In my classroom, students learn to connect communication skills that they already have with the communication skills that they will use in future personal, professional, and civic contexts. My approach to teaching focuses on teaching writing and visual composing skills, asking students to design instructions, present design defenses, create social media posts, and write employment documents. Problem-solving drives my pedagogy; students in my classes make sense of business writing practices through activities such as creating infomercials to practice presentation skills, job document galleries where students hang their resumes on the walls and give feedback with post-it notes, and designing their own small business portfolios to present to potential investors.
Below are recent courses I’ve recently taught or am prepared to teach:
English 205: Business Communication (Online, Fall 2017 & Summer 2018)
In Business Writing, you will learn to write and discuss workplace documents including emails, memos, letters, resumes, cover letters, proposals, etc. while analyzing effective choices for the purpose, audience, and context. In this section, you will write and revise documents for your own small business, including a business plan, advertisements, job documents, and pitch proposal. Toward the end of the semester, you’ll revise these documents to create a Small Business Starter Pack. Along the way, we’ll consider ethical implications, how to define professionalism, and the ways in which our communication choices affect others in school, the workplace, and in civic life.
English 205: Business Communication (Face to face, Fall 2016-Fall 2017)
In Business Writing, we will focus on writing memos, letters, emails, resumes, cover letters, business reports, and other types of professional correspondence while analyzing effective choices for the purpose, audience, and context. We’ll also practice organizing and completing team projects, as well as individual and group presentations. Along the way, we’ll consider ethical implications, how to define professionalism, and the ways in which our communication choices affect others in school, the workplace, and in civic life.
Advanced Technical Communication – UW FLEXible Option (Summer 2016)
In this set of competencies, you will enhance and refine what you learned in the Introduction to Business and Technical Communication course in several ways. You will demonstrate your understanding of processes for revising and editing, show your facility for researching business cases, master the fundamentals of designing and testing documents, and conclude with a demonstration of your enhanced overall skills as a researcher, writer, and designer. In these competency sets, you will report on a typical document lifecycle at your organization, research business cases, user test a series of documents and make revisions based on test results, and create a portfolio of your FLEX work to present
Information Design – UW FLEXible Option (Summer 2016)
You are surrounded by design. The skills that you’ll develop in this course will allow you to see that every document that you encounter or produce has a purpose and whether that purpose is achieved or not is largely dependent on design. This ability to recognize, analyze and evaluate not just text content but also design is instrumental in producing holistically successful documents.
Our course will explore practical skills and theoretical knowledge of visually designing and displaying complex information. We will begin by examining design theories and conventions, and then put these skills into practice by applying those theories to a number of information artifacts. You will also be producing your own design-oriented documents, which will take a number of different forms over the course of the semester, including a design critique, a style sheet, an infographic, and wordless instructions.
Women in Professional Communication – Sample Syllabus Available
In this course, we will examine the role(s) of women and gender in the history, theory, research, and pedagogy of professional, technical, business, and scientific communication. From the beginning of professional communication, women have been active in professional communication (Malone, 2015); however, women’s contributions have not always been acknowledged (Allen, 1990). This course seeks to fill that gap through examining, synthesizing, and evaluating women’s overlooked contributions to the field through both articles by women and through articles about women’s issues, including subjects like workplace sexism, pregnancy, and traditionally gendered technologies like ironing boards and washing machines.