Course overview
This course invites students to explore key approaches to writing and communication by critically examining an array of texts—from podcasts to policy briefs, from memes to news articles, from Reddit posts to research articles, from Tik Tok videos to testimonials—and how these are used in context to produce knowledge, build worlds, construct identities, and exercise power. The course introduces students to writing and communication as a field of study: It introduces students to key principles that underpin the field, to enduring and pressing issues that are transforming the field, and to methods of analysis widely used in the field to make sense of how writing and communication are produced, circulated, and used in different cultural, academic, and professional contexts.
Throughout the course we explore knowledge about writing and communication and a range of issues related to writing, multi-modal communication, audience and situation, social (inter-)action, knowledge-making, identity construction, ideology and power, colonization and Indigenization, and disciplinary and professional practice. We move between different levels of analysis—from close attention to detailed choices of language and visual presentation, to community-shaped genres and their social functions, to pragmatic (real-world) effects across texts and situations — to analyze a variety of writing and communication case studies. Students learn about writing and communication using active and blended learning activities and by completing individual and team-based assignments along the way; these involve writing but are not writing intensive.
The course is organized into 5 modules. Each module focuses on 1 key principle in writing and communication and a set of related ideas and claims. Through instructor-led and student-led workshops, presentations, and reflections that accompany each module, students learn about writing and communication principles, processes, and issues and critically examine writing- and communication-related case studies associated with them.
Students will learn in the first week of each module through a series of instructor-led activities: curated readings, interactive quizzes, lectures, and a writing- and communication-related case study (consisting of one or several texts and their context), including an analysis of the case study modeled by the instructor. In the second week of each module, students will learn by working with each other and with the instructor to select further case studies — that speak to key principles explored in the course and to student experiences within and outside the course — and by sharing them with the class, facilitating short analysis workshops, and summarizing and synthesizing key lessons learned and issues raised.
By the end of the course, engaged learners will be able to:
- [LO1] Identify and explain key principles about writing and communication, including but not limited to the following: writing and communication
- are social and rhetorical activities;
- are knowledge- and meaning-making activities;
- are implicated in processes of colonization, decolonization, Indigenization, and reconciliation;
- enact and create ideologies and (embodied) identities;
- act through recognizable forms and multiple modes.
- [LO2] Recognize how these key principles apply to a range of writing and communication case studies curated by the course instructor and the learners themselves.
- [LO3] Analyze these case studies using analytic methods commonly used in writing and communication: e.g., content analysis, multimodal analysis, rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, genre analysis.
- [LO4] Engage in constructive and collaborative dialogue and inquiry about course concepts via peer discussions, workshops, writing, and reviewing.