Graduate Certificate: English Literature and Composition Pedagogy

Application Procedure and Certificate Requirements

Interested students must apply through the Graduate School and meet their admissions requirements. Current graduate students of WSU should complete the Declaration of Intent to Pursue a Graduate Certificate form through the Graduate School. The admission review faculty may request any of the listed admission requirements before rendering an admission decision. Students enrolled in the 12-hour certificate program will be required to take a variety of coursework within the English discipline with emphasis placed on coursework appropriate to high school educators. No more than 1/3 of these classes will be S/U graded. A cumulative graduate grade point average of at least 3.00 for all courses comprising the certificate program will be expected with no grades below C . Transfer hours will not be accepted for this certificate program. Students may use certificate coursework toward an eventual degree. See below for the certificate's admissions process and plan of study.

Advanced Studies in Graphic Novels (Engl 576)

Students pursue an in-depth study of the graphic novel with special emphasis on critical responses. The course is designed to help students recognize aesthetic, social, metaphorical, and philosophical meanings/themes in graphic novels and to critically analyze these texts. Readings could include Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta , Chris Ware's J immy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, among other graphic novels.

(In)dependent States: The Young Adult in Literature (Engl 534)

This class explores representations of childhood as depicted in popular young adult novels published in the United States. The course opens with two early American texts, Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, as an introduction to how shifting definitions of childhood contributed to the development of YA literature as a genre. From there, we will turn our attention to more contemporary representations of childhood, focusing on four coming-of-age stories: Lois Lowry’s post-apocalyptic Gathering Blue (2000), Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s free verse novel The Poet X (2018). To help reveal the diversity of the interpretative approaches available to scholars of YA literature, each work will be paired with a different disciplinary lens, including disability studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and Latinx studies.

Theory and Practice in Composition (Engl 680)

This course introduces students to theories of rhetoric and writing, major research questions in the field of composition studies, and best practices for teaching writing in schools and colleges. We will investigate writing processes, analyze varieties and examples of student writing, and hone our own writing skills by drafting, revising, and evaluating our own and others’ work. As we read significant publications in the field, we will continually consider the relationship between theory and classroom practice. Assignments will give you experience reading challenging pedagogical and theoretical texts; posing complex and worthwhile questions about the teaching of writing; performing research and synthesizing your findings; drafting course materials for current or future writing classes; reading instructional texts critically; and responding effectively to student writing. Topics of discussion will include using writing as a reading strategy; teaching sentence structure and grammar; and responding to and assessing student writing.

Monsters of the Nineteenth Century (Engl 527)

From Frankenstein's Monster to Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde to Dracula, many of our most enduring monsters emerged from nineteenth-century texts. This seminar examines these figures and their twentieth-century counterparts through a range of theoretical lens, including critical race and queer theory, in order to trace the evolution of the monstrous "other." Texts include The Vampyr e (1816), Frankenstein (1818), Carmilla (1872), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Beetle (1897), and Dracula (1897), as well as film adaptations like The Beetle (1919), Frankenstein (1931), and Dracula (1931).