Your department or program fields a variety of courses to meet distinct educational needs. Please explain how this course fits into your department's plan for participating in the general education curriculum of the College. The sector panel will want to know what is distinctive about this course along with the other courses your department lists in the sector that makes them suitable for the sector requirement.
This proposal advocates for a rather different kind of English course from those that presently fulfill this sector: ENGL 127 is an ABCS creative writing course, taught by a major poet. Both the ABCS and creative aspects of the course indicate a natural fit with the elaborated aims of the sector; this course is a showcase for overlapping disciplinary and critical perspectives, and it necessarily connects the theoretical to actual. The attached syllabus is particularly attentive to radical theories of pedagogy and rhetoric that students will have the opportunity to consider and apply within local contexts.
One-term course offered either term
Humanities & Social Science Sector
Rachel Zolf
Part Time Lecturer
Part Time Lecturer
English 127 is an intermediate-to-advanced creative writing course that includes substantial study in theoretical and literary texts in addition to being designed as a creative writing workshop. It is especially appropriate for students taking English or Comparative Literature majors. Students in GSE will also be able to participate in this course via graduate-level independent study. This particular offering of English 127 - Community Writing - is also cross-listed with Urban Studies, and is an ABCS course supported by the Netter Center.
From Community Writing course description:
Community Writing combines theory with practice: students will first study critical and creative writing pedagogy, and then visit a range of Philadelphia communities to write creatively together and form new kinds of community through writing. Students will have the opportunity to work and write with community members from Sayre High School, the FreeWrite Prison Writing Program, Mighty Writers West, the transcribez Writing Group for Trans and Gender Nonconforming Youth, the Write On! program with Lea middle school students, or the Writing a Life program at Kelly Writers House for people with cancer diagnoses. We will study nonhierarchical creative writing teaching techniques, such as spoken word and hip-hop pedagogy, and we will learn how to develop community-appropriate creative writing prompts that inspire people to write. We will also study a number of classic texts in radical pedagogy (by authors such as bell hooks and Paolo Freire) and generate ideas about how to harness the power of education – and creative writing in particular – for personal and social change.
10 writing assignments of 200-300 words each; one 3-week workshop curriculum of at least 10 pages; one 1,200-word process/reflection paper
No exams.
Participate in class discussion, complete assigned readings, complete group work to develop their own teaching workshops, and complete four teaching field trips in addition to required weekly class sessions. Attend final reading celebration at the end of the semester with community participants from Philadelphia, with whom Penn students have been working.
Sector II - History and Tradition