As we kick off another exciting quarter here in the PWR, I want to walk you through an assignment sequence that I’ve had particular success with in English 131.
Foregrounding my Teaching Commitments
I want to start by giving a quick overview of some of my main commitments when teaching. I always like to base my course design in a genre-centered approach