Undergraduate courses I¡¦m prepared to teach
| Nonverbal Communication and Interactive Bodies (Course offered at Lower Division) | |
| Course Description This is a course designed to help you develop an understanding of nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is first and foremost about the body. You will move through a series of readings in the first few weeks and develop your creative process in visualizing the body as a living medium in many communicative situations. This is a class that contains both readings and practices. As we talk about the interactive body, you will engage in exercises designed to help you observe and explore the possible relationships between the body, the interactants, and the material world where we all inhabit. Later this semester, you and your classmates will form a team and develop a visual/multimedia project about interactive bodies. This body might be your body reconfigured for interaction; it might be a body you make that is interactive; it might be your bodily interpretation of the communicative world. Your work should be digitized and you will learn how to build a website that documents all your work and your written and visual materials. Of primary importance will be your engagement with your readings and work, your labor of making the website, your dedication to the evolution of your own critique and sensibility as well as your dedication in completing both individual and team projects. |
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| Reading Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction by Mark L. Knapp and Judith A. Hall Excerpt from ¡§Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative¡¨ by Peter Brooks. Excerpt for ¡§Micrographia; or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses, with observations and inquiries thereupon¡¨ by Robert, Hooke. Course Packet (contains instructions of web design and using multimedia tools/resources) |
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| Grading Assignment 1: Reading/Writing 20 % Midterm: 25 % Project 3: Website Building 20 % Your team will develop a simple website that documents your team¡¦s work in the course. This site should be designed in such a way that it evokes and visualizes the ideas you pursue. You will be given a personal directory on the (school/departmental) server where you can store your files. Post-dates are the same as project due dates. At the end of the semester this website and its dependent files should be duplicated on a CD-ROM for final presentation and archival purposes. Project 4: Web Design 20 % Your team will complete a video document that describes the interactive bodies & communicative experiences (physical body, exercised body, sensory body, medical body and so forth). Final Presentation & Final 15 % |
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| Things to find/get/ask¡K Sound recording device with microphone CD-RWs Mini-DV camera and tapes Calendar (TBA) |
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| Linear/Non-Linear Narrative (course offered at upper division) | |
| This is a course about stories in face-to-face encounter, in mass media, and in computer-mediated context. Throughout this course, you will know what a story is and how it is used to communicate ideas and to build narrated relationships (e.g. mother-in-law v.s. daughter-in-law or friendship) of various kinds. This is course that contains both theories and practices. You will collect stories from ¡§different¡¨ realities- from real life, from the screen, from e-mail communication, and from other virtue/hyper-textual realities. You will then engage in textual and communication analysis. This is also a course in experimental storytelling techniques and production. Later this semester, you will produce texts which are going to be redefined by technologies that challenge their syntax (physical and linguistic structure), appearance (design and layout), content (word, image, and meaning) and distribution (print and electronic). You will publish your journals online and shift ideas and storytelling practices around and about texts that are influenced by technological innovations. | |
| Reading Roland Barthes, S/Z Mark Meadows, Pause & effect: the art of interactive narrative http://pause-effect.com Course Packet |
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| Grading Assignment 1: Reading/Writing 20 % Midterm: 25 % Project 3: Online Journal Publishing 10 % Project 4: Journal Practices and Visual Transformation of Stories 30 % Final Presentation & Final 15 % |
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| Things to find/get/ask¡K Sound recording device with microphone CD-RWs Mini-DV camera and tapes Calendar (TBA) |
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| Some other undergraduate courses I¡¦m prepared to teach (syllabi to be provided): Language, Culture and Communication Interaction and Multimedia Talk and Body / Talking Bodies in Computer Mediated Communication |
Graduate Courses I¡¦m Prepared to Teach
| Theory Class | |
| Multimodalities and Visual Syntax of Human Interaction Multimodalities are resourceful; language is not the only mode and we constantly draw on vocal, visual and kinesthetic modalities as we communicate. This course discusses the emerging research area of communicative modalities and physical objects surrounding us and how these sensory and material modalities all together shape our interactional syntax. Students are required to engage in extensive reading of philosophy writings and thoughts on phenomenology as well as of practical research papers. The goal is a discussion of meaning as it is to be found in both the situated communicative practice and in the multimodal approach to your interpretation of how, for instance, the slightest change of eye gaze or head movement or the manipulation of the material object can affect the moment-to-moment interaction. The discussion will cover several topics including Merleau-Ponty¡¦s thoughts, the situated theory of embodied interaction (Goodwin, 2000, 2003), multiple modalities and the deaf community, bodies at work-place communication, body metrics, technologically mediated perceptions and so forth. For the duration of the semester you will record an interaction and develop a visual syntax utilizing multimodal thinking. You will become familiar with multimodal analysis and interpretation. Finally, you will use the theories, tools or techniques of this exploration to create a paper or an original piece of visual work. |
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| Reading Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge. Virilio, P. (1994). The vision machine. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1489-1522. Goodwin, C. (2003). Pointing as situated practice. In S. Kito (Ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture and cognition meet. Mahwah, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates. Course packet |
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| Grading Reading & Writing 35 % Final Paper & Presentation (that digitally documents your paper/ work) 65 % Schedule (TBA) |
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| Method Class |
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Microethnography, Multimedia, and Representing Human Interaction 1. The images from the analog videotape already provide for the experience of three-dimensional representations. 2. The analog images move, adding temporality, a fourth dimension. 3. The digital moving images are nonlinear, the uni-directionality of time and the conventional uniformities of spatial representation can be manipulated, adding a fifth dimension. 4. The technology affords the co-presence of sound, and this aural domain adds a sixth dimension to our enriched representation of face-to-face human interaction. (Jarmon, 1996, Chapter Two) In this class, you will learn that conducting microethnography research is as important as engaging the explorations beyond the existing dimensions. Your data and work should be thoroughly documented and transformed digitally by semester's end.
Jarmon, L. H. (1996). An ecology of embodied interaction: Turn-taking and interactional syntax in face-to-face encounters [CD-ROM]. Doctoral dissertation,
University of Texas, Austin. |
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Reading |
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| Grading Data Collection 20% Sample of Data Analysis 20 % Multimedia Project 20 % Final Paper and Presentation 40 % Schedule (TBA) |
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| Other graduate courses I¡¦m prepared to teach (syllabi to be provided ) Minority Language, Culture, and Communication Narrative Communication Space, Time, and Embodiments Workplace Communication and Technology
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