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As an advanced rhetoric and composition doctoral student, I taught Engl 3135: Visual Rhetoric, a three-credit upper-level course offered by the Department of English at Georgia State University. Mary E. Hocks originally designed this course in 2000 to, in her words, "introduce visual information design theories and practices for writers [and] examine the use of visual meanings in the production of texts, the influence of visual culture on written discourse, and audience-centered document design" ("Undergraduate"). My own research interests include visual rhetoric/culture, feminist theory/pedagogy, critical theory/pedagogy, digital media/pedagogy, and comics studies, and as evidence of the rhet/comp program's deep commitment to graduate student professionalization, I was encouraged to redesign Visual Rhetoric to more specifically reflect these interests. My redesign resulted in a course that employed comics studies as a generative framework on which we built theoretically, historically, and culturally informed definitions of visual rhetoric. Students used these definitions to analyze contemporary popular culture and compose their own research-based arguments in comic book form. To view the course website, please visit: http://criticalrevisions.wordpress.com/.
Institutional Context
Georgia State University is an urban, public, four-year research institution located in downtown Atlanta and has an enrollment of approximately 32,000 students. Its 24,000 or so undergraduates select from among 74 degree programs, and over 100 certificate, MA, and PhD programs are home to approximately 8,000 graduate students. English is one of Georgia State University's largest departments, representing over 500 undergraduates and 300 graduate students. In addition to offering bachelors' degrees in English with emphases in rhetoric and composition, literary studies, creative writing, or secondary English education and graduate (MA, MFA, and PhD) degrees in rhetoric and composition, creative writing, and literary studies, Georgia State University's English department houses Lower Division Studies (the first year composition program), the Writing Studio, and the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, which has also become a division of the recently created Center for Instructional Innovation.
Rhet/comp faculty played an instrumental role in forming the Second Century Initiative in New and Emerging Media (2CINEM), an interdis- ciplinary endeavor begun in 2011 to support and develop intellectual and creative innovation within digital media by fostering local, regional, national, and international collaboration among scholars, students, practitioners, and artists. Currently, it is comprised of faculty from the departments of...