Integrating Online Personal Branding into the Composition Classroom: An Argument and Method

摘要

This paper identifies online personal branding, or the act of marketing one's professional self as if that professional self were a brand, as a key skill necessary for career advancement in the 21st century and one that deserves a place in the English composition classroom. Students are already engaging in personal branding, albeit unintentionally, through their use of social media (Perrin, 2015; Labrecque, L., Markos, E., & Milne, G., 2011). Additionally, personal branding provides a number of benefits for composition students, including an authentic audience and opportunities to cultivate skills in critical thinking, analysis, organization, and multimodal composition. Finally, students will benefit from learning about branding early in their studies so they can graduate ready to transition into a career. Therefore, the first-year composition classroom offers an environment conducive to the inclusion of a personal branding curriculum. This paper provides a literature review exploring how personal branding and closely related concepts have influenced pedagogies in and outside of English composition, a rationale for the inclusion of a personal branding curriculum, a personal branding curriculum, and a methodology for studying the effectiveness of this curriculum.