Elizabeth Burrows
Biography
Change Agent
Elizabeth Burrows is a New Jersey native who earned her Master’s in English at Auburn University; she also has a certificate in teaching writing from Auburn University at Montgomery. In addition to teaching writing, Elizabeth is also an avid creative writer. She is currently finishing book one of a romance trilogy, and she enjoys writing flash fiction and bad poetry.
Sample Courses Taught
Knowledge for Every Level
ENGL 0103: Introduction to Composition
ENGL 0103 is designed for students who need intensive review of their general English writing skills in order to increase confidence in their communication abilities and succeed in college. The course improves students’ rhetorical and organization skills for better clarity and more effective communication in the academic context. It covers a wide range of writing modes as well as grammar and sentence structure principles. Students will compose texts in different modalities and genres. In doing so, they will practice the writing process and the language and writing conventions they learn throughout the course.
ENGL 1010: Composition I
ENGL 1010 is a first-year writing course focused on introducing students to the concepts and practices of rhetoric and composition. The course prepares students to compose texts in variety of genres for various purposes, audiences, and contexts, including digital environments. The course emphasizes analytical and critical skills: rhetorical analysis, critical thinking, argument, and reflection. Students use writing processes to draft, peer review, revise, edit, and reflect on their work. The course assignments and projects prepare students for varied writing contexts at the university and in their future professional career.
ENGL 1020: Composition II
ENGL 1020 is a writing course that focuses on developing academic research writing skills that students will utilize in their academic and professional contexts. The course introduces students to the methods, strategies, and skills required to conduct an informed inquiry: critical reading, critical analysis, synthesis, constructing a research-based argument, and reflection. The course is themed, and students formulate their research questions around that theme. Students also learn how to evaluate academic and non-academic sources and proper citation and documentation of sources. The course also focuses on improving oral communication skills to prepare students to share their research with various audiences.
ENGL 3060
The essential skills of written communication in a business environment, such as report writing, letters and other modes of business communication. This is a writing intensive course. Prerequisite ENGL 1010 and ENGL 1020.
ENGL 2540: Survey of English Literature II
In this course we will study nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. This course covers over 200 years of literature, so it’s an impossible course, really. We can’t cover everything in one semester, but what we can do is read the texts deeply and intensely, argue with and about them during class sessions, place them in historical contexts, and think and write essays about their form and significance.
The last 200 years of English literature are intimately tied to contemporary thinking and ideas in our own culture, politics, art, science, and psychology, and my argument in structuring this course is that what we think of as “modernity” begins around 1800. By studying this literature, we’ll be able to understand in a more sophisticated way our current historical moment, who we are, and how we think.
During this course, we will work on organizing and developing papers for diverse audiences and purposes. This will include enhancing your ability to discover and focus on a topic, develop ideas, gather support, and draft and revise papers effectively. We will also go over fundamental language skills, and you will be introduced to library research and argumentation.
UNIV 1000: University Success
This course will provide you with an opportunity to practice skills identified by your peers and professors as critical to your academic, personal, professional, and social development at AUM. Through this course, you may expect to:
understand the skills and time required for academic success at AUM
practice skills required for academic success at AUM
engage with faculty and staff from various departments across campus
foster connections to the campus communities.
Ultimately, UNIV is designed to increase the likelihood that you will successfully transition into AUM and prepare you with knowledge and skills needed to complete your degree.
Presentations & Workshops
Section Being Updated Slowly but Surely
Jeopardy, Journals, and Journey Mapping: Digital-Based Activities and Teaching For Transfer
- Elizabeth Burrows & Amy Locklear
May 2019
What can we do differently in the day-to-day classroom to help students develop a ‘way of thinking, perceiving, and processing information’ (Haskell 23)
For us, that begins with designing in-class activities driven by questions of metacognition, not simply skill practice(i.e., how to best get students to think critically about their thinking). However, facilitating such transfer doesn’t always happen when the lesson privileges textual practices and skill-based practice, a problematic assumption underlying much of education’s traditional tools like textbooks, instructor manuals, and assignment sheets.We propose focusing our instructional efforts on developing inventional cognitive practices through specific types of digital spaces best suited to reflection and visualization of student thinking processes, including but not limited to open education resources.
Performing Teaching for Transfer
(TFT) at the Composition-Program Level
- Elizabeth Burrows, Amy Locklear, Lilian Mina, Jason Shifferd, and Clay Sims
March 2019
In this panel, instructors in a composition program at a small university share their experience of how they collaboratively performed the TFT theory (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak) at the composition-program level. Our experience is an embodiment of Bump Halbritter’s understanding of Performance-Composition as “collaborative composition-partnerships that blur actors and audience, influence and invention, creation and interpretation.”
Preparing Students for Writing Futures: New Possibilities for Transfer in WAC, FYC, WCs, and TA Education
- Elizabeth Burrows, Cassandra Book, Amy Locklear, and Elizabeth Woodworth
October 2018
This is a citation of your published piece. Write a brief description to give a snapshot of your work. Make sure to specify the medium for publishing, such as an academic journal, book, essay or magazine. If your work only appears on certain pages, include that information so it’s easier for your readers to find.