The Visionary Course Pairing
Looking Beyond Ourselves: Writing for Action (WR 100)
Think about your favorite piece of writing -- what effect does it have on you? Effective writing has the strength to make someone laugh, think, learn and act. Your mission is in this course to write with strength and confidence. In this class, you will think about how powerful writing affects you both as a reader and a writer. Reading pieces by writers like Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Susan Casey will give you the chance to look through the lens of other writers in order to sharpen or refocus your own. Activities out of the classroom will serve to broaden your understanding of yourself in the context of your new community as well. In addition, you have the opportunity to take one of two tracks: the traditional path or the service-learning option. Service offers yet another text to integrate among our readings, discussions, and writing opportunities. On the service track, you’ll be asked to see yourself in direct relationship to those you meet at Tunbridge Charter School. Whether you opt for service-learning or not, you will have the opportunity to serve people outside our classroom through your writing. We will always try to contextualize our discussions beyond ourselves and to see how writers attempt to move their readers and affect the world around them. As you look beyond yourself, you will use your writing to envision who you wish to become. Along the way, you'll be writing for action.
Faculty Biography
Dr. Andrea Leary is a Lecturer and the Internship Coordinator in the Department of Writing, where she has been teaching for the last 27 years. In all of her classes, her goal is to guide her students toward excellence in writing while keeping the Jesuit mission of “men and women with and for others” in their thoughts. Margaret Mead’s reminder guides her teaching: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Complicating the Classics (EN 101)
This English course cultivates reading, writing, thinking, and oral communication skills by investigating the kinds of attention that literary texts, in multiple genres, ask of readers. The topics for this course is "complicating the classics" which will investigate major pieces of writing, considered canonical literature, and the literary responses to those classics, usually in the form of other literature. In reading these pieces, we'll discuss what shapes the values and attitudes of writers and thinkers of the past and how these new visions of these literary classics help to inform who we are today.
Faculty Biography
Dr. Victoria Barnett-Woods is a lecturer in the English department, where she specializes in literature of the long eighteenth century.
Mentor Biography
Coming soon!
Virtual Advisor
Both courses in this pairing satisfy core requirements for all students and WR 100 is taught with a service learning option.
