Spring UW Course Descriptions

Registration Transaction Forms (RTFs)

Please note that all Fall and Spring UW1020 sections are capped at 17 students and that this cap cannot be exceeded for any reason. UW instructors cannot sign RTF forms to add students to a section. The only way to add a section of UW1020 is through the GWeb system. If a section is full, you should either check GWeb frequently for open seats, select a different section, or plan to take UW the following semester.

Spring 2027

UW 1020 Courses:

Art, Andrew - Writing Through the Self

When is it okay to use “I” in an essay? You’ve no doubt been instructed at some point to avoid using personal pronouns in your academic writing, but what is the source of this prohibition? In this course, we will examine and unpack the assumptions surrounding “personal writing” in a range of rhetorical situations. Through readings in both creative and scholarly genres, we will begin the course by considering the rhetorical implications of writing from a first-person perspective. We will also examine the history of the “essay,” a genre marked by its embrace of the singular first-person, and explore its significance to inquiry and discourse.

The writing exercises and projects of this course will ask you to engage with the “self” from a variety of angles: your lived experiences, memories, ways of seeing, and ways of knowing. This will require a significant amount of self-reflection and critical analysis. While we will often be in the realm of the subjective or personal, this does not mean that we will abandon objectivity. The major research project of this course, an autoethnographic essay, will ask you to investigate aspects of your own personal experiences in order to arrive at new cultural knowledge. As the co-editors of the Journal of Autoethnography put it, “Your mind, body, instincts and intuitions, interests, emotions, experiences, perspectives, values and beliefs, and everything else makes you a one-of-a-kind research instrument.” Writing through the self means you are both the researcher and the subject of your research, and you will be writing to “know thyself” as well as others.

Barlow, Jameta Nicole - Writing Science and Health

This community engaged course meets any student, STEM major or not, at the door of discovery. Recent political moments have attempted to sanitize and malign science in a way that can inhibit such discovery. We, as co-learners, will describe scientific discoveries so our audience could possibly replicate the experience.  This method offers you to consider multiple standpoints, interrogate their philosophy of science and consider alternative ways of knowing—all skills critical to introducing you to university writing and an academic learning environment, while exploring the District of Columbia. You will leave this class appreciating the discovery and application of science (STEM), improving critical thinking skills and communicating through multiple genres. Teaching students how to deconstruct research, as well as think critically about current events in STEM may encourage ongoing practice beyond the end of the course. You will engage in a comprehensive overview of the intricacies between objectivity, moral ethic, science and truth. This process will expand your approach to information—how you receive it and how you understand it—as well as inform your worldview.

Bieda, Casey - Of Margins and Monsters: Writing, Perspective, and Advocacy

Writing always has a job to do.

Historically, science fiction and speculative fiction writing, for example, ask us to contemplate what problems we are facing in our current culture. Many of these stories underscore important “real world” conversations about environmentalism, equity and equality, power, social justice, and technological development. Speculative fiction and research-based writing share the common goal of highlighting the current conflicts in our culture, and facilitating actionable solutions to our most immediate societal issues. This genre of writing highlights what is wrong to us in the hope that we will examine what we believe is right. It is a genre of advocacy, action, and change.

Therefore, this writing course examines, through the lens of science fiction and speculative fiction, the craft of writing as a form of community participation. In this course students will use research to engage with a social or cultural problem of their choosing, and over the course of the semester create both a research paper as well as a multimodal adaptation of their work. Students will learn not only sustainable rhetorical practices for composition, but also learn how to engage with the perspectives of others, how to critically assess the presentation of information, and how we can create the future we want by considering the future we don’t want. 

Carter, Katharine - "I Did my Own Research: Writing Evidence of Systemic Inequity"

From federal and state laws to school rules and codes of conduct, systems have historically placed barriers to people’s freedoms and access to opportunities. These institutionalized drivers of inequity are often embedded in social interaction, where they are far more subtle but equally as unjust.

Scholars have used theories, including critical theory, to explain these occurrences and write solutions to these inequities.

