Texas Tech University

Graduate Course Offerings, Fall 2021

If you have any questions about the Literature, Creative Writing, or Linguistics courses, please contact the graduate advisor. For all Technical Communication courses, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies.

Courses from previous semesters are archived here.

Campus Map - the English/Philosophy building is #46, located in D1

 

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ENGL 5067 Methods of Teaching College Composition

Dr. Michael Faris
Mondays, 12:00 - 1:20 PM (Section 001, CRN: 39390)
Wednesdays, 12:00 - 1:20 PM (Section 002, CRN: 39984)

This course is designed as a practicum for GPTI teaching first-year writing at Texas Tech University. This course will introduce teachers to methods and practices of teaching writing and provide scaffolding for their first three semesters teaching first-year writing. We will use class time to discuss teaching activities, to introduce you to theories of learning, writing, and rhetoric, to solve problems related to teaching and learning, and to help you build your teaching philosophy.

ENGL 5302 Translating Middle English Literature

Dr. Julie Nelson Couch
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 38597, Online: 44117
Class Type: Hybrid

This course introduces students to the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonology, and prosody of Middle English. This course also introduces students to Middle English manuscript studies. The term Middle English encompasses an array of regional dialects that coexisted in England roughly between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the standardization of English in 1430. Class time will be spent translating and pronouncing Middle English, transcribing from manuscript facsimiles, and discussing related issues in translation, manuscript context, and literary interpretation. By the end of the course, students will be able to comprehend and read aloud Middle English poetry that ranges widely in dialect, form, and genre. This course will be of interest to literature students as well as to linguistics and creative writing students interested in form, prosody, book history, and the theory and praxis of translation.

Requirements Fulfilled: Philology Sequence, British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; Book History/Digital Humanities Certificate, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5306 The Renaissance Bible: Three Perspectives

Dr. Ryan Hackenbracht
Wednesdays, 2:00 - 4:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 35489, Online: 41969
Class Type: Hybrid

Defending the new science of a heliocentric universe, Galileo declared, “the Bible teaches one how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” His perspective was part of a larger transformation at the time in how the Bible was read. With the rise of historical (or “higher”) criticism, the Bible's knowledge of nature, accounts of miracles, and promises of an afterlife came under scrutiny—yet, the Bible remained the crucible of culture, a moral standard, and the foremost shaper of worldview and ideology. Through the works of three intellectuals—Hobbes, Spinoza, and Milton—we will probe the nature of this paradox and chart the ramifications of the historical-critical method. Topics for discussion will include: how did Jewish scholarship influence Christian ideas of the Bible? How did mastery of sacred languages (Hebrew and Greek) offer new tools for interpretation? What strategies were invented for reconciling scriptural truth with scientific fact? This is also a class in academic professionalism, as we learn about presenting at conferences, publishing articles, and navigating the job market. The semester concludes with a paper/portfolio on a subject in your own area of specialization—e.g., Creative Writing, American lit, LSJE, etc.

Requirements Fulfilled: British literature, Period: early; Genre: Poetry; Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5313 The English Novel from Marriage Plot to Modern Woman

Dr. Jen Shelton
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 40757, Online: 33022
Class Type: Hybrid

This course will undertake an idiosyncratic history of the English novel by exploring works by women addressing themes of marriage and independence. Our study will begin in the 18th century with Frances Burney's Evelina, dally in the scenic byways of Jane Austen, visit those threatening and sexy Yorkshire moors, and wind up in the 20th century with some bold ideas about women's possibilities. Course work will feature the graduate-school usual: a class presentation, a seminar paper, a class mini-conference, some ongoing writing work on Blackboard to help us develop our thoughts for the long writing assignment.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5317 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: The Empire Codes Back

Dr. Kanika Batra
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 37200, Online: 37203
Class Type: Hybrid

