SHANNON BUTTS 

​

​

​

​

As a writing professor, I instruct students to tinker, tailor, and specify. Tinkering encourages students to critically analyze and experiment with writing through project-based, active learning initiatives. Instead of merely mastering a checklist of skills, students tinker to explore ideas and use writing to both transmit and create knowledge. Tinkering empowers students to work out their own models for effective communication and draw on diverse skills and experiences. In addition, project-based learning helps students focus on specific communities or rhetorical goals. Writers can then tailor documents to consider audience, media, design, and accessibility. Through tinkering and tailoring, students learn to analyze rhetorical contexts, ask questions, and make decisions about what type of media works best for different situations. Students can then specify through revision. The process of specifying challenges writers to refine style through word choice, images, sentence structure or even formatting. Whether teaching first-year writing seminars or graduate level workshops, my courses prioritize learning to communicate across diverse media environments and compose rhetorically persuasive documents. 

​

Through classroom activities, public writing projects, and learning experience design, I create educational opportunities for people to discover their own voices and better understand how reading and writing shape our interactions with the world. Below you can find syllabi for a selected list of courses. Click on the images to access details about each class. For a complete list of my teaching experience, interests, and pedagogical research, please visit my CV page.