Dr. Kevin Brooks
Office: Morrill 219A
Phone: 231-7147
Email: Kevin.Brooks@ndsu.edu
I have been a professor at NDSU since the fall of 1997; I am currently chair of the department.
Teaching:
I primarily teach courses in our upper division writing curriculum: English 325 Writing in the Health Professions, English 326 Writing in the Design Professions, English 357 Visual Culture and Language. At the graduate level, I am most likely to teach Rhetorics and Poetics of New Media. For 2012-13, I will be teaching Visual Culture and Language (357), and in the spring I will likely be teaching Electronic Communication (457) online (but not DCE). We will look at the New New Media and Web 2.0 tools for non-profits.
Research:
My research interests used to be the history of writing instruction, but for the last 10 years, I have been focusing on the future of writing instruction through investigations of the use of weblogs in classrooms, laptops in our graduate program, PowerPoint Music Videos in our first-year composition courses, and Scott McCloud's visual language as a guide to reading and writing visual compositions.
My research generally grows of out my teaching. I like to try new things in the classroom--especially but not exclusively with new technology--I like to have fun, but I also expect my students to work hard and have high expectations for themselves. A mentor, Dr. Carl Ridd, liked to say "No play, no joy, no life."
I started down a new research and creative activity path in 2007 by working on a documentary about one of Fargo's Lost Boys of Sudan. The African Soul, American Heart project took me to Kenya and Sudan in December of 2007, our documentary premiered on Nov. 9, 2008, and I have written about my experiences a few times, including this essay in the NDSU Magazine, "The Trip of a Lifetime Doesn't Need to Come to an End." I have composed a MEmorial for the Lost Boys of Sudan, and worked on a Virtual Peace Garden website and Second Life island, both of which have been mothballed, but not forgotten. I am still working on issues related to Sudanese refugees in Fargo, but I have moved on to founding "Sugar Labs at NDSU" and running an afterschool program for students at Madison Elementary that we call "Fargo XO."
Last updated: August 15, 2012.
