LIBS 122: Reading and Writing About College Life

Ultimate Party or Ultimate Test?: Reading and Writing about College Life

In this class you will consider your identity as a college student to better understand and also challenge popular cultural myths that college is “just a party.” You will also explore what it means to be a college student today and how your experience might compare with or differ from the experiences of other college students in the present and the past. You will study how college life is and has been constructed in films, novels, journals, letters, personal interviews, essays and textbooks. While reading and writing about the college experience, you will address the intersection between fact and fiction and explore how print and visual representations might shape perceptions of the world. You will write several short informal papers about the assigned reading and films. You will also complete three small writing projects: an interview with a UM-D alumnus, a reflective piece about your experiences as college students at UM-Dearborn and a short creative essay, short story or script about college life based on your experiences and the experiences of other UM-Dearborn students, past and present. Overall, your own stories as college students will be crucial to the class's investigation, assessment and production of college life narratives. This work will also be used to help plan UM-Dearborn’s 50^th anniversary.

Liz Rohan is an assistant professor in the Humanities Department at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She teaches introductory and advanced writing courses and courses in the University's American Studies and Honors programs. Her scholarly specialization is Writing Studies (a field otherwise known as Composition and Rhetoric). She studies what is called the "extra curriculum" of Composition, that is, settings where people use writing to make meaning, and form identities, outside of school settings. She also studies the relationship between writing and other technologies for meaning making--such as photography--and particularly in the Progressive Era (roughly 1890 to 1930). She has published several articles about this research, two of which won national awards.

This course may be used to satisfy the CASL distribution requirement in Letters.