What kind of online course is this?
While this is a 3000-level English course open to students across colleges and majors, a lot of what we do in an ENGL course will be discipline-specific. I’m very excited that the roster for this class includes students from a variety of backgrounds. Don’t worry if you’ve never taken this kind of course before — English is a pretty broad field with ever-changing boundaries, and I’m not assuming any subject area knowledge. We will, however, exercise the methods and values that generally characterize the English discipline: an emphasis on “texts” (broadly conceived) as objects of critical inquiry, on how language works as a system to make meaning socially, and on how meaning-making practices change based on context rather than being static or stable. We won’t be reading much if any fiction because this is not a course in literature, but a course in writing and rhetoric. If you’ve taken a required writing course at Northeastern before, you were likely trained by someone putting theories and methods from this field into practice. For the purposes of our topic focus, the bulk of our readings will be academic articles and book chapters that engage critical and rhetorical theory, as well as popular and journalistic texts.
This is a primarily asynchronous course, meaning we will each be engaging with the course material for the most part at different times and places, rather than meeting regularly in a single (digital) space for real-time interaction. The course will have the equivalent amount of work that an on-the-ground course might have in terms of class time (400 minutes/week in the Summer session), plus reading and other assignments. You will respond in discussion board posts and complete activities that may include content-generation, analysis, or reflection on the week’s material; after the first week, these weekly assignments will generally be due on Mondays Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:59PM, EDT. Please engage with the materials and post early and often, rather than waiting until the last minute, since others’ participation in the course depends on yours.
Because this is not a self-paced course, the course content will become available to you week-by-week. I reserve the right to change the trajectory of the course depending on how it’s progressing and our changing interests. This means that you will not have the opportunity to, for example, access next week’s material early because you’ll be away and want to get it done sooner (although I don’t expect that any of us will be doing much non-essential traveling at the moment…). You will, however, have knowledge of major deadlines well in advance, and I’ll only push those back if necessary rather than move them up.
How can I stay connected and seek help if I need it?
While this course was originally scheduled as an asynchronous online course before the COVID-19 pandemic broke, I’d like to incorporate whatever synchronous components I can for us all to continue to feel connected. To guide me, I’ll be sending around a mandatory When2Meet poll for you to indicate your availability. I may try to schedule one or two Zoom discussions for all of us over the course of the term, or possibly some small breakout sessions if there is no good common time. I’ll keep you well-posted on that. I appreciate your patience and flexibility, since holding a productive online course at this moment is a learning experience for both students and teachers.
A sure thing that I will use these results to schedule will be virtual office hours, in which I’ll set aside a block of time when I’m absolutely available to you on Zoom. Office hours can be a great time to clarify or probe any questions you may have about the course concepts, as well as to hash out and get feedback on your ideas for assignments. Please feel free to come ask questions at whatever point you are in your writing process — I can help with brainstorming, drafting, revising, etc. — or just for clarification about material related to the course. You need not be struggling to come to office hours, nor is coming to office hours a sign that you are a poor student. If you are unable to make my office hours and would like to meet some other time, please email me, and we’ll see if we can arrange for an appointment (the earlier you do this, the better I can accommodate).
On the subject of email, I’ll communicate with the class through Canvas, so please check your Canvas course notifications and Northeastern email address regularly. I will do my best to answer any emails from you with questions in a timely manner. Please expect, however, that my replies will not be instantaneous, and it’s rare that I’ll see and respond to your email outside of daytime hours or on weekends. If you have any Canvas-related questions, please contact the 24/7 technical support that Northeastern pays for, using the red question mark in the lower left of your Canvas screen. You should also feel free to call Northeastern’s ITS at 617-373-4357[HELP], and they have a text chat available too. When you choose to email me about something related to our course, please be appropriate. (P.S. feel free to address me by my first name. When you address or refer to other students in the class, please use their preferred name and pronouns from our introductions, which may be different than what’s listed in Canvas!)
What materials will I need for this course?
To participate in this course, I expect that you have regular access to some kind of device with which you can access Canvas, reading and responding to the course texts comfortably. To participate in virtual office hours and any potential synchronous components, you will require a webcam of some sort, whether on your computer, external, or on a mobile device. I’ll provide you with all of the course’s required readings through Canvas. I’ve purposely provided the endnotes for chapters of books, but did not include the full references lists to save space and scrolling — if for some reason you want to locate some text cited in one of our readings and can’t find the reference, please feel free to ask.
We may have some class activities later in the term that require the use of a full-fledged computer, and also to Google apps, which is not necessarily a given depending on where students happen to be physically. I will be sending out a mandatory survey early in the term to get a better sense of your needs and limitations, including issues of access to technology, care responsibilities, and potential extenuating circumstances.
