. I chose to pursue this topic because Stuart Hall's "Representation and the Media" and Edward Said's Orientalism felt extremely relevant in my generation's media-saturated upbringing.
In this essay, titled "Silence As a Pedagogical Practice in FYC," I connect "prior knowledge of the history of composition and rhetoric pedagogies to articles on argument culture and the power of rhetorical silence and listening in a speech-centered world." The essay examines my positionality as an instructor in an overwhelmingly silent class, and questions what that silence might point to, how it can be reframed into a pedagogical tool, and how to resist the urge to fill the space as the power-holding instructor.
This study was conducted in order to reflect on the effectiveness of my teaching strategies. After five quarters of teaching ENG 101, I was at the point in my pedagogical practice where I wanted to see how I could more effectively channel my teaching energies and budget classroom time based on what skills students were actually transferring into their professional and personal discourses after completing my course. More specifically, I wanted to see if and how multimodal activities--especially visual brainstorming--impacted my student's concept retention and helped students transfer writing strategies into other discourses.
