UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

Through engagement with reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary memoirs of displaced young women and essays by prominent refugee writers from around the world, students will develop their writing, critical and creative thinking, and analytical skills. Longing for home and a fear of an uncertain future binds all of the displaced asylum seekers whose journeys you will read and respond to. In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, all of the nearly 80 million currently displaced is a person with dreams for a better, safer world.

Course Description

This writing seminar helps students develop as college-level, academic writers. Students will engage, rhetorically, with the theme of class war in America to develop their abilities to participate in important academic discourses, understand and respond to the arguments of others, and develop and support their own positions. Through deep inquiry and revision, this seminar facilitates the habits of critical and creative questioning, thinking, and argumentation to help students become more proficient and skillful academic writers. Through two major writing projects, requiring the practice of extensive revision, students will be asked to draw their own conclusions and write for academic audiences about what it means to live in an economically equitable and just society. The first paper will focus on analyzing an act of class war, chosen by students. The second paper will focus on (virtually) any social justice issue important to the writer and will illustrate both what that writer has learned about the academic revision process and rhetorical argumentation.

Course Description

This writing seminar invites us to consider not only the sources of our food, but the environmental, social, and ethical impact of our choices. How are we connected (or not) to the sources of our food? How are social justice and sustainability linked? Students will engage these questions through readings, writing projects, service learning, field trips, and films, developing the ability to present arguments in clear, academic prose, employ writing as a critical thinking tool, and participate in civic discourse.

Course Description

This course will develop your academic writing skills by teaching you to write for a variety of rhetorical situations about the complex relationships between politics and media, with a focus on reasoned, ethical argumentation. Through assigned readings and class discussions, we will explore how the news media shape our views of politicians and political issues, and discover ways we can contribute our own voices to the political discourse.

Course Description

This course will develop your academic writing skills by teaching you to write for a variety of rhetorical situations about the complex relationships between politics and media, with a focus on reasoned, ethical argumentation. Through assigned readings and class discussions, we will explore how the news media shape our views of politicians and political issues, and discover ways we can contribute our own voices to the political discourse.

Course Description

Through academic and civic writing, this course explores the theme of water citizenship—what we as citizens know about where our tap water comes from, where our flushes send it, how much it costs to manage it, who owns it, and how humans threaten its supply and safety. Our “knowledge” is often shaped by pop culture and media, which serve us a mixture of fact and fear about water. Think of news coverage of recent floods, droughts, and contamination; of TV series such as Mighty Rivers and Blue Planet; of films such as Quantum of Solace, Rango, and Dark Waters; and of thriller novels such as The Water Knife. Think also of the rhetorical impact of the phrases “water wars” and “toilet to tap.” Clearly, to be educated, responsible water citizens we need to understand the power of language and image and have the rhetorical knowledge and writing skills to write our way into these civic conversations. This course, through analyzing pop culture artifacts, reading civic and researched arguments, and creating writing and visual projects that ask you to be proactive water citizens, will prepare you for academic writing, with its emphasis on analysis, research, and argument.

Course Description

How does art shape your opinion about social issues? In this academic writing course you will examine the rhetoric of art for social change evident in various forms of creative expression, including literary arts, music, and visual arts to understand ways in which the arts communicate messages, advance arguments, and motivate civic responsibility. Through close-readings and rhetorical analyses of written and visual texts, you will write about ways in which art is essential to sustaining people and place.

Course Description

Through engagement with reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary memoirs of displaced young women and essays by prominent refugee writers from around the world, students will develop their writing, critical and creative thinking, and analytical skills. Longing for home and a fear of an uncertain future binds all of the displaced asylum seekers whose journeys you will read and respond to. In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, all of the nearly 80 million currently displaced is a person with dreams for a better, safer world.

Course Description

Through engagement with reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary memoirs of displaced young women and essays by prominent refugee writers from around the world, students will develop their writing, critical and creative thinking, and analytical skills. Longing for home and a fear of an uncertain future binds all of the displaced asylum seekers whose journeys you will read and respond to. In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, all of the nearly 80 million currently displaced is a person with dreams for a better, safer world.

Course Description

Our language does not only convey our messages; it constructs our belonging. This course explores: (1) how language is used to construct social identities; (2) how society perceives language varieties and stratifies its speakers into categories of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class; (3) how language attitudes, ideologies, and policies affect the speakers and writers of marginalized groups; and (4) how speakers and writers negotiate their social identities and access to power within language ideologies.