FYW Curriculum Idea 1: Federal Program Impacts

 A motivating question: How can we get writers to move beyond ideology to explore, understand, and make decisions based on evidence?

EXIGENCIES/ASSUMPTIONS

  • Immediately (Spring 2025), DOGE is massively cutting federal funding for a variety of agencies and programs that have existed for decades or more. 
  • Broadly speaking, citizens (of all ages) are getting "further from the facts," in terms of forming attitudes about civic behavior. There is a deepening of inductive (top-down) thinking about the role of government, where sweeping political ideologies over-drive people's orientation to specific events. (The alternate I prefer in this CI is deductive exploration of information, a kind of "working up" from evidence, ideally to encourage subtle interrogation of top-down ideologies they may have already acquired.)
GENERAL SKETCH
A note: I think this CI is probably "unit scale" rather than "semester scale"--it would probably need to be combined with other units to form a more complete curriculum.

What is the key task/genre? Conduct research on a program that has historically been funded primarily/entirely through federal funding. Explore the history, purpose, and implementation of that program, and then develop a clear statement that expresses your position on the program. Craft a 3- to 5-page letter (to a local newspaper or to a congressional representative) meant to share your evidence-based, citizen-level understanding and position on this issue. 

A. Students pick a federal agency or program to explore. It probably makes sense to have them do some initial pre-writing to help them identify positive or negative things they think are created by federal government. A teacher might ask them to write about education, environment, economy, religion, crime, etc, to get them thinking about what they know or think they know about government. An alternate approach would be to have students start with an agency that has been cut, then "drill down" to find a specific program to investigate in more detail. 
        To consider: How to help students get to the right scale for their investigation; how the libraries (including the law library?) could help with specific information literacy tasks for this project

B. Students conduct an exploration of the issue/program that they selected. At minimum, students should be asked to learn the history of the program, its key purposes, critiques and defenses of the program, its funding, and its impacts. 
        To consider: Can AI be used productively for this kind of research?

C. Students engage in careful arrangement of their developing knowledge. I don't usually think in terms of arrangement, but I wonder how students could be asked to physically "place" or represent the sets of information they have gathered. (Maybe this is as simple as a heuristic that asks them to place key pieces of evidence in text boxes labeled "history," "purpose," "critiques," "defenses," "funding," "impacts," and "other information." What do I assume about the potential value of this kind of spatial arrangement activity?

D. Student craft a "position statement" that captures their overall evaluation of the program's importance. This task could be productively supported by Graff and Birkenstein's They Say/I Say, I think, as a way to help them generate nuanced positions that take into account critiques/weaknesses as well as strengths/benefits, and that avoid reduction back to sweeping ideological views.

E. Students consider potential genres for communicating their position. This could include basic information about op-ed writing and/or lobbying: what features of these genres would they want to consider in crafting an evidence-based text for a specific audience and purpose.
        To consider: whether this phase should include an audience analysis activity;  the concept of"motion" as a way of thinking about persuasive activity. (Motion implies that a reader starts "somewhere" and is ideally moved to a different position as a result of their reading. This is somewhat simplistic but can provide help for the meta-commentary moves they should make in their writing.)

F. Students draft, peer-review, and finalize their external communication effort. 

G. Student reflect on the process. 

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