The Expository Writing Program in the English Department has just opened one more ENGL 281 course and there are still seats available in the ENGL 382 course for Spring Quarter 2021. Please forward these course descriptions to your students and let them know about this enrollment opportunity.
These courses are a great opportunity for any student looking to fulfill their "C" or "W" credits and all work toward the Writing Minor! More information can be found on the minor here: https://english.washington.edu/writing-minor.
Please find descriptions for these courses below to be circulated to your students.
NEW ENGL 281 F - MW 10:30-12:20 / SLN: 21722
Course Title: Writing About Social Change
In this class, we will look to several texts that work to imagine alternatives to the structures of our current world-system. We will engage with texts that are interested in transformation—in the possibility of the old falling away and something new emerging. In order to facilitate this conversation, we will consider Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and a few short stories. Each text will be paired with secondary readings and materials to help us think through the way these texts offer critiques of our world as well as offer imaginative, compelling alternatives. We will use these primary and secondary materials to produce various kinds of writing. Students will begin and develop lines of inquiry that emerge out of the primary texts and our class conversations, and, ultimately, students will use these primary and secondary texts to produce arguments that matter and that intervene in ongoing conversations and issues.
ENGL 382 B - TTH 1:30-3:20 / SLN: 14084
Course Title: Reading and Writing Social Justice through Board Games
Students will hone their reading and writing skills by critiquing and responding to dominant societal narratives and stereotypes through gameplay, research, and design. They will engage with primary sources such as firsthand anecdotes and interview data to craft alternative “counterstory” narratives. They will then learn to find, evaluate, and synthesize academic sources to create a research topic. The course will conclude with a game design project in which students work in teams to create digital playable board games that communicate their research to “real world” audiences.
The skills students gain in this course can be applied in their future research; multimodal design projects; and courses, teams, and jobs that call for collaborative problem-solving.