In this course students will be introduced to research by examining topics within society that are rooted in inequality and maintained through social systems.

Students will develop research questions to explore a chosen topic, and review existing research on the topic they’ve chosen to address. Research sources will include a combination of scholarly and non-scholarly sources, such as journal articles, social media posts, case studies, narratives, and government agency reports.

Students will then be prepared to use their analysis to create solutions to the inequities related to their research topics, social justice. Students will write topic summaries,  research papers, and research proposals for a hypothetical research study. Students will also create posters to display their research.  

Counts, Benjamin - Conflict and Information Literacy

This course covers a wide range of current topics and events—with an emphasis on current. Our initial focus will be on the idea of political conflict as performance art, followed by branching out to cover other forms of conflict, several different styles of writing and public speaking, the dos and don’ts of academic integrity, a dozen or so different databases, and at least three analytical frameworks that will help prepare you for the world beyond the classroom. Through it all, we are going to see how conflicts operate at three levels: What is shown, what is hidden, and what goes unseen.

Major assignments will include two research papers, a policy proposal, a narrative essay, and a portfolio. Minor assignments will include accessing and making use of multiple databases, as well as learning and using structured analytical frameworks. While the course will revolve around comparing and understanding numerous conflicts, students will select their own research topics and materials from outside the assigned readings. Students will be required to take part in interdisciplinary conversation and engage in critical thinking.

Daqqa, Hanan - “Not Another Home Movie”: How Do You Research When the Subject is Yourself?

Be prepared to change what you know about writing, and maybe even what you know about yourself. This course will give you the opportunity to make an impact powerfully and artfully through the telling of that family story, hidden in the attic. Give it the attention it needs, so it can connect you to yourself. As we connect, we gain control.

Telling your story, you will be wearing three hats: the journalist, the researcher, and the filmmaker.

As a journalist, you will learn how to take risks and dig deeper into yourself in order to tell a captivating and impactful story, and you will conduct an important interview.

As a researcher, you will learn how to formulate your own research question and how to let your question drive the journey. Your question focus will be on how to tell your story on film.

Finally, as a filmmaker, you will learn how to use framing, camera movements and sound to tell a story. Your film will be screened during the last week of class. A keepsake for generations to come. 

Fletcher, Wade - An Empirical Approach: Writing in the Social Sciences

Media portrayals of social science research, such as a Time Magazine report on “how laughter can boost one’s attractiveness,” often result in sensational claims made in limited contexts, which some scholars say devalues the important work being done in fields such as sociology, psychology, and education. How is social science research relevant to our daily lives? What ethical implications accompany such research? How do disciplinary conventions function in social science disciplines, and how do these differ from those with which we are more accustomed?

In this course, we will seek to better understand how knowledge is constructed in the social sciences, explore how this knowledge is communicated rhetorically, and consider how tenets of social science research and writing can inform our own work in other areas and disciplines. Assignments will include three papers—an article critique, an Op-Ed, and an argumentative research paper on a current issue in a social science discipline—as well as short projects, an annotated bibliography, and contributions to an online class discussion forum.

Francois, Emma - Fashioning Thought

“Fashion has to do with ideas,” Coco Chanel said, “the way we live, what is happening.” This course explores the fundamentals of writing by considering fashion. What can the principles of design teach us about our own writing and the writing we love? How can we fashion our writerly identities to produce meaningful texts engaging the world we live, dress, and write in?

We’ll start the semester exploring fashion writing across genres by translating a scholarly essay into an article for a popular media platform. As we write, we’ll experiment with skills from the designer’s toolkit (like social brainstorming, vision boards, and sketches) to disrupt and examine our own writing processes. Other major assignments include a “collage annotated bibliography” and a class field trip to the GW Textile Museum to explore how writing, in conjunction with other mediums, exists beyond the page. Drawing on this experience and research conducted throughout the semester, we’ll write a 8-10 page object essay to discern—and communicate—how one sartorial text can change and reflect the world.

