My name is Alaina Feltenberger, which is pronounced more or less exactly how it’s spelled. Although my last name got me teased by the other kids in grade school, I now have an appreciation for its direct translation from German: “felt” or “feld” means “field,” “en” is a contraction meaning “and,” “berg” means “mountain,” and “er” is a contraction meaning “one-who-is-from.” So, Alaina “of-the-fields-and-mountains” is a rough literal translation of my name, which seems especially appropriate now that I live in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. As a transplant from the Midwest and East Coast, I arrived in Boulder four and a half years ago after growing up and going to undergrad in Ohio and teaching and going to school in New York City, where I earned an MS in Education. I really enjoyed my years in these places, but now feel that Colorado is my home. I finished my MA at CU in English Literature and now am working toward my PhD in Literacy Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education. I really love teaching writing and have been doing so for eight years.
Whenever I think about designing and teaching a writing class, I always try to consider what it is I think my students need to know. In a world of increasing scrutiny upon the writing skills of recent college graduates, I recognize that you need to have skills that can be transferrable to a variety of contexts in your personal and professional lives. With this in mind, I always come back to two basics: an emphasis on critical thinking, and an understanding of rhetoric. You are always thinking critically in ways that you probably aren’t aware of—weighing evidence, examining details, and considering multiple angles. I hope that this class will help you apply these skills to an awareness of rhetoric. To my mind, rhetoric in its most basic sense has to do with the choices that you make as an author to convey a message given a certain context or intended audience. It’s all about your decisions in how you communicate. Rhetoric has power—it’s the difference between “good” writing and “bad” writing, finding a text convincing or not. I hope that this course will help you feel more empowered as you use your rhetoric purposefully to convey what you want to say.
In planning this course in particular, I recognized that “Writing on the Visual Arts” was waaaaay too broad for a topic for a normal semester. Yet, that is the registered title, and so that’s what we’re going with. As you look over the syllabus, however, you’ll notice that my theme for this class has to do with “reality.” We live in an increasingly interconnected, multimodal, multimedia world. In our modern intellectual landscape, we can no longer assume that only certain kinds of texts are privileged; there are many forms of communication that are increasingly considered valuable in our world, just as there are a multitude of literacies and languages that have importance in our contemporary society. I decided to focus on forms of visual art that impact how we interact as human beings, how we think about what’s “real” or really important, and how we practice our rhetoric and visual analysis in a variety of media and genres. I hope you join me in exploring these big ideas throughout the rest of the term!
The Official Blog of WRTG 3007, Summer 2012 