Tragedy & The Dark Knight is an English 9 credit recovery course that focuses on rhetorical reading, thinking, and writing as means of inquiry. Students will gain fluency with key rhetorical concepts and utilize these in a flexible and collaborative writing process, reflecting on their writing process with the goal of developing metacognitive awareness. They will employ conventions, including formal citations, appropriate for a given writing task, attending to the constraints of audience, purpose, genre, and discourse community. Students will compose in two or more genres. They will produce 3000-3500 words of revised, final draft copy or an appropriate multimodal analog for this amount of text. Students will produce at least one essay that integrates research and demonstrates an understanding of the role of an assertive thesis in an academic essay of at least 1000 words.

Course Outcomes:

1. Rhetorical Awareness
   1. Exhibit rhetorical awareness & develop rhetorical competence;
   2. Use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts.
2. Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing:
   1. Critically read and use college-level texts to support writing goals;
   2. Locate, evaluate, and use sources for writing goals; demonstrate an understanding of the communal and conversational nature of research;
3. Writing Processes:
   1. Develop and compare flexible strategies for composing processes;
   2. Collaborate in the exchange of writing as both reviewer and author, generating and evaluating feedback as part of the revision process;
   3. Use a variety of technologies in composing for different purposes and audiences.
4. Knowledge of Conventions:
   1. Recognize and apply the conventions of Standard Edited English;
   2. Vary text structure, paragraphing, sentence structure, and word choice appropriate to genre;
   3. Apply citation conventions.
5. Metacognition and Transfer:
   1. Reflect and document procedural knowledge gained in the areas of writing strategies;
   2. Discuss how to transfer and apply writing knowledge to new contexts.

Access and Accommodations:

To request assistance or accommodations, contact me. Send an email (timbjornstad@me.com) or stop me in the hall. Talk to me before or after class. Tell Theresa that I am not doing my job and ask here to yell at me. She won’t, but she’ll laugh and advocate for you. Whatever you do, remember to communicate.