Postcolonial writers have consistently written back to Empire and power. One strategy employed is to re-code the canon in ways that indicate the racial, gendered, and class assumptions of works such as William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This course will examine a few such instances to analyze how postcolonial authors disrupt conventional understandings of genre, plot, and audience, subvert normative gender codes, contest monochromatic racialization, and how their works are placed within textual and digital codes of revisionary literary histories. Our focus will be on a selection of texts which may include some of the following: Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism; Patience Agbabi's remixing of Chaucer in Telling Tales and the Global Chaucers blog, an “online archive and community for post -1945, non-Anglophone Chauceriana;” Aimé Césaire's rewriting of Shakespeare in Une Tempête; Derek Walcott and J.M. Coetzee's versions of Robinson Crusoe in Pantomime and Foe; revisions of Bronte's work in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Dorothea Smartt's Reader, I Married Him and Other Queer Goings on; scathing critiques of Conrad in Chinua Achebe's “An Image of Africa” and Sven Lindquist's Exterminate All the Brutes. Our attempt to understand revisionary literary history cognizant of the Eurocentrism and coloniality of traditional literary periodization will be aided by influential DH projects such as Postcolonial Digital Humanities, Women Writers Online, and Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present.

Requirements Fulfilled: Comparative Literature, Globalization, and Translation (CLGT); Period: Later; Genre: Non-Fiction

ENGL 5323 Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Occasion of the Poem

Dr. Elissa Zellinger
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 14963, Online: 37201
Class Type: Hybrid

Occasional poetry seems straightforward: it is verse that commemorates a public or social occasion. However, this class will examine how these poems constellate a number of concerns involving print culture, poetic professionalism, and geography, as well as the assumptions structuring race, class, and gender. Occasional poems speak to the duration of figures, ideas, and verse forms; we will investigate how such verse works to make visible overlooked histories, people, and counter-narratives. Considering that gendered and raced “others” did not have full and equal access to the American public sphere in the nineteenth century, this class will focus on how women, Black, and Native authors used poetic memorials to assert their belonging. We will also use occasional poems to contextualize other nineteenth-century verse forms and to better understand the processes of canonization in subsequent decades and centuries. In so doing, students will be introduced to a broad range of authors, texts, and critical methodologies. Requirements for the class include in-class presentations, weekly Blackboard posts, a research proposal, and a final written assignment.

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature, Period: Early; Genre: Poetry

ENGL 5327 Studies in Multicultural American Literature: Indigenous Futurisms

Dr. Sara Spurgeon
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 34395, Online: 41068D
Class Type: Hybrid

This course will explore creative and scholarly works in the emerging field of Indigenous Futurism. We will read novels, short stories, graphic stories/comics, and watch several short films. All our primary texts, both literary and filmic, are created by Indigenous authors, artists, and/or filmmakers from somewhere in the Americas. Among the questions we will consider are: Why has speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, alternative history, futurism, etc.) traditionally been so closely associated with white, Western, male authors and narratives of invasion and conquest? What happens when authors from a culture which has already survived an alien invasion and conquest claims speculative fiction to tell their own stories? Why are we currently experiencing a groundswell of publications in speculative fiction by authors/filmmakers of color, including native/tribal peoples?

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature, Period: Later; Genre: Fiction or Film; Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE)

ENGL 5335 Principles of Language

Dr. Aaron Braver
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30 - 1:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 33023, Online: 43918
Class Type: Hybrid

Language touches every aspect of our lives. From reading the morning paper to decrypting secret codes, the subconscious knowledge of language is uniquely human. In this course we'll ask what it means to have a command of language—do animals have it? Infants? How can analysis of its structure help us understand literary or poetic works?

By examining the structures of the world's languages, we will discover why linguists believe in a “universal grammar” in spite of the world's rich linguistic diversity. We'll also learn how to make the sounds of the world's languages—from French nasal vowels to the clicks of Africa's Bantu languages.

This course is suited to anyone interested in language, literature, how the mind works, or the characteristics that make us uniquely human.

Requirements Fulfilled: Philology/Methods Sequence; Linguistics Graduate Certificate

ENGL 5340 Research Methods

Dr. Wyatt Phillip
Tuesdays, 2:00 - 4:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 14987, Online: 35475
Class Type: Hybrid

This seminar introduces incoming MA students to a range of research methods and methodologies utilized in humanities-based studies, including the vast array of digital, material, and archival resources available to researchers. The course focuses on the process of research in order to better prepare students for the kind of work expected at the graduate level. Students will develop a significant research project in their selected area of specialization that will include a book review, annotated bibliography, conference-length presentation, and research paper. This section is reserved primarily for new onsite MA and PhD students.