Gamber, Cayo - Legacies of the Holocaust 

Every UW 1020 course requires ‘finished’ writing, developed in a rigorous composition process often consisting of pre-draft preparation, drafts, and revisions based on instructor’s advice and classmates’ comments. In this course, the series of tasks you will perform — including writing a research paper that integrates both primary and secondary sources — are designed both to help you become familiar with an array of research efforts as well as familiar with writing an authoritative study of your chosen topic. In this course, we analyze primary documents from the Shoah — photographs and oral histories, in particular. I ask that we engage with these materials because such research encourages us to value the research findings of others; to acquire research skills; to recognize the ways in which primary materials are central to both the research process and the conclusions one draws; and, perhaps most importantly, to realize our analysis allows us to make meaningful additions to the academic conversation about a given topic. The range of research topics is wide, from the role art played in the Holocaust to the workings of a particular concentration camp; or from the role liberators played (or failed to play) to what is known about the "bearers of secrets," the Sonderkommando, who were eyewitnesses to the Final Solution. While we may not be able to make amends for the Holocaust, I believe that through the careful study of the lives of those who perished and the words of those who survived, we become witnesses for the eyewitnesses, witnesses who are willing to be bearers of the stories and history of the Shoah.

Gretes, Andrew - The Good Life: Exploring Writing Through Philosophy

If you’re interested in questions like “How does one live a flourishing life?” and “Is anxiety lowkey a superpower?” you’re in luck: this is the class for you. In this class, we’ll use philosophy to approach critical thinking and composition. More specifically, we’ll sample some of the most famous self-help theories in world history: Buddhism, Daoism, Stoicism, Existentialism, etc. As a student of this class, you’ll choose a philosophy, test-drive it, and write about your findings. We’ll engage in a variety of projects, including a TED Talk where students will take a concept from their chosen philosophy and use this concept as a tool to explore and re-think an issue in our own culture.

Hayes, Carol - “How Writing Works”

To write is to convey your thoughts on paper in a traceable form that others can then respond to. Writing is thus both a challenge (are you able to put what you mean into words on the screen or page?) and an act of vulnerability (you are opening yourself to response from your readers, whatever those responses might be). Very, very few people find writing “easy” (I am not among them). Your past experiences with writing and language, whether good or bad, will have shaped your emotions, your writing process, and your view of your own writing identity.

This UW class is designed to give you a space to explore your experiences and challenges with writing, with the goal of increasing your writing knowledge in ways that will support your transitions to writing in other contexts, such as other GW courses, internships, and beyond. Drawing upon writing studies research (yes, scholars research writing!) and research in educational psychology, you’ll use that research to help prepare you to write in new contexts. 

Hijazi, Nabila - Contested Bodies: Beyond a Standard Refugee Narrative 

This is a service learning course. Learn more about service learning courses.

This course examines the complex and often dangerous realities that refugees face on their journeys, including human trafficking, smuggling, sexual exploitation, imprisonment, and other inhumane practices, as well as the social, political, and economic factors that compel people to flee. Rather than reinforcing the dominant narrative of refugees as victims or objects of rescue, the course emphasizes their lived experiences, agency, and strategies for survival, mobility, and advocacy. Through academic texts, personal narratives, TED Talks, and documentaries, students will learn how refugees exercise agency not only to survive but also to advocate, thrive, and achieve economic mobility. Students will practice summarizing, analyzing, researching, arguing, and remediating--key rhetorical skills necessary for ethical public engagement, rigorous academic scholarship, and exemplary professional practice.

As a community-engaged course, this class moves beyond theoretical inquiry, providing students with the opportunity to collaborate with nonprofit organizations working directly with refugee communities. These partnerships offer hands-on experience in public scholarship, advocacy, and ethical engagement. By integrating classroom learning with direct community involvement, this course challenges students to question assumptions, engage deeply with the complexities of migration, and recognize writing as a powerful tool for social change.