Where do I find what I need to do?
Each week will have a module associated with it here in Canvas, which will have the week’s readings and any writing tasks for you (including discussion board posts or annotations). You can find due dates for our major assignments in the schedule on the syllabus page, which is also the course’s landing page in Canvas. Please bear with me as I repeat things in multiple places, as I want to ensure you know what’s expected of you! I will try my best to keep everything updated and consistent, but do let me know if there are any discrepancies.
How do I submit my major assignments?
You will be submitting your assignments through Canvas. The written portions of your assignments should be submitted .docx, .doc, or .pdf format (no .pages files, please). Note: I sense that this is a less common limitation than it used to be, but you have a circumstance that prevents you from working from storing and uploading that kind of file — say, if you only have access to a closed-system tablet or a netbook that requires you use web-based apps — please let me know.
While there is a time and place for being strict with formatting, I am much more concerned that you are deliberate with your formatting choices than that you conform to some particular convention. Your assignment lengths will be given as word count guidelines, although even those are ballpark and analytics manifest subjective choices with data (To start, what do you count as a word?). That said, please use a readable typeface, and please make sure that your assignment includes some sort of heading or title page with your name, information about the course, and a descriptive title for your paper.
Will you accept late assignments?
Especially in an accelerated summer-term course, receiving late assignments makes it extraordinary difficult for me to provide you with timely and thorough feedback. Unless you have Approved Classroom Accommodations from the Disability Resource Center or have arranged an alternate due date with me in advance, I will not accept late papers for a grade, and will not be able to provide written feedback, unless you have extenuating circumstances. You will, however, still have to submit the assignment and receive what would’ve been a passing grade to pass the course. In the case that you do receive an alternate due date, please understand that my written feedback will be much more delayed and limited than usual, if I’m able to offer any. While the discussion forum posts will close on the day they are due, I work under the assumption that each student will miss one post over the course of the semester.
All of this said, I also understand that life happens, and even moreso in a moment when we are dealing with a global pandemic and domestic political upheaval. To borrow from one of my dissertation directors, Ryan Cordell:
We’re all doing our best to learn together during an unprecedentedly difficult time. We’re working in new ways and in unusual environments. We’re caring for others and trying to keep ourselves healthy, sheltered, fed, and sane. We are worried all the time and some of us are dealing with fear and loss…I will operate from the base assumption that each of you is here in good faith: that you are curious, engaged, and eager to do the best work you can. Taking all that as given, I also want you to know that your health—both physical and mental—is always more important to me than this class.
If you are having a hard time because of your health, unforeseen life obstacles, the significant illness or death of someone close to you, etc., please send me an email so we can arrange something.
What if my computer crashes or my assignment gets corrupted, etc.?
Living in the twenty-first century requires both an awareness of how and where digital materials are stored, as well as work habits that take into account potential technical issues. I will thus not offer extensions because of computer viruses, crashes, lost passwords, or lost, corrupted, or incompatible files. Please save early and often. Back up your work in multiple locations, locally (say, on a thumb drive) and off-site (say, on Google Drive or DropBox).
Note: If your computer fails entirely and you are unable to access another computer to submit your work because of COVID-19, that’s a different situation, and would warrant an extension. Please let me know if that happens.
What Academic Integrity standards are expected of me?
Northeastern University is committed to the principles of intellectual honesty and integrity: the NU Academic Honesty and Integrity Policy is found at http://www.northeastern.edu/osccr/academic-integrity-policy/. Broadly, violations of this policy constitute: cheating, fabricating (data or citation), plagiarizing, unauthorized collaborating, misrepresenting individual contribution, or facilitating any of the above.
A note on plagiarism: while all writing is, in some sense, a representation of words and ideas from elsewhere in your own words, scholars have a responsibility to be transparent about attributing ideas. Briefly, this can be directly quoting or paraphrasing material, while citing according to the conventions of some citation style. By citing, authors invoke other texts to use them for their own purposes, provide information for readers to locate other texts for themselves, and implicitly suggest what may and may not count as important knowledge in a particular context by virtue of what they include and leave out. The way it looks changes based on discipline because each has different needs and values. Because proper attribution is a responsibility, one is culpable for a violation of academic integrity regardless of whether or not the violation was deliberate.
Since this is an upper-level, writing-intensive English class, I will expect that you are familiar with using strategies for attribution, which can vary across genre and medium. I will expect you to use the MLA format in your major assignments. That said, there is no shame if you don’t know these things, since they are learned! Please feel free to approach me if you have any questions about citation practices, especially since citation is one of my research specialities.