Requirements Fulfilled: Foundation course

ENGL 5340 Research Methods

Dr. Wyatt Phillips
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 34750
Class Type: Online

This seminar introduces incoming MA students to a range of research methods and methodologies utilized in humanities-based studies, including the vast array of digital, material, and archival resources available to researchers. The course focuses on the process of research in order to better prepare students for the kind of work expected at the graduate level. Students will develop a significant research project in their selected area of specialization that will include a book review, annotated bibliography, conference-length presentation, and research paper. This section is reserved primarily for new distance/online MA students.

Requirements Fulfilled: Foundation course

ENGL 5341 Histories and Theories of the Book

Dr. Marta Kvande
Thursdays, 2:00 - 4:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 40758, Online: 37204
Class Type: Hybrid

This course begins with an overview of material text production across history and cultures, examining early writing and publishing technologies. We'll move through the transition from scribal to print cultures and the hand press period, through the nineteenth century industrialization of print, and end with digital texts. Students will learn about the relationships between texts and their material embodiments, from stone to screen, papyrus to paper, codex to Kindle. Throughout the course we will also consider books (or scrolls, or a stylus, or a ball point pen, or a printing press, etc.) as technologies, and study them within the context of current theories of technology and culture. A primary principle of this course will also be learning by doing in a hands on way. Pandemic permitting, students will have the opportunity to work with Special Collections materials, to work in the English department Letterpress Studio, and engage with a variety of technologies of textual production.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Novel; Core requirement for the Book History and Digital Humanities Certificate

ENGL 5342 Critical Methods: Cultural Studies, Literary Theories, Readings

Dr. Scott Baugh
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 14996, Online: 40755
Class Type: Hybrid

“Critical Methods” is a graduate course designed to survey a range of approaches to reading texts critically. Bring in theory explicitly, some naively assume, and you lose the so-called magic of reading; however, theory is always already there, and we may gain from being fully aware of our discursive approaches to reading texts, our critical methods, and articulating them as such, as methodology statements. Our group will explore recognized ‘schools' of criticism predominant over the last four decades or so, but we will place emphasis on significant patterns within, across, and among these schools. Formal requirements: assigned readings & several in-class ‘teaching demo' presentations; one short (5-7 pp.) research essay; one class research presentation; and one article-length (15+ pp.) essay. A course-long ‘journal' will track lessons over the term and be the basis of a final exam. It's also likely we will take advantage of some activities in Blackboard.

Requirement Fulfilled: Foundation course

ENGL 5343 Studies in Literary Criticism: World Fabulation from Metamorphosis to Science Fiction

Dr. Bruce Clarke
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: Onsite: 35492, Online: 35546
Class Type: Hybrid

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This section of Studies in Literary Criticism will survey a range of celebrated 20th- and 21st-century prose fictions, mostly in translation, by renowned authors from Austria, Poland, Colombia, Argentina, India, and China. Our focus will be on their literary interest as fabulations that encode their scenes of cultural origin, that is, as allegories or refractions of historical events. In these narratives, it may be that the story world and its events depart, a little or a lot, from historical settings or realistic expectations, only to have these contexts slip through in disguise. If the telling of the tale turns back on itself to undermine its own pretense to natural verisimilitude, that metafictional device comes with a cultural timestamp. These fictions may be placed in various genres, such as metamorphosis, metafiction, magical realism, speculative fiction, and science fiction. Fabulation is a convenient general designation that underscores the common element in these genres: Each offers a kind of modern fable in which the resources of myth and fantasy process the stresses of modern and contemporary society, while refreshing our current ideas about the past, present, and future of the Earth, technology, or human possibility. We will consult some critical writings on fabulation by Robert Scholes and Ronald Bogue and rehearse some basic concepts of narrative theory to gain purchase on the craft of these fabulous fictions.

Texts: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; Stanislaw Lem, Solaris; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome; and Cixin Liu, The Three Body-Problem.

Assignments: weekly short class reports, a midterm essay, and a final essay.

Requirements Fulfilled: CLGT Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5351 Fight the Power! - Building and Destroying Empires through Global Film and Media

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 41970
Class Type: Online

“The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.”

This Winston Churchill quote underpins this course about global film and media's role in the building of empires. We examine traditional imperialism, founded on conquest and military colonization, along with neo-imperialism founded on soft power defined as a nation's cultural and economic influence. We ask: how is the media a tool to colonize the minds of potential subjects? How does the media permit audiences to fight the power and to imagine futures where empires are destroyed?