Hijazi, Nabila - Feeding Hope: Writing, Food, and Refugee Agency in the DC Community

Aligned with the policy, innovation, and humanity pillars of the Global Food Institute (GFI), this course encourages students to consider the broader social, political, and humanitarian implications of food systems in a globalized world. This course examines the intersections of food, culture, and refugee empowerment, focusing on refugees resettled in the Washington DC region. You will participate in hands-on culinary activities, including a cooking demonstration, to explore how food preserves cultural identity, fosters resilience, and supports economic sustainability amid displacement. You will develop critical thinking and research skills by analyzing food literacy’s role in storytelling, adaptation, and empowerment. You will develop critical skills in analysis, research, reflection, and argumentation, learning to ask thoughtful questions, evaluate counterarguments, and communicate well-supported positions, abilities essential for academic scholarship, public engagement, and professional practice.

Experiential learning is central to this community-engaged course, which moves beyond theoretical inquiry by partnering with local nonprofit organizations that support refugee communities. Through community-based projects, ethnographic research, participation in cultural events, and direct engagement with refugees, you will explore how food shapes identity, belonging, and community. These partnerships provide hands-on experience in public scholarship, advocacy, and ethical engagement while integrating classroom learning with meaningful community involvement. Through inquiry, reflection, writing, and collaborative practice, you will deepen your understanding of food's transformative role in fostering sustainable and inclusive communities, challenge assumptions about migration and displacement, and recognize writing as a powerful tool for social change.

Janzen, Kristi - “Beyond the Numbers: Economics, Business, Money & Markets”

This course aims to deepen students’ understanding of economics and business, while introducing them to university-level research and scholarly/academic writing. By examining writings on economics, business and finance (e.g., inflation, the cost of higher education, corporate earnings, interest rates, mortgages, antitrust laws, wages, taxes, economic growth), students will both broaden their practical understanding of these topics and hone their ability to write about them. Students will read about the discipline of writing and examine different styles and genres. We will discuss research techniques, context, information sources, and methods of evaluation, while analyzing why and how particular choices are made about what data or information to include or exclude. The class includes numerous smaller writing assignments, an OpEd, and a scholarly article following the format of a typical economics journal article. The students’ scholarly articles must incorporate peer-reviewed journal articles and other appropriate scholarly sources and data. Students will choose article subjects within the realm of business, finance or economics. Over the course of the semester, students will share and discuss their writing in class, not only to improve their writing, but also to enrich everyone’s understanding of the topics. They will also edit their peers’ work. 

Malone-France, Derek - TBA

TBA

Mantler, Gordon - From Abolition to Home Rule: Writing D.C. Movement Histories

What do historical social justice movements in Washington, D.C., tell us about not just the nation’s capital but the nation itself? Whether it was the movement to abolish slavery, activism to establish women’s right to vote, or the District’s own struggle for home rule, social movements have a storied history in Washington, D.C., despite – or perhaps because – the capital has never enjoyed full-fledged democratic rights in its nearly 250-year existence. In this class, you will begin to think like historians by analyzing the activism that shaped the city and region you live in today. In the process, you will visit parts of the city with which you may be unfamiliar, including communities and archives not in Foggy Bottom. And you will begin to – or continue to – develop university-level research and writing skills, including understanding disciplinary differences in writing genres, audiences, and conventions, exploring GW’s vast library resources, recognizing the limitations of generative artificial intelligence, and seeing writing as inherently a social act.

McCaughey, Jessica - Composing Connection: Paying Attention and Making Meaning in an Age of Loneliness, Efficiency, and Screens

Seeking, building, and maintaining true human connections are arguably more complex feats in this moment than they’ve ever been. Due to factors as wide ranging as AI, productivity culture, a desire for a frictionless existence, the distractions of life online, altered post-pandemic social habits, and economic and political divisions, among many others, genuine connection is rare. In this class, we’ll try to understand what this means for us as writers, thinkers, future professionals, and humans by asking questions such as: What do we lose when our connections with other people are lacking? How can we find and create meaning when so many things are competing for our attention? Are we really currently living in a ‘loneliness epidemic,’ as some claim? What does it look like to make more effort toward human connection on a college campus? In the workplace? With our families? What are the costs and rewards? Finally, what does it mean to connect with *ourselves*?

