Graduate Courses
Professional Writing Practicum—English 505
Co-taught graduate professional development course with professional writing program director for two semesters, helping to orient two new cohorts of professional writing instructors. Course included pre-semester orientation, and weekly meetings focused on classroom management, curriculum design and crafting evidence of effective teaching. The course also taught professional writing theory and helped new instructors understand how their diverse research interests intersect with professional and technical writing scholarship.
Professional and Technical Writing Courses
Technical Communication—English 421
This technical documentation course asked students to identify a problem of interest to them either professionally, or more broadly in their field of study. Students then set their problem as a technical documentation problem and used user centered design principles to first design document, then perform user experience testing and recommendation reports for revision.
Unit two assignment–developing technical documentation
Unit three–performing usability testing
Business Communication—English 420 (5 sections)/Business Communication Online—English 420Y (5 sections)
Undergraduate professional development course using project-based strategies so students engage audiences outside the classroom. Taught three sections as a service learning partnership with CARE, a newly formed sexual violence response advocacy and education center at Purdue. These courses take a problem setting approach to writing and research including methods for distributed work and digital collaboration.
Unit 2–background report overview
Unit 3–group project planning overview
Introduction to Professional Writing—English 306
Exploratory course for majors and prospective majors, designed to introduce students to the field, and help them identify professional trajectories related to professional writing. Students practice public rhetoric, genre analysis, and user centered design.
First Year Composition (11 sections)
Taught several distinct versions of first year writing with approaches including inquiry based essays, data-driven research, project-based research, writing about writing, and a data science learning community (linked course, see curriculum development). In all courses students worked to develop research questions and explore research methods relevant to their communities or fields of study. Students use project-based methods to do different kinds of research, including discourse community analysis, activity mapping, and observational field research.
FYC Writing About Writing Syllabus
Mapping and rhetorical ecology approach and lesson plans
Data Science Learning Community Syllabus
Michelle McMullin 