To answer these questions, this interdisciplinary class situates global media against political theory as well as postcolonial and cultural studies. For instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's conception of empire founded on a transnational enemy permits us to see Iron Man (2008) as a critical allegory of the United States' War on Terror. Reading Donald Duck comics against Chilean criticism of Disney's ideology reveals how Hollywood acts as a weapon for cultural imperialism. Franz Fanon's and Homi K. Bhabha's writings on the fractured psychology of the colonized creates solidarities between the oppressed in The Battle of Algiers (1966) who resist French colonialism and those in The Handmaiden (2016) who buck against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Finally, we bring Shoshana Zuboff's study of surveillance capitalism's imperial roots to the Japanese horror film, Pulse (2001). Through its tale about a haunted internet browser, we glean how corporations like Facebook and Google may be replacing nation states as the drivers of empire.

This cross-media course introduces students to a variety of theoretical lenses and to global film and media studies, more generally. Coursework includes conversations with featured artists and scholars. Students will write article-length research papers wherein they pair close readings with archival research to investigate how empires of the mind are created, maintained and, ultimately, subverted.

Requirements Fulfilled: Film & Media Studies; CLGT; Period: Later; Genre: Film

ENGL 5354 Doctoral Research and Critical Methods in English

Dr. Julie Nelson Couch
Mondays, 2:00 - 4:50 PM
CRN: TBD
Class Type: Onsite

This course, taken by Literature, Linguistics, and Creative Writing PhD students in their first semester, will introduce research and critical methods for graduate-level research in English, specifically the processes of formulating and executing advanced research projects, thereby launching students into their field of study. Students will begin the process of marking out a field and methodology for doctoral research, which will include compiling bibliographies for their qualifying exam reading lists and areas of study.

Requirements Fulfilled: PhD Foundation Course

ENGL 5361 Introduction to Rhetorical Theory

Dr. Lisa L. Phillips
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 37087 (Section 001), 37091 (Section D01)

Rhetoric has a long and rather sordid history, which makes it both delightful and thorny to study. In this theory course, we will consider ancient Greco-Roman approaches to rhetoric and become acquainted with leading theoretical approaches that challenge and/or expand the classical, Western canon (e.g., postructuralism, feminism, critical theory, posthumanism, decolonial theory). Rhetorical scholarship that addresses nonwestern perspectives emphasizes the spaces and places where voices have been silenced by canon-makers. To explain, Ellen Cushman writes, “decolonial approaches” invest more time in “delinking from the colonial matrix of power” because to decolonize rhetoric is to “offer options, rather than alternatives” (2019, p. 2, my emphasis). Expect to have options.

One aim I have for the course is to examine the possibilities for, and continue to build, a sensation-based perspective for rhetorical studies. Beginning with Debra Hawhee's work on “Rhetoric's Sensorium” and sense-making in public places, we'll read a range of work from rhetoric and allied fields (anthropology, English studies, political theory) to consider the work of sensation in relation to language, communication, and suasion.

Given the range of materials we'll interact with, the course reading list will necessarily aim for connectivity rather than comprehensiveness. My hope is that we'll engage in a variety of “options” to rhetorical theory and its applications within public and private spheres.

ENGL 5361 Theories of Invention in Writing

Dr. Ken Baake
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 38063 (Section 002), 38064 (Section D02)

This is a class that looks at the history of rhetoric, how speakers and writers have developed arguments from Classical Greek and Roman times to the present. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of finding the best available means of persuasion. For the Greeks rhetoric was primarily oral, although it is obviously found in all forms of human communication—especially writing and visual media. In this course we will survey of rhetorical theory from the Sophists through Aristotle and fellow Greeks, Romans, Medieval theologians, Enlightenment scholars and others to 20th century thinkers. We will consider everything from Cicero's blistering attack on a fellow countryman accused of conspiracy in first century B.C.E. Rome to Dr. Martin Luther King's speech proclaiming his dream for civil rights in 20th century America. The class will cover all aspects of rhetoric, but focus mainly on invention, arrangement, and style. We will study how rhetoric functioned in these historic periods and how it functions today.

Students will post reading responses to Blackboard, engage in practice developing arguments using Classical techniques, and conduct a research project.

