Taking Shape: An Initial Draft

Over time, I think that a move to a writing-about-writing approach has meant that I have increasingly turned my attention to writing to learn. When procedural and declarative knowledge about writing is the focus of the course, then writing about ideas about writing and using a variety of written practices to do so become natural and constant foci. For example, writing becomes a means not only of learning to write a particular genre, but also of learning about genres and why and how they function, come to be, and change. Not only that, but writing in any genre becomes a means of learning more about the ideas we've been reading and discussing; deciding on a genre in which to write becomes an exercise in learning about how to dialogue with interlocutors in a way that makes sense to them. -- Liz Wardle, 2014

Principles, Goals, Commitments

  • Acknowledges and promotes linguistic diversity (through readings, grading, and writing projects)
  • Values slow attention, attentive reading, and intentional composing (e.g., Postman, 1988; Wolf, 2018; 
  • Recognizes that the goals of teaching composition do not mandate an exclusive focus on efficiency, "clean" "final" products, or vocational success
  • Understands attribution, closed-form features, intellectual humility, multimodality, and "standard American English" as typical features of post-secondary academic writing (see Thonney, 2011)
  • Promotes reading and writing as an opportunity to deepen critical thinking and understanding (see Bean & Melzer, 2021; Kiefer et al., 2000-2021)
  • Recognizes purpose and audience as essential drivers of composing 
  • Recognizes meaningfulness as an essential driver of engaged writing and revision (see Geller, Eodice, & Lerner, 2016)
  • Recognizes the role of communities and technologies in composition (see Baron, 1999)
  • Defines "effective" writing as the intersection of content knowledge, discourse conventions, and identity (see Moje, 2008)
Potential Texts and Technologies
  • Sound Writing (Open-access online resource from U Puget Sound)
  • Readings from or inspired by Writing about Writing 
  • Pen/pencil and paper
  • WyoCourses course management platform
  • Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive (for draft+process work)
  • Google Docs or Microsoft Word (for word processing)
  • Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, or other generative AI platform (recommended)
  • Hypothesis reading account (free version // embedded in Canvas?)
Threshold Concepts
  • Language use is diverse; using language well involves knowing your options.
  • We are all writers; we are enveloped by written language and other multimedia compositions.
  • Composing is a process; composing processes are diverse.
  • Composing is part of a social conversation; writing connects humans across time and space.
  • Written composition is always material and increasingly digitally mediated.
  • Writing products are only a part of writing as activity; writing is greater than its products.
  • Writing is an opportunity to learn // Knowledge is contested // Writing (class) is a laboratory for knowledge-making
Collaborative Impact Goals
  • ENGL 1010 can support retention and persistence at UW (through small class sizes, social approach to writing, and attention to transitional experience)
  • ENGL 1010 can recruit students to English and English education majors
  • ENGL 1010 can drive intentional and meaningful engagement with the Writing Center
  • ENGL 1010 become a site for featuring scholarship of English faculty and graduate students (in comp/rhet, public humanities, literary studies, and beyond)
  • ENGL 1010 (through Inside English 1010) can achieve a statewide profile demonstrating engaged student learning
  • ENGL 1010 can become a site for gathering and disseminating information about UW student experience (through an initial intake survey and end-of-course evalaution)
Hallmark Curricular Features
  • Grading contract approach to assessment (with clear process and product specifications; see sample 1, sample 2, sample 3)
  • Research activity grounded in composition/rhetoric
  • Common curriculum with limited flexibility for instructor interest/expertise
  • Meaningful formative feedback (instructor, peers, writing consultants, AI, ...)
  • Intentional engagement with technologies to support composition
Essential Activities
  • Initial intake survey (questions for class exploration/analysis, questions for pre-/post- assessment, and questions about student knowledge/expectations/executive function)
  • Grounding in shared understanding of text/language/composition (+rhetoric?)
  • Opportunity to engage with writerly "voice" through audio essay (+literacy narrative or self-as-reader/writer?)
  • Supported attentive reading of complex academic texts
  • Direct assessment of declarative knowledge about composing? (exam?)
  • Practice in academic writing (report genre? with limited primary analysis?)
For consideration...
  • "Letter to a literacy sponsor" (see syllabus here)
  • I-search paper (in place of AB? see brief explanation here)
  • Prompt engineering????? (Where does it actually fit?)
  • Self-selected final showcase piece 
Taking shape...
  • Intake survey
  • Literacy narrative/diagnostic writing (after Brandt or similar?)
  • Video essay (after readings about rhetorical authenticity?)
  • Reading: A basic foundation in Writing Studies
    • 2 shared 
    • 1 group (students choose 1 of 3 and then present to class on their article) -- GAs select from WaW or common pool)
    • 1 self-selected (from WaW or common pool)
  • Research project (I-search + proposal for research study?)
  • Exam (declarative knowledge)
  • Public-facing genre? or showcase piece? 






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What "Ordinary Men" teaches about conditioning for mass murder

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a book about a Hamburg-based police force's involvement in the mass killing of Jews during WWII. It is, in part, a historian's effort to understand how relatively "ordinary men" (conscripted into the war effort relatively late in the overall timeline) became willing participants in execution. "Willing" is perhaps not the right word, and in fact many did not participate on account of deep ideological values -- but the interviews on which the book is based do point to the variety of justifications and manipulations that made it possible for these ordinary men to become killers. Here's what I've learned so far: Collapse the distance between "police" and "military." Make killing legal. Create conditions of economic uncertainty. Create promotion ladders (or, alternately, threats against career promotion for non-participants) Make opportunities for "con...
Read more

What I think I know about writing (pt I)

"there are no general recipes or designs that can be applied to all contexts, but certain principles and experiences that must be adjusted to the predominant theoretical and pedagogical traditions, to the profiles of instructors and students, and to the institutional resources and to the curricular spaces available." -- Federico Navarro, "Think Globally, Act Locally: How to Design an Academic Writing Course for Students Entering University," p. 112 (https://doi.org/10.37514/INT-B.2025.2739.2.04) as Rose and Martin (2012) point out, if students are not taught to read and write independently, educational institutions will only reproduce the underlying social and cultural inequalities of their students. (Navarro, p. 119) Writing encourages a slowing of thinking. That slowing down is good when it allows for inspection and growth. To the extent that a process approach encourages inspection, it is good for writers' development. A process approach that produces change ...
Read more

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...
Read more