• RCL Home
• About Us
• Alumni
• RCL Faculty
• Undergrad Courses


• Graduate Courses
• Undergrad Program
• Graduate Program
• Jobs
• Library

Programs and Areas

Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy

Spring Course Offerings

ENGLISH 269: Digital Media Composing

H. Lewis Ulman
MW 1:30-3:18

Course Description
This course introduces students to the theory and practice of composing digital media texts-texts that variously employ alphabetic writing, graphic elements, still images, video, and sound. We will examine the formal properties and cultural contexts of numerous digital media texts (Web sites, audio essays, word/image collages, audio slideshows, and digital videos). In particular, you will learn to: Understand and apply fundamental rhetorical and design principles for the creation and analysis of digital media texts (DMTs); Use and critically examine numerous digital composing technologies (Dreamweaver, Garage Band or Audacity, Photoshop or GIMP; iMovie); Situate the development of DMTs historically, exploring how DMTs draw on, and affect, older forms of media (e.g., print, film, photography, radio). Working toward those ends, students will read scholarship in digital media studies and analyze numerous examples of DMTs chosen by the class. Students will also compose numerous short DMTs (e.g., a documentary photo essay concerning a subject of their choosing, a documentary Web site on that subject, an autobiographical audio narrative, and a 1-minute video public service announcement).

ENGLISH 276: Introduction to Rhetoric

MW 11:30-1:18
Course Description
Study of developments in rhetorical theory, teaching, criticism, and practice through examination of representative figures, texts, movements and periods from antiquity to the present.

ENGLISH 569: Literacy Research Using Digital Media

Richard Selfe
MW 11:30-1:18

Course Description
This course will use mediate discourse-audio documentaries, visual arguments, video demonstrations delivered through collaborative, interactive systems (blogs and wikis)-to develop well researched autobiographical and biographical literacy documentaries. In western culture civic, professional, and personal literacy practices are "merging, accumulating, and fading" at an amazing rate (Brandt, Selfe & Hawisher), but those changing practices are largely undocumented. Students will conduct interviews, collect digital artifacts, and document their own and others' literacy practices thus creating multimodal documentaries that can, if the student chooses, be made public in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Their work would then be of value to literacy researchers for years to come.

Readings from:

• Brandt, Debra. Literacy in American Lives
• Selfe, Cynthia and Hawisher, Gail Literate Lives in the Information Age
• Sunstein, Bonnie Stone & Ciseri-Strater, Elizabeth. Field Working.
• Online media "readings" will supplement this list.

Assignments will include: Contributions to online and in-class reading discussions; Multimodal Literacy Autobiography; Professional or Civic Literacy Research Proposal; Multimodal Professional or Civic Literacy Documentary; Online Reflections: The influence of media on literacy practices, research, and the dissemination of information.

ENGLISH 573.02: Spectacular Rhetorics: The Visual Culture of Human Rights

Wendy Hesford
TR 1:30-3:18

Course Description
This course will focus on the visual culture and rhetoric of the international human rights movement, with particular attention to the creation and consumption of the spectacle of victimization in human rights literature, documentary film, and the campaigns of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UNICEF, among others. This course aims to provide students with a broad working knowledge of human rights as both an intellectual discourse and a realm of political action.

Required Texts: Jack Donnelly's Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice; two memoirs: Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers; Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa; and two plays: Ariel Dorfman's Speak Truth to Power; Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. Documentary films include: S-21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine; Stolen Childhoods; and Born into Brothels, among others.

Course Requirements: three critical essays and a visual project.

Image: Amnesty International Poster, Photograph Steve McCurry, Magnum Photos

English 883: Topics in Literacy: Professional Literacy

Harvey J. Graff
TR 3:30-5:18


Course Description
Within the developing general framework of LiteracyStudies@OSU, ENG 883 [ASC 883] is an unusual practicum/workshop course that complements planning for the April 2009 international interdisciplinary graduate student literacy studies conference and the development of the new Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Literacy Studies (GIS-LS).This is an unusual conference for which students are responsible for all aspects of planning, development, and operations. The making of the conference itself involves traditional and new literacies, and multiple opportunities for their use and sometimes their abuse. At the same time, it also provides an environment in which to reflect critically and collectively on those endeavors and to reflect on their multiple contexts, meanings, and uses.

