Course Spotlight – WRD 550: Online Instructional Design and Pedagogy

As registration begins for Spring Quarter 2023, the WRD blog is excited to showcase several brand-new course offerings, beginning with Sarah Brown’s graduate course WRD 550: Online Instructional Design and Pedagogy. As an MAWRD alumna, Brown has worked in instructional technology and faculty development at DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning for over a decade, and she has taught several courses in the WRD department. In 2021, Brown received the Excellence in First-Year Writing Teaching Award from WRD. Here, she shares more about her plans for the course and what students can look forward to learning.  As we get started,

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Winter Break Reading Recommendations

Although more reading may seem daunting now, at the end of the quarter, the month-long winter break is a great time to reinvigorate your reading muscles. We sought out some recommendations for what to read during break and have some options for readers of all kinds. Enjoy this list of our ten picks – and have a wonderful break! For Enlightenment How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy – Recommended by WRD GA Amanda Finn This book is a gorgeous examination of how we interact with our digital selves. As members of a 24/7 online environment (whether we actively

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Course Spotlight: WRD 309 Persuasion in the Age of TikTok

One of the incredible things about studying rhetoric and discourse is how our modes of communication are always evolving. That means that even social media is part of our social discursive lives. What better way to explore how these incorporations impact our cultural rhetoric? Professor Margaret Poncin Reeves is teaching an upcoming class all about the topic with a special focus on TikTok.  Read on to see what the course has in store for Winter Quarter / WQ23! What inspired you to teach WRD 309? Two things: The first is the topic of the cross-listed course, which is LSP 275:

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Course Spotlight: WRD 511 Rhetorics of Displacement Update

During Spring Quarter 2021, Professor Monica Reyes taught WRD 511: Rhetorics of Displacement which was a hit with students and will be coming back for Winter Quarter 2022. We caught up with Reyes to talk about how this class differs from the last time she taught it.  Are you doing anything differently for this iteration of WRD 511: Rhetorics of Displacement? Yes! Students responded so positively to the course the first time I taught it in Spring [of] 2021, so the bones of the course are still the same. I still have units/themes centered around various rhetorics (like those in

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Q&A with WRD’s New Chair Julie Bokser

The WRD department has a new chair. Professor Julie Bokser has been part of the program since its inception in 2007 when the department went its separate ways from the English department. Even prior to that she has called DePaul her academic home since the fall of 2000.  We wanted to take some time to chat with Prof. Bokser about her hopes for this new position, her time in the WRD program, and how it differs from her scholarly pursuits.  Why don’t we just start with who is Julie Bokser in relation to the WRD program? I’ve been here since

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Six Books to Keep the Summer Interesting

Being that we are nearly at the end of the Spring Quarter, thinking about reading for fun might not be high on the priority list. But we are just a few short weeks away from summer break which opens up some time for reading what we want to read. Luckily we have some recommendations courtesy of the WRD graduate assistants as well as from experts on social media.  Don’t worry, these aren’t all high-level academic works. These recommendations will, however, keep your summer interesting and your mind curious.  For Fun: The Secret History – Recommended by GA Kristin Fleming Written

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Event Recap: Writing and Rhetoric Across Borders Speaker Series with Dr. Laura Gonzales

On Tuesday, April 12, Dr. Laura Gonzales gave a fascinating presentation as part of the WRD Writing and Rhetoric Across Borders Speaker Series. Dr. Gonzales’ talk entitled “Translating Writing Across Communities, Languages, Contexts, and Disciplines” primarily focused on the ways in which we can all make a more conscious effort to bring equity into our work–both inside and outside the classroom. Much of what Dr. Gonzales had to share stemmed from the work she did with multilingual communicators who do translational work for her 2016 book Sites of Translation. A term she referred to frequently throughout her presentation was “translation

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