My classes invariably include some online component, and this page consolidates the resources that have developed over the years. Gathered here are the class sites created for courses I have taught while working at Kean University in Union, NJ, and as a seminar facilitator at DHSI in Victoria, BC.
Throughout this collection, I balance consistent design with flexible implementation. Toward the bottom of the page, I present student-authored textbook projects, which have been enthusiastically received by students and colleagues alike.
Hired as Assistant Professor of English in New Media, the courses I teach and create center around helping students develop critical understandings of writing studies, student-centric pedagogies, and digital literacies. (I often joke that I’m “an English teacher who acknowledges that the Internet exists.”) For the past several years, I’ve maintained class blogs to which students contribute each week with their responses to texts we read throughout the semester.
This class is designed as an introduction to writing studies as a discipline and to the varying expectations of writing at the college level. We look at how people develop literacies; how communities function through writing; how students’ writing processes adapt to changing circumstances; and how situations shape how writing is produced, distributed, and used.
This class is designed to give students experience thinking about and working with writing from the perspective of a writing-studies scholar. We look at how literacy develops, how communities form around writing, how the writing process works, how technology influences writing, and how writers develop a professional identity.
This class is designed to give students an opportunity to create online content beyond the usual confines of social media and profile-based pages. We look to both theory and practice to enrich our understanding of—and appreciation for—web-based writing.
Students create a web presence of their own design. Their add their voices to the internet, learn technical skills along the way, and study how writing works when it’s designed for digital spaces.
This course explores contexts and historical traditions of writing instruction and establishes a conceptual framework for understanding the teaching of writing at all levels. It is designed to help future teachers make effective decisions regarding the use and assessment of writing, giving them vocabulary to articulate their pedagogical position, and providing opportunity for publication.
This class examines technological systems that shape daily life and gives students tools to navigate, evaluate, and tactically respond to those systems. Major topics include privacy erosion, digital identities, surveillance, and data practices. We study technology, writing, and data through a rhetorical lens, highlighting the intentional design behind our information, devices, and social networks.
Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities ran from 2016 through 2024 at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The course (in certain iterations co-taught by Jesse Stommel, Chris Gilliard, or Robin DeRosa) was inspired by our work with Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy. Our work at DHSI was an exploration of pedagogy, challenging us to re-think how we approach our classes and interact with students.
Together, we built an open course as a playground, letting participants experiment with critical digital pedagogy in a class-created online course that we co-designed, built, deployed, promoted, and assessed, all within a single one-week seminar.
Two things stand out in this collection: The developing maturity of participant-generated sites, as I learned the degree of support most beneficial for these seminars, and the wildly varying interests of the participants over the years, leading to markedly different topical emphases each year. This adaptability and responsiveness is a hallmark of my approach to class projects.
This course is an experiment in critical digital pedagogy. The class members co-designed, built, deployed, promoted, and assessed an open-access online course during our 5-day seminar. We designed its three modules to help participants better understand how pedagogical practices and structures impact (digital) learning environments and frame educational experiences for multiple audiences.
This class was designed to prompt reflection and discussion around the role and significance of place/space in education. For individual educators, this is an opportunity to reflect on how physical and online places/spaces shape pedagogical practice. Taking the course and completing the activities and assignments may help us better understand how students, faculty, and institutional entities function and fulfill their roles through place/space.
This self-paced MOOC provides resources and guidance to help educators and institutions create sites of resistance giving students space to make plans and take action. It adopts and presents principles of Critical Digital Pedagogy as a means of helping students find agency.
This site aims to guide visitors through the course-planning process by providing explanations, resources, and activities designed to focus attention on advocacy for student agency in the midst of corporate and institutional pressures to use students as data points or profit opportunities. We aimed to bring a sense of organization and clarity to the important considerations of applying Critical Digital Pedagogy in today’s educational environment.
This online-only edition of the course focused on building community in collaborative digital learning environments and interrogates notions of outcomes, best practices, and instructional design. Work in the course is productive, grounded in praxis, and driven by learner experiences.
This course also served as a playground, letting participants experiment with critical digital pedagogy. Participants leave with a better understanding of their approaches to teaching and how critical digital pedagogy applies to DH courses.
Many of my classes culminate with students authoring textbook chapters for use by future students in that same class. I explain and justify this approach in “Student-Authored Textbooks: Challenging Expertise, Establishing Authority, Shaping Discourse,” Composition Studies 52.2 (Fall 2024). All active projects appear below.