This UW1020 section asks students to interrogate their own lives and connections alongside popular and scholarly texts in an effort to explore how human connection and deep work in a distracted world make an already extremely challenging process of development—becoming an adept researcher and writer at the college level—much, much harder. In an effort to combat this, we’ll develop our academic writing and research skills through a series of increasingly complex assignments, each one scaffolded with the support of substantial feedback from peers and your professor. As we do so, we’ll consider catalysts and implications of human connections across time and across disciplines, from sociology and economics to geography and the arts, among others, while working to develop the analytical and reflective skills necessary to consider, research, and express nuanced intellectual arguments clearly and effectively across a variety of forms of writing. Ultimately, it’s my hope that, even in a world that seemingly wants to keep us operating only at the surface level, we’ll find lasting ways to engage deeply with other people and with texts.

Mullen, Mark - The Grateful and the Dead

In the US especially we have a conflicted relationship with the idea of death.  On the one hand, our entertainment media serve up regular doses of the most spectacular and inventive forms of death imaginable.  Our news offers a steady drumbeat of stories that testify to a peculiarly US tolerance for large numbers of mostly preventable citizen deaths: gun violence, automobile fatalities, and of course, the national scandal of the highest COVID-19 death toll in the world. But while our culture has—until recently—hesitatingly moved toward a greater openness when talking about issues like sexuality and mental illness, we remain curiously reluctant to talk about what is, after all, the one certainty in all our lives.

Part of the problem, of course, is the cultural belief that death is a grim and depressing topic.

This course, however, takes its lead from a counter-intuitive set of research findings from the field of positive psychology.  Researchers were surprised to discover that one thing positively correlated with long-term human happiness was in fact regular contemplation of death. Not a morbid obsession with death, but rather regular brief reminders of mortality, both our own and that of others.

This course will challenge students to engage imaginatively with death by exploring an array of writing and research styles while investigating different approaches to the contemplation of death. A major component of this course will be to explore locations associated with death in DC, particularly lesser-known cemeteries, memorials and historical sites.

Myers, Danika - Poetry + Research

“There is no telling this story; it must be told” – NourbeSe Philip, Zong!
“Poems and poets of the first rank remain mysterious” - Susan Howe, My Emily Dickenson

What role do facts and evidence play in research, and what role does the language we use to say what we know play? How can poetic language function as a research methodology that allows poets to make new knowledge by finding ways to say what was previously unsayable? While we often think of poetry as "expressing feelings" and research as "reporting data," the two are more alike than you might think. Both poets and scholars are driven by a deep curiosity to uncover truths that are elusive, forgotten, or silenced.

In this course, we will look at how modern poets use meticulous research and structured language to challenge what we know and how we know it. We will study works like J. Michael Martinez’ poetic sequence “The Mexican American War Post Card Company” which asks what it means to document the atrocities of a war for commercial sale, and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, which uses the language of government resolutions to critique the ongoing legacy of settler-colonialism.

This class invites you to step into the roles of both poet and scholar in order to learn how to write as a researcher. We will treat research as a pursuit of knowledge that requires curiosity and determination, playfulness and empathy, and, always, struggle to speak new ideas in new words. Together, we will ask: How do we develop research projects where something real is at stake and there is a true need for the knowledge you seek? What can "play" teach us? How can we experiment with using sources in bold new ways?—subverting, celebrating, and transforming them to see how creativity makes our academic writing stronger and more authentic. What kind of knowledge-seeker are you? What will you do with the habits of mind—curiosity, persistence, and listening—that will serve you throughout your time at GW and beyond? What language do you need to speak the knowledge you discover into the world so that others can share your discovery?

Assignments will include a research-based poetry project developed over the course of the semester, with contributing projects including a proposal, a project talk, and a zine. 

