English 101- Antiracist Approaches to Language and Rhetoric
Reggie Townley
Class Metadata
Course- English 101
Course Theme: Antiracist Approaches to Language and Rhetoric
Teacher-Designer: Reggie Townley
Course Timeline: Quarter
Introduction to Course
This English 101 course explores a variety of antiracist approaches to language and rhetoric. In three units, we examine rhetorical thinking and common academic expectations as presented by our core text, Everyone’s an Author by Andrea Lunsford, and then critique these expectations through the lens of a variety of multilingual and antiracist scholars. We discuss these core ideas in class and on Canvas discussion boards. For major writing projects, students are given choice of topic and genre in order to honor their voices and meet their goals as writers and scholars.
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Course Narrative
The course is broken into an introductory unit, followed by three major units. The first and third major units culminate in a unit essay, while Unit 2 focuses on self assessment of the first unit, and planning the final project.
Each unit is divided into Core Readings, Major Writing Assignments, Student Choice Assignments, and Additional Resources.
Core Readings/Discussions
In this portion of the unit, we conduct online and in class discussions on rhetoric, using our core text book, and critical language discussions in which we use antiracist and multilingual authors to critique the limitations of standard approaches to languaging in composition classrooms.
Major Writing Assignments:
This portion of the unit is where unit essays and other larger assignments are completed.
In Units 1 and 3, this section contains the Essay Assignment sheet, as well as three draft assignments: Rough Draft, Second Draft, and Final Draft.
For Unit 2, we focus on assessing our work in Unit 1, and planning our final project, so the major assignment is our Topic and Genre Proposal for Final Project.
Student Choice Assignments
This section offers a variety of topic based assignments. Students are required to complete one student choice assignment per unit. This gives students the opportunity to explore a variety of topics, with sources included. Thes assignments are designed to give students options for essay topics as well as opportunities to apply our core concepts to a variety of intersecting issues. Student Choice topics include “Indigenous Rights Issues”, “Gender”, “Racial Justice and Oppression of Black Communities, “Athletics”, and “Computer Sciences”. Each SC assignment provides instructions for how to address a source using 3 basic prompts, as well as a short set of instructions on how to adapt the assignment to the essay assignment.
Additional Resources
Here are additional pages to assist with composition skills, including paragraph sandwiching, MLA citation, and revision strategies.
Add Video Walk through of Canvas Course.
- an audio/video narrative of your course design/approach that runs no more than 10 mins and/or a written narrative of your course design/approach that runs no more than 1,000 words.
- the use of headings and lists in structuring your written narrative.
- Using Hypohes.is for layering on addition meta-commentary about elements of the course.
Links to Course Materials
In this section we will provide links to accessible versions of your key course materials (i.e. syllabus, assignments, etc.).
Approach to Assessment
This course uses labor based grading, following grading bundles adapted from Katherine Burns.
Instructor Reflection
In this section provide a written and/or audio/visual reflection on how your course design/approach fits into antiracist curricular and pedagogical praxis.