The course also goes beyond both of those projects to examine critically a number of the fundamentals of professional scholarly practices that shed light on our understanding of literacy and literacies and in turn provide opportunities to practice and hone those abilities and their critical uses. Together, they provide a special and unusual approach to professional learning and preparation for scholarly life.

More specifically, our foci and objectives address:

• interdisciplinary conferences for graduate students, organized, developed, and managed by graduate students
• paths to professional preparation and professional practice
• different varieties of literacies paralleled by the conference themes

This course meets the GIS in Literacy Studies requirement for an elective core course

Our activities include oral and written reports:

• locating and comparing graduate student conferences; sketching the history of graduate student conferences; careful examination and critiques of previous conferences, comparison of student and other academic conferences.
• brief synthetic, comparative, and critical papers that develop some of these areas
• brief sketches of alternative conference formats and practices
• group and individual projects that link the planning for our April 2009 conference to these approaches and understandings
• inquiring into and probing critically the varieties of literacies that we encounter or bring to bear in these pursuits

Readings may include:

• David Lodge, Small World (Penguin 1995)
• Andrew L. Johns and Kenneth A. Osgood, "Planning a Graduate Student Conference," American Historical Association Perspectives, Mar., 1999
• Chris W Golde and George E. Walker, eds., Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education. Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate. Jossey-Bass, 2006
• Optional: Susan Friedmann, Meeting & Event Planning for Dummies. 2003

English 884/History 775: Literacy Past and Present/History of Literacy Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Harvey J. Graff
TR 1:30-3:18

Course Description
In recent years our understanding of literacy and its relationships to ongoing societies and social change has been challenged and revised. The challenge came from many directions. The "new literacy studies," as they are often called, together attest to transformations of approaches and knowledge and a search for new understandings. Many traditional notions about literacy and its presumed importance no longer influence scholarly and critical conceptions. The gap that too often exists between scholarly and more popular and applied conceptions is one of the topics we will consider.

Among a number of important currents, historical scholarship and critical theories stand out, both by themselves and together. Historical research on literacy has been unusually important in encouraging a reconstruction of the fields that contribute to literacy studies, the design and conduct of research, the role of theory and generalization in efforts to comprehend literacy and, as we say increasingly, literacies (plural). It has insisted on new understandings of "literacy in context," including historical context, as a requirement for making general statements about literacy, and for testing them, and carries great implications for new critical theories relating to literacy.

This seminar investigates these and related changes. Taking a historical approach, we will seek a general understanding of the history of literacy primarily but not exclusively in the West since classical antiquity but with an emphasis on the early modern and modern eras. At the same time, we examine critically literacy's contributions to the shaping of the modern world and the impacts on literacy from fundamental historical social changes. Among many topics, we will explore communications, language, family and demographic behavior, economic development, urbanization, institutions, literacy campaigns, both political and personal changes, and the uses of reading and writing. A new understanding of the place of literacy and literacies in social development is our overarching goal.

Assignments
Regular reading, attendance, and preparation for each class meeting; brief commentary papers; leadership of one or more seminar sessions, two brief essays There may also be opportunities to work on Graff's Literacy Studies at OSU "initiative."

Reading may include
William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy; Michael T Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms; Donald McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts; Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth; Carl Kaestle, et al, Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880; Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: The Intelligence of American Workers; Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives

The Department of English, 421 Denney Hall, 164 W 17th Ave., Columbus, OH 43210-1340 Phone: (614) 292-6065 Fax: (614) 292-7816

The College of Humanities and The Ohio State University takes your privacy seriously. Please read our Privacy Policy for more information. This Web site, all content and related materials are ©2003-2008 by the The Department of English, the College of Humanities and The Ohio State University. If you have difficulty accessing any portion of this site due to incompatibility with adaptive technology, or if you need the information in an alternative format, please contact the department at .