Publish Your Syllabus in the “Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository”

Most of us have faced the dreadful challenge of creating a new course prep with only a few weeks (or days!) to get ready. Even if you have enough time to prepare, it can still be difficult to gauge whether the syllabus is effective or not. A syllabus sets the tone of the course. It is more than just a checklist or collection of policies and procedures. It has activities, readings, and assignments, and preparing for all of those can seem like a daunting task and make you think, “if only I could get some insights on making this course exciting for the students!”

We are hoping to address this concern faced by so many instructors, especially graduate students, by developing and sharing a public repository of tried-and-tested syllabi and other resources from the fields of rhetoric, composition, and technical and professional communication.

The Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository is a public, crowd-sourced collection of syllabi of courses taught by our contributors. We see the syllabus repository as a library of diverse classroom artifacts that may offer insights into the course design choices, texts, readings, projects, and classroom or online activities that instructors who have taught at the intersections of Digital Studies can share. We hope these syllabi will function as mentoring texts for instructors designing or redesigning courses, offering inspiration as we think deeply about our work’s pedagogical and justice-oriented implications.

If you have recently taught a course that belongs in one or more of the following categories, we invite you to submit it for a potential publication in the Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository.

Digital rhetoric
Anti-racist pedagogy
Disability studies
Health rhetoric
Feminist rhetoric
Visual rhetoric
Technical communication
Composition studies
First-Year Writing

If you have taught any of these courses, please consider submitting your syllabus so that others might take inspiration for their Fall 2021 (or future) course preps, by filling out this form.

We’re hoping to publish the first batch by June 2021. So if you would like to be part of the early submissions, please submit today!

Authors

Nupoor Ranade

Nupoor is a PhD Candidate in the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media at the North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on audience analysis, digital rhetoric, user experience and information design primarily in the field of technical communication and artificial intelligence. Her research experience and partnerships with the industry help her bridge gaps of knowledge that she then brings to her pedagogical practices.

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Jianfen Chen

Jianfen Chen is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition at Purdue. Her research interests include public rhetoric, digital rhetoric, risk communication, intercultural communication, and professional and technical communication.

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Sarah Hughes

Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English & Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research interests include digital rhetoric, gender and discourse, and gaming studies. Her dissertation project explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.

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