Pollack, Rachel - The Greek Ideal in Art

This course examines the greatest surviving masterpieces of Greco-Roman sculpture and explores their enduring significance in western art from antiquity to the present day. From this essential canon of ancient sculpture, which includes the Doryphoros (Spear Bearer), the Laocoon, the Aphrodite of Knidos, the Spinario, and the Weary Hercules, we will analyze why these works have both inspired artists and stirred scholarly debate amongst ancient writers, art historians, archaeologists, Renaissance humanists, and Enlightenment philosophers.

During the first half and the semester, the class will study various artworks on view at the National Gallery of Art as well has masterpieces in major art collections (i.e. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Walters Gallery, The Vatican Museums, The Capitoline Museum). Each student will first select a sculpture from one of these collections and write a catalogue entry on the subject (~2-3 pages). Mid-semester, you will also write a short research paper (~6-8 pages) on a selected sculpture you find to be worth further exploration. 

Presser, Pamela - Writing Lives: Composing Consciousness and Community Engagement 

This is a service learning course. Learn more about service learning courses.

NOTE: This course will be taught via remote instruction.

Feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun wrote “Out of old tales we must make new lives.”

Can we repurpose the texts which surround us, and utilize writing to create a more just, more inclusive world? Could reading Mary Shelley’s 19th century novel Frankenstein help us understand 21st century climate change? Does an evaluation system which requires grading need an overhaul? How can we responsibly interact with our communities?

In this class, we will ponder these questions, drawing on theorists such as Inoue, Freud and Marx. Students will be expected to complete several short assignments each week. Major assignments will include developing an annotated critical bibliography and an accompanying research paper, and students will also engage in an intensive peer review process.

The class includes a community engagement component which will require students to work with a local non-profit organization. 

Quave, Kylie - (Social) Science Writing: Rhetorics of Transparency and Uncertainty

How long ago were humans in the Western Hemisphere? In what ways does social media harm health? What makes up the ideal human diet? Research questions are sometimes not answerable, answers can be ambiguous, or evidence can be weak. In this course, we will examine a range of questions about humans that illustrate how science functions and how it falls short. The scientific method is designed to be self-correcting, through hypothesis testing, peer review, retesting, replication, and data transparency. Beyond this, some scientists’ research is undermined by epistemic injustices: the discarding of ideas based on who the scientist is. When researchers ignore scholarship outright or (unintentionally) perpetuate false or weakly supported claims, including undue certainty, there can be significant impacts on individuals and societies.

This course includes reading about cases of research un/certainty and the social values and norms that shape knowledge. Students will choose case studies related to uncertainty, ambiguity, and scientific transparency. Assignments include tracing a claim about humans through non-expert and scholarly literature, a deeper examination of an example of ambiguity or uncertainty in the (social) sciences, and a public-facing project that brings together research from several students. Reading and writing about scientific uncertainty contribute to our ability to critically examine claims, evidence, and how research is communicated to the public.

Richter, Jacob - Writing About Data Centers

Discussions about data centers are everywhere. From community organizations to urban planners to environmental advocacy groups to major AI technology companies singlehandedly propping up the US economy, it seems like everyone is talking about data centers these days. What are data centers, though? What are their proven and potential economic impacts? How big is their carbon footprint and what is their impact on people’s health? How much water do they use, do they raise electricity bills, and do they pollute the air that we all breathe? Why do communities, including communities right on GW’s doorstep, choose to build (and increasingly, not build) data centers? For GW students, concerns about data centers are not theoretical: DC itself has six data centers and just a bit west of GW’s campus sits “Data Center Alley,” an area where nearly 22% of the world’s internet traffic passes through.

In University Writing 1020: Writing About Data Centers, students will investigate, research, write, and create in response to this hot topic within current events and the contemporary political landscape. In the course, students will investigate some component (environmental, economic, technological, community-based, labor, humanitarian) of an existing or proposed data center, beginning with a novel research question that will be of public importance for the world. Students will then research this question about their data center of choice, investigating crucial sites of public importance that exist at the nexus of technology, politics, economics, communication, education, and even democracy. After a thorough research-based investigation of popular, scholarly, and primary sources, students will intervene within public data center discourse by writing a “Public Recommendation Report” that offers the public an argument-based "recommendation" for future action. Students will then remix their research and writing projects into an innovative multimodal project to end the course. 

