Professional Learning
The Professional Learning tab includes summaries and materials from sessions offered by English department faculty for their colleagues on best practices, approaches to teaching, and hiring in higher education. This content is primarily, if not entirely, for faculty. Students should not be given direct access to this information. Thank you.
This presentation, facilitated by Natalie Kopp, discusses incorporating video editing assignments into the composition classroom. It focuses on the user-friendly editing program Adobe Premiere Rush, which is available to all CSCC faculty and staff as a download and to all students when using the college's computers. This workshop will include an introductory tutorial to Adobe Premiere Rush, classroom applications and sample assignments, and a discussion of accessibility and closed captioning for video assignments. Why might you consider incorporating video editing into your composition classroom? Multimodal assignments such as video-based assignments equip students with skills for the contemporary workplace, and some students may be more comfortable showcasing their skills of expression in video assignments than in traditional essays. Indeed, recent scholarship (Bruce 2009, Shepherd 2018) shows students may consider video composition as more closely related to their home literacies than some text-only writing. Video assignments also allow students to express creativity in a new form and may promote learning-transfer to and from other modes of writing and composition. Video assignments can also be used to introduce students to visual rhetorics and provide new tools for analyzing and "reading" the world around them.
Presentation Date: February 27, 2024
This presentation, facilitated by Heather Holliger, provided a summary of key findings from scholarship on writing transfer. The primary focus of the presentation was classroom practices that support student transfer of writing knowledge and skills to new writing tasks and situations. Audience members were invited to share their own experiences and participate in a sample writing transfer reflection activity.
Presentation Date: February 9, 2024
This presentation, facilitated by Stephen Logan and Heather Thompson-Gillis, was a support session for current English faculty members who are either interested in learning more about the higher education job market or who are planning on applying for positions in the upcoming year. It gives an overview of the general hiring process, where to search for positions, cover letter and curriculum vitae suggestions, tips for the interview process, and insights from recent hires. Please reach out to Heather (hthompso@cscc.edu) or Stephen (slogan5@cscc.edu) if you would like to talk more about the hiring process or presentation or would like more support as you put together your application materials.
Presentation Date: November 13, 2023
This presentation, facilitated by Jingyi Zhu and Martha Bove, takes an interdisciplinary perspective, looking at how children’s literature— specifically, picture books— could be incorporated in first-year composition courses. With hands-on practices, the workshop showcases pedagogical activities using literature as a point of departure to engage students in discussing social topics and exercising writing skills (e.g., paraphrasing, summary, citation, etc.). Endorsing an interdisciplinary creativity in composition courses, the presentation further facilitates a discussion on the concept of (in)efficiency in English education, exploring composition-classroom approaches to address the issue of decreased collegiate interest in the humanities.
Presentation Date: October 27, 2023
This presentation, facilitated by Jingyi Zhu, starts with scholarship on academic reading experience among college-level students, presenting findings about how some students visually envisioned their reading experience (including reading challenges, motivation, strategies, and successes, etc.) and how they made connections between reading and academic writing. The presentation moves on to talk about how the findings may be relevant to students under the CSCC context, suggests explicit conversations on reading among students and instructors, discusses pedagogical implications on the topic. Some questions this presentation poses include: What (de)motivates our students to read? What reading materials are inclusive and benefits students’ writing? How do we know students read and gain knowledge? Any successful classroom reading activities that promote students’ critical thinking? How do we help students engage in reading and make strong reading-writing connection?
Presentation Date: October 13, 2023
This presentation, presented by Rob Ryder, explored fun, light, educational, and empowering activities to fill a bit of class time as students continue the writing process.
Presentation Date: September 29th, 2023