English 5362 Rhetorical Analysis of Text: Rhetorical Genre Studies

Dr. Jennifer Nish
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 43859 (Section 001), 43858 (Section D01)

In this course, we will explore rhetorical analysis through the lens of genre studies. Students in this course will analyze texts and their contexts using concepts and methods associated with rhetorical genre studies. Genre analysis is used to study a wide range of texts, from historical archives to social media, from academic articles to student writing to organizational communication to public discourse. Therefore, this course will be useful for students who have interests in both rhetoric and TC, and the concepts and methods will be applicable in academic, professional, and everyday contexts.

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Image credit: “The Rhetorical Cat Does Genre,” by Lisa Bickmore is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

ENGL 5363 Research Methods in Technical Communication and Composition

Dr. Rebecca Rickly
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 15059 (Section 001), 15066 (Section D01)

This course will introduce you to a variety of research methods and methodologies used in composition and rhetoric and technical communication research. While this course does serve as an overview, we will concentrate primarily on work that has influenced our broad field of TC/writing studies for the past ten years. The work you do in this course will give you an orientation that will prove to be valuable as you select further research courses from which you will ground your dissertation research or other future research. In subsequent, more focused research courses, you'll build upon the overview knowledge base you'll get in 5363.

The course relies on the assumption that research is intimately related to context, theory, and practice, and that all research—quantitative, qualitative, or mixed—is an act of collecting, interpreting, and representing information best designed to answer (or address) research questions. Throughout the course, we will explore the implications of these assumptions, test their applicability to specific research methodologies, and look for common ways in which they shape the work of researchers using different research methods and approaches.

Our central questions for this course will be “What constitutes a good, workable research question?” and “How do I select the best method(s) to answer that question?” As a participant in this class, you will read critically texts on conducting research, evaluate existing research, and conduct your own research on a limited basis, and this experience will enable you to address the central questions from an informed perspective.

Required Texts:
Feak, Christine B., & Swales, John M. (2009). Telling a research story: Writing a literature review. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ISBN: 9780472033362

Leavy, Patricia. (2017). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community-based participatory research approaches. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. ISBN: 9781462514380

Nickoson, Lee, & Sheridan, Mary P. (Eds.). (2012). Writing studies research in practice: Methods and methodologies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN: 9780809331147

ENGL 5370 Studies in Creative Writing (Poetry)

Dr. John Poch
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 15196, 40760
Class Type: Hybrid

In this workshop, you will submit a new poem (or perhaps a portion of a sequence or longer work) every week. We will attempt to workshop (critiquing as a group) as many poems as possible, but we will also let our organic conversations carry us where they will. I will be intentional about workshopping at least half if not the whole class each week, but I want to liven it up a bit so you can write the best poems of your life. This semester I am going to encourage us think about how other arts might inform our perspectives on poetry. Film, dance, painting, photography, performance art, street art, fiction, architecture, sculpture, music, etc. …what are the best artists in these fields doing that might change or strengthen our own imaginative work in making poems? We don't have to collaborate, but might we? Outside of class, we'll watch some amazing documentary films on these various arts and reconvene to talk about them.

Also, I want us to deeply consider and share in conversation the changing nature of publication. How do we publish or share our finished poems? Poetry publishing is radically changing, and we can't merely depend on the old model of publishing in magazines and those poems culminating in a book. I am looking forward to being immersed in the poems together.

Requirements Fulfilled: Poetry Workshop

ENGL 5370 Studies in Creative Writing (Fiction): Thrilled, Horrified, Entertained; Fiction Writing with an Edge

Nickolas Butler
Tuesdays, 9:30 AM - 12:20 PM
CRN: 15198 (Section 002)
Class Type: TBD

This course takes inspiration from the old ten-cent paperback collections of action, adventure, horror, and suspense found in secondhand stores and the basements of our grandparents.  The heavily worn copies of Stephen King novels residing in attics, guest rooms, and weekend cabins.  Novels and stories written by the likes of Jack London, Saki, and Edgar Allen Poe.  Every week, two students will present newly written stories, novels, or novel excerpts (first chapters, preferred) that engage the four aforementioned genres.  It is the instructor's hope that students will submit work that, rather than emulating the work of past masters, attempts to interrogate and confront the horrors and issues of this time.  We will regularly discuss the narrative tactics that make such tales memorable, by dissecting, scrutinizing, and encouraging student work.  We may also discuss published pieces of literature by the likes of Carmen Maria Machado, Tom Franklin, Jane Harper, Tim O'Brien, and Stephen Graham Jones, as time allows.