Russ, Ebony - Anti-Racist STEM Writing in the 21st  Century

academia, publications, private industry, media, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is key to advancing anti-racist STEM writing. Our writing skills and style are informed by the subject matter we engage with. Intentional approaches to anti-racist STEM writing can be pivotal to your success as a well-informed scholar. Exercising inclusivity can be superficial and deceptive if one does not possess the foundational knowledge of the interplay of race, racism, and scholarship in academia. Anti-racist STEM writing is a function of scholar activism, which is a component of social justice that can contribute to overall equality.

In this course, we will examine components of anti-racist STEM writing in the 21st century while comparing similarities and differences in social justice across past centuries. Our examination of anti-racism will be guided by scholarly writings on race and racism. This will involve critically reading and writing about scholarly and popular texts authored by African American authors as well as many other Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Assignments include identifying scientific evidence, original research writing, responses to readings and peer writing, collaborative and independent revision, and graphical display of information (tables, charts, and infographics), and critiquing Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI).  Students will rhetorically evaluate scientific arguments and respond to them in socially relevant ways for both expert and broader public audiences. 

Ryder, Phyllis - Writing for Social Change

This is a service learning course. Learn more about service learning courses.

In “Writing for Social Change,” you will get to know the city of DC beyond the National Mall and Capitol Hill. You’ll explore DC neighborhoods and history. You’ll also explore your own “big questions” about how to create social change in this city at this time.

This is a “community-enaged” writing class, which means you will volunteer with local DC nonprofits to study writing in concrete and urgent contexts.  How do community leaders convince everyday people that we can make a difference? How do they guide us to join them in a spirit of reciprocity?  By combining your experience with DC nonprofits with a careful analysis of related academic theories, you will shape thoughtful answers to questions that matter to you.

Over the semester, you will build on the writing strategies you learned in high school to become stronger, more deliberate writers. I will challenge you to reflect on your own values and identity, so that you can connect with your readers. I will push you to think more fully about the sources you draw on and the tools you use, so that your essays are complex and compelling.The assignments are divided into manageable pieces and you will receive a lot of feedback along the way. I have high expectations, and you will have a great deal of support. 

Sauer, Beverly - Risk Communication

The Shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters, the submersible Titan, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Maui fire, Boeing accidents, continuing wild fires over much of the Western US demonstrate that communication plays an important role in risk management. Since the beginning of 2020, we ourselves have struggled to make sense of risk information about COVID as we consider whether to travel, see our families, party with friends, or mask (or not) in public spaces.

Risk demands action. But facts alone may not persuade stakeholders to act. What kinds of evidence can we draw upon to persuade people to act in what we perceive to be their best interests? Who can we trust? What does science tell us—or fail to tell us—about how to act in the face of uncertain and contradictory data? Can effective communication make a difference? What role does AI play in modern risk communication?

Writing assignments in this class are designed to help you construct persuasive fact-based ethical and logical risk communication messages for particular audiences. Although the disasters presented in the class are interesting from a technical point of view, you will focus on communication strategies (visual, verbal, graphical, and written) that influence the outcomes of the disaster.

In this class, you will summarize and critique previous communication failures; construct a research-based assessment of a risk of your own choice; learn to construct a ‘mental model’ of what audiences know or believe (audience analysis) about a particular risk; explore the challenges of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary risk communication; and produce a short research paper in which you apply the skills you have learned to persuade specific audiences to act to reduce risk.

Ultimately, you will develop critical thinking skills that enable you to identify and mitigate communication failures before, during, and after a crisis. No technical experience is required.

Schell, Heather - Data Driven

We inhabit a data-driven world. While people may disagree on what constitutes data—or even if data is plural or singular—"showing someone the numbers" is now our most valued method of proving something is true. It's "hard evidence," which could explain why it “crunches” when we "crunch the numbers." Personal experience—our most direct source of knowledge about our world—is sometimes rejected as "anecdata." In this class, we'll learn to be more critical data consumers and resist the common assumption that numbers speak for themselves.  Are data-driven arguments the best approach to every question?  Can data even exist without humans?  What does it mean for each of us to have so much data about our “private” lives—our educational record, our health, our politics, our phone calls, our driving record, even our food preferences—so easily accessible for data brokers and AI tools?  

