Programs and Areas
Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy
RCL at OSU Mansfield
OSU Mansfield is located 75 miles north of Columbus on 700 wooded acres. Students can complete their undergraduate degree in English entirely on the Mansfield campus, and of those who do, a significant percentage take upper-level courses in rhetoric, composition and literacy. The RCL group at Mansfield includes two regular faculty members, the writing center director, and seven lecturers and senior lecturers.
Last year, Susan Delagrange's Eng 367 students created podcasts of public service announcements as part of their investigation of a pressing social issue.
This quarter, Joan Richmond will assign documentary photography "books" created with Powerpoint to accompany her students' research projects. In addition, Patricia Burdette's Eng 110.01 students are exploring representation and identity through image manipulation and visual and verbal collage; Bob Gibson's Eng 268 (Creative Non-Fiction) class is composing iMovie films to accompany thier essays; and several faculty are planning to include spoken editorials for NPR in their assignments.
To support the work of the writing faculty, Susan Delagrange is using a 2006-07 Professional Development grant to design a resource Web site for the writing program at OSU Mansfield. Working with senior English major Tricia Laughbaum, she is developing a site that will include links to resources and handouts for students, individual course and instructor home pages, and a database of shared assignments and teaching strategies for English 109.01, 109.02, 110.01, and 367. The centerpiece of the site is an archive of images, texts and sound files stored in OSU's new Media Manager. Accessible to instructors from any computer, these materials will be used in designing assignments and presenting multimodal material in the classroom to support their teaching of visual, verbal and aural literacy and rhetoric.
Another initiative of the RCL program at Mansfield is taking place in the Writing Center, where Mike Sasso has developed an ESL program to serve both first-year writing students and the campus as a whole. Prior to this initiative, ESL students were referred to a Mansfield City program designed to provide sufficient "functional literacy" for their clients to enter the local workforce. Designated writing consultants have been trained to evaluate the needs of second-language learners and develop a weekly program of study. In addition, the ESL client's regular class work is used as a site for literacy "practice." Last academic year the OSU Mansfield ESL program served fifteen clients, only eight of whom declared themselves as ESL students in their admission process. Of those fifteen, four are continuing their ESL program this quarter, one has transferred to Columbus, one has left the university, and the remaining nine are continuing their studies at OSU Mansfield and using Writing Center services as part of our general academic community.
Want to know what else is going on at Mansfield? It's a beautiful drive up I-71, and we welcome visitors. Or keep track of us on our English Department Web site.