Requirements Fulfilled: Fiction Workshop

ENGL 5371 Foundations of Technical Communication

Dr. Scott Weedon
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 15203 (Section 001), 37105 (Section D02)

How do we define technical communication? How might it differ from or relate to professional writing? To engineering communication, science communication, or health communication? How does rhetoric relate to technical communication? Is rhetoric just something for scholars of technical communication or do practitioners use rhetorical principles as well? Exploring the answers to these and similar questions will help you situate yourself to graduate study in technical communication.

ENGL 5371: Foundations of Technical Communication is the gateway to graduate education in technical communication. The course introduces graduate students to the central texts, enduring themes, and persistent tensions in technical communication. We will explore the history of technical communication, its conceptual frameworks, and its dual identity as an academic and professional field. We will look at how technical communication relates to topics such as Embodiment, Design, and the User. The course will function as a survey to the field while preparing you to take part in ongoing scholarly conversations through the typical genres of graduate school. In other words, students can expect to receive a solid foundation for understanding the field to better articulate and pursue their own interests within it.

ENGL 5373 Instructional Design for Technical Communicators

Dr. Jason Tham
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 39491 (Section 001), 39492 (Section D01)

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This course introduces students to the principles and processes involved in developing instructional content for professional settings, including design thinking philosophy, user/learner and task analysis, learning theories, asynchronous and synchronous learning methods, and methods of usability evaluation. The course also covers several theoretical approaches to technical instructions, including instructional architectures, human-centered design principles, practical learning objects, and other rhetorical methods. Major assignments include analyzing instructional materials, interviewing users, prototyping an instruction set, testing the prototype, and creating recommendations for future development.

Upon completion of the course, students should feel confident about:

    • Describing planning processes and methods in instructional development
    • Applying principles of user-centered design in developing instructional materials
    • Explaining how methods of assessment and evaluation contribute to instructional quality and usability

ENGL 5376 Online Publishing

Dr. Craig Baehr
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 43862 (Section 001), 41985 (Section D01)

This graduate level course will provide an overview of the practical and theoretical aspects of designing effective online documents and Web sites. Specifically, our work will focus on process and planning, content development, site structure, navigation, visual design, interface design, usability, and accessibility. The course will cover practical skills with various software tools and scripting languages, including HTML, CSS, and an introduction to some interactive scripting with JavaScript. Assignments will primarily focus on developing Web sites and online content using a variety of tools and development methods. And finally, the course will address theoretical issues in online publishing, digital literacy, content management, and technology.

ENGL 5387 Publications Management

Dr. Michael Faris
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 35502 (Section 001), 27716 (Section D01)

This course covers strategies of content management, project management, asset management, and content strategy development, especially as they are used to support the publication of technical communication in professional contexts. Students will explore the complexities of content management through reading case studies and advice on best practices and approaches; practicing content management strategies through a documentation project; and practicing structured authoring, single sourcing, markup languages, and content reuse.

ENGL 5388 User Experience Research

Dr. Rob Grace
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 37088 (Section 001), 35503 (Section D01)

This course introduces foundational approaches to user experience (UX) research. Students will learn and discuss theories of human-computer interaction that provide a basis for UX research and human-centered design methodologies. Students will also learn user research and design methods such as contextual inquiry, scenario-based design, personas, journey mapping, think-aloud testing, wireframing, and paper prototyping. Emphasis will be placed on design approaches that help us understand people's goals, behaviors, and experiences when using services and technologies to better understand, in turn, requirements for designed artifacts and how they shape work and daily life.

ENGL 5391 Grants and Proposals for Nonprofits

Dr. Rich Rice
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
CRN: 38968 (Section 001), 36382 (Section D01)

Students in this course will learn about the genre and process of writing grants and proposals. Topics will include understanding the process in the nonprofit community, locating funding opportunities, determining persuasive appeals, and writing and editing proposals. Students will be introduced to scholarship and research funding databases. Coursework will involve reading and writing and editing proposals. Writing grants and proposals in conjunction with community members will be required.