We’ll explore these topics through a series of four projects: 1) your autobiography in data; 2) reverse-engineering a professional report; 3) a deep dive into a data viz; and 4) Data as Art, where you’ll create your own entry for a class exhibit of data visualizations.  This class will help you write about data ethically and effectively, while leaving you in the driver’s seat.  

Tomlinson, Niles B. - Fake News and Ironic Views: Satire as Social Critique

While satire has a long history of exposing social/political excess and human folly, never has it been so prevalent as in our current cultural moment. From The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight to the Netflix series Bojack Horseman to the mockumentaries of Sasha Baron Cohen to the films Don’t Look Up and They Cloned Tyrone, satire is a potent and sometimes dangerous rhetorical tool for illuminating the absurdities of extremist views and partisan propaganda. This course starts with the question of why satire has become such a pervasive phenomenon and then moves towards an exploration of the value of, and potential problems with, satire as a lens for social criticism. 

This course will include assignments like the creation of a short satire film that critiques a relevant current issue, a rhetorical analysis of a scholarly article on satire, a critical reading of a satirical film or novel, and a capstone research project which will give students a chance to explore in depth a particular example of satire in contemporary culture. In all, this course will make the larger points that the language of satire and irony is our language, and that laughter and seriousness are not mutually exclusive.

Troutman, Phillip - Visual Past: Images in History

Historical images pose writing problems. Despite appearances, their meanings are not self-evident. We need context, outside knowledge, and technical expertise to help us understand and analyze them. We need creativity to turn the visual into the verbal. What words do we use to describe and interpret paintings vs. photographs, political cartoons vs. protest posters, films vs. television commercials, museum dioramas vs. performance art? Images don’t speak for themselves, and yet they say things, they want things, they make claims upon us, they affect us–especially when they speak on issues we care about. How do we understand that interaction between ourselves and the visual past, and what do we do with that as writers? In this class, you will be pursuing archival visual materials in digital and physical collections, framing research questions interesting to you and to prior scholars, and acquiring specialized vocabulary, methods, and concepts to help you interpret the visual past. Most importantly, you will hone your writerly, analytical voice by responding to feedback from the professor and your peers in a supportive writing environment. 

Upper-Level UW Courses:

Zink, Christy - Preparation for Peer Tutors in Writing/UW2112 Pedagogy and Praxis for Writing Consultants

Enrollment in UW 2111W and UW 2112 is by permission, after application and selection in the preceding fall. UW211W meets a WID requirement.

Writing invokes both science and art, and the study of writing, in turn, calls on all the disciplines in between. This course invites you to engage with interdisciplinary knowledge, with multiple genres of writing, and with questions of audience, purpose, and possibility to unlock deeper, more varied understandings of “good writing.”  What happens when we disturb insistence on a single, stable notion of English, as linguists and cultural studies scholars do, to revel in the reality of multiple Englishes? Playing with rich meanings and matterings of language, as do anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, among others, reveals what new expressions of individual identity, community, and communication? These questions are foundational to Writing Studies and are typical of the ones we’ll explore in this course.

UW2111W (three credits) and 2112 (one credit) are taken together, meeting pedagogy--how and why we teach—with praxis--the active application of the tools and techniques of peer writing consulting. Course readings and projects purposefully engage with research methodologies rooted in Writing Studies alongside models in parallel academic fields, providing a grounding in disciplinary writing that consultants encounter every day in a university’s writing center. The practicum sets that new expertise into motion as you observe and practice consulting in GW’s Writing Center, gaining interpersonal skills essential to teaching writing -- connecting, listening, and staying attentive to the full, complex humanity of writers (including yourselves).
UW2111W meets a WID requirement. Together, the courses are prerequisites for students applying to work as consultants in the GW Writing Center.