Month: August 2017

As we are often reminded, we now inhabit an increasingly complex and confusing hyper-fast media landscape, where traditional forms of journalism and reporting have been radically reshaped and even supplanted by emerging forms of digital media. This course will give you the tools to engage intelligently in the major issues of our time; to analyze media of all kinds; to parse out the subtle distinctions between various kinds of problematic information; and to find credible, carefully-researched, and accurate journalism, news, and opinion on a variety of topics.  

Because I think of myself first and foremost as a writing teacher—with all the requisite hand-wringing that entails—ENG-W 131 (and its counterpart, ENG-W 132) have occupied a central place in my thinking, reflection, and teaching since my first day at IU Kokomo.

Given current events and student interest, the most recent version of the course (Spring 2017) led students through an exploration of so-called “fake news.” Students gained valuable experience in information literacy by analyzing and writing about the infamous #PizzaGate scandal, concepts such as “digital polarization” and “filter bubbles,” and even important epistemological questions such as “How do we know what we know?” and “Which sources of information can be trusted in the digital age?”

This course is a practical introduction to developing a research project in the humanities that is guided by these questions: how do researchers and scholars create knowledge? And who gets to decide what “counts” as knowledge in a given disciplinary arena?

Since its “invention” in the fifth century BCE, rhetoric—the study and practice of persuasion through language, signs, and symbols—has been a powerful force in public affairs, education, politics, and in the practice of civic life, even though today rhetoric is rarely studied outside of English and communication arts.