Teaching Portfolio

In my literature and composition courses at SLU, I use my research interests in collaboration and community to foster student engagement through collective production and discussion.

By leading each course with the conviction that a student’s independent thoughts and interpretations are important, I challenge class participants to become their own interpreters, to formulate and expand their own arguments, supporting their interpretations with evidence and close reading through multimodal processes.

See below for recent course offerings, including links to course websites. Syllabi are also available on my Academia profile.

Advanced Strategies of Rhetoric & Research: Gender and Identity

Gender, Identity, and Literature

What does it mean to lose one’s sense of self? Or, to have one’s identity written by another? If our identities make us who we are, what do we become when these vital aspects of ourselves are taken from us—by force or by choice? This course explores how literature and art has shaped, responded to, and transformed cultural and political conceptions of gender and identity, including aspects of race, class, and sexuality.

Business & Professional Writing: Rebranding

Intro to Literary Studies

This course will focus specifically on depictions of excess in a variety of genres–poetry, drama, novel, novella, and short stories. Therefore, as we read each work, we will push against boundaries by questioning the various definitions of excess: what does it mean to be out of control? to have unrestrained feeling? to be in violation of law or morality? to overstep moderation?

Heather Bozant Witcher

Teaching Portfolio