Taking Shape: An Initial Draft

ANCHORS/GUIDESTARS: 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)

KEY STUDENT LEARNING FOCUSES: 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.
• Language is not literal; meaning can be contested.
• 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. // Writing (class) is a laboratory for knowledge-making.

NETWORKED IMPACT: Collaborative Potentials

• 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)

ECOSYSTEM: 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 Writing Studies (as well as creative writing and public humanities?)
• Common curriculum with guided flexibility for instructor interest/expertise
• [-] Meaningful formative feedback (instructor, peers, writing consultants, AI, ...)
• Intentional engagement with technologies to support composition

ACTIVITY: 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 (or diverse understandings?) 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 (potential assignment types)

• "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?) - as reading "about" rather than "doing"?
• Self-selected final showcase piece
• Low-stakes place-based prewriting activities
• Prompt assignments
• "Saying more with less"
• "Defining writing lingo"
• "The research prospectus in first-year writing(and beyond)"
  

Taking shape, v1 ("not so different from now")

• Intake survey
• Literacy narrative/diagnostic writing (after Brandt or similar?)
• Audio 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? 

Taking shape, v2 ("Tour of UW English"--leaning into contrastive explorations of writing)

• Opening set-up (~1 week), 3 units (3-4 weeks each), student presentations (2 weeks?). Final exam on declarative knowledge?
• Each unit includes an expert lecture (video) introducing key values, genres, texts, ways of meaning making, and marks of "good" writing (across creative writing, literature+public humanities, writing studies) -- maybe based on Beaufort's figure?
• Each unit includes a scholarly/theoretical/conceptual reading about the field
• Each unit includes examples of sample "good" works in the field
• Each unit includes a culminating assignment of 3-4 pages
• Final 2 weeks are presentations of student explorations of disciplinary discourses?

Potential Texts and Technologies

• Sound Writing (Open-access online resource from U Puget Sound)
• Readings from or inspired by Writing about Writing and/or the Writing Spaces series
• "Vision and Revision: The Whys and Hows of Employing Creative Writing Pedagogy in the College Classroom"
• from Beaufort "College Writing and Beyond)
• 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?)

Some quotes to keep in mind...

The seven elements of antiracist writing assessment ecologies may seem commonsensical to many, but not many consider them holistically and interconnected when designing, engaging in, or investigating classroom writing assessments. ... The seven interconnected and holistic elements are: power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places. (Inoue, 2015, p. 119)

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