Course Description

Brad Queen holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and has taught and administered in Composition and Rhetoric for over a decade. His research interests include various topics in writing and literacy studies: class sizes for multilingual composition sections, assessment theory, genre, portfolio pedagogies, and theories of student agency. He teaches graduate seminars focusing on pedagogy, and undergraduate composition seminars whose themes engage the broad field of free speech and expression. For the 2015-2016 Academic Year, he will serve as Vice-Chair to the University Committee on Preparatory Education (UCOPE), a UC systemwide body that oversees the Analytical Writing Placement Exam, which is taken by approximately 15,000 students annually.

Daniel M. Gross (Professor & Director of Composition, UC Irvine) runs a program with 14,000 enrollments annually, and which has offered fully online writing courses since Summer 2009. He has published and taught widely in the history and theory of rhetoric, specializing in the rhetoric of emotion. Relevant publications include Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion between Science and the Humanities (Chicago 2017) and The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago 2006), as well as articles in the field of writing studies that have appeared in the journals Pedagogy and Composition Forum. He has been teaching writing and rhetoric courses since 1991, his first year as a graduate student in the Rhetoric PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Carl Whithaus, Professor & Director, UC Davis, University Writing Program. Carl Whithaus is a Professor of Writing & Rhetoric and the Director of the University Writing Program (UWP) at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on writing in the disciplines and professions (particularly in the sciences and engineering), writing assessment, and the impact of information technologies on literacy practices. He teaches courses ranging from first-year writing to graduate-level classes in traditional, hybrid, and distance learning environments. His books include Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning (Erlbaum/Routledge, 2008) and Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing (Erlbaum, 2005). His articles have appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Assessing Writing, and The Journal of Basic Writing. He has served on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Planning Committee for 2011-2019 Writing Standards Framework, the editorial board for Kairos, and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI) Committee (2007-10).