Time Schedule:
Rania M Mahmoud
ENGL 111
Seattle Campus
Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays.
Class description
English 111 is designed for you to become a more confident, thoughtful, and skilled writer and reader. Throughout the quarter you will be engaging with difficult and challenging texts. You will be asked to seek out and develop a critical conversation with and between these texts in order to articulate original and analytical ideas within your own writing. This is a course about writing and reading, but the focal point of the class is your willingness to think critically about language, culture, history, and politics. Throughout the quarter we will be discussing controversial topics, and your challenge will be to further develop your critical reading and thinking skills in order to question your own basic cultural assumptions, rather than to simply rely on facts that are provided to you by your textbooks, newspapers, and television. The goal is to be critical of common sense assumptions as they have been given to us. This class is intended to provide you with a comfortable space in which you will write, revise, and polish your own analytical essays, which will ultimately reflect your own willingness to extend the boundaries of your thought. In this course you will be asked to engage a specific set of literary, historical, and theoretical texts and participate actively in discussion in order to collectively examine issues related to the core topic for the course: The construction of Race. More particularly, how is the logic of race/races (and the distinctions between them) produced, rationalized, mobilized, re-created, and solidified through the production of various systems of colonialism and colonial rule. Our readings will start with the construction of race in the colony, follow the steps of colonized subjects as they immigrate (whether willingly or forcefully) to the West, and end with racial constructions of African Americans and other ethnicities in the United States. One final note: this is a reading and writing-intensive course, so be prepared for a lot of work.
Student learning goals
To produce complex, analytic, persuasive arguments that matter in academic contexts.
To read, analyze, and synthesize complex texts and incorporate multiple kinds of evidence purposefully in order to generate and support writing.
To demonstrate an awareness of the strategies that writers use in different writing contexts.
To develop flexible strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading writing.
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
In order to accomplish the course goals you will need to prepare for class, actively participate in class discussion as well as go-post discussion, and give a class presentation. In this course, you will complete two assignment sequences, each of which is designed to help you fulfill the course outcomes (attached at the end of the syllabus). Your success on fulfilling each of the course outcomes is ultimately what your final grade will depend on – so it is your job to familiarize yourself with these outcomes and exactly what they demand of you. Each assignment sequence requires you to complete a variety of shorter writing assignments. Each of these will target one or more of the course outcomes at a time, help you practice these outcomes, and allow you to build toward a major paper at the end of the sequence. You will have a chance to significantly revise each of the major papers using feedback generated by your instructor and peers. The majority of these assignments include close readings of texts and passages, analytical essays, formulating provocative questions for discussion, and a willingness to engage with difficult concepts which we will discuss in class and which will provide you with the tools to write your larger essays.
Class assignments and grading
Since this class is in large part about the process of writing and revising, you will not be graded until the end of the quarter. I know that this may cause some anxiety, but it has many advantages. In particular, this model allows you time to develop new skills and techniques before being assessed -- you will be graded on how well you’ve achieved the outcome goals for the class at the end of the quarter rather than the beginning. Throughout the entire quarter you will be receiving detailed feedback from me and from your peers, which should give you a good sense of what you need to work on in your writing. At the end of the quarter, you will turn in a portfolio of your work along with a portfolio cover letter. The portfolio will be graded according to the following: a revision of one of your two major papers, revisions of three to five of the shorter writing assignments, and a cover letter that makes a detailed argument about how each of the revised essays all together demonstrate the four outcomes for the course. The portfolio grade constitutes 70% of your final grade. The remaining 30% will assess your participation.
