Courses

Some DEI-Fostering Courses

WRT 101: This entry level writing course is designed for students who need additional support with their writing skills before taking the WRT 102. Our instructors focus on issues of language, culture, and personal/social experience to foster student agency and confidence in writing. Instructors create a supportive environment for the diverse students who take this course, including international and multilingual students, creating opportunities for students to exchange ideas and experiences that they bring from across cultural and national boundaries.

WRT 102: Our foundational (first-year-writing) course introduces students to the skills of research, argumentation, and critical thinking. Some instructors foreground DEI issues and objectives while teaching these skills, including culture, language, and systemic inequities.

WRT 302: Some instructors foreground DEI-related issues in sections of this special topics course, including Writing for Social Justice, Writing Across Cultures and Contexts, and Rhetoric of Poetry (in which students examine texts in response to social change and social justice, while engaging with poets of different ethnicities, races, genders, and social classes).

WRT 201: Some instructors focus on cross-cultural collaboration and gendered communication, as well as netiquette that affects these issues, in professional writing in Principles of Professional Writing. 

WRT 304: In “Writing for Your Profession” instructors foreground the personal and social aspects of students’ professional growth, helping them explore their career options in light of who they are and what social, political, academic, and professional contexts/forces shape and affect their growth. Building on cutting-edge scholarship in technical and professional communication, one instructor teaches how professional writing constructs realities for everyday people, often inscribing prejudiced or unjust outcomes for those who don’t belong to the dominant linguistic, cultural, or social groups.

WRT 382: In “Grant Writing,” students learn about the elements of a grant application and produce one in an area of interest or expertise. This provides an opportunity for them to explore possible solutions to issues of inequity/injustice that affect them personally due to their own backgrounds and lived experiences. For example, students have written grant applications to explore COVID vaccine hesitancy among Togolese-Americans in the Bronx,to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the housing situations of Chinese immigrants in Flushing, Queens, and to increase the number of youth of color entering healthcare careers in the underserved community of Jamaica, Queens.

WRT 614: In this special topics course, “Feminist Rhetorics,” for instance, helps students explore a rich array of feminist rhetorical theories, methods, and performances from both a historical and global context, including protests, speeches, manifestos, and toolkits. In "Digital Rhetorics," modules focus on cyberfeminism and the impact of digital culture on the disabled. In “Rhetoric of Poetry: Ecopoetics,” students examine how literature by diverse writers responds to, and affects, environmental and social issues. Students in “World Rhetorics” interrogate dominant Western rhetoric, exploring other traditions from around the world that are erased/marginalized and how they could help affect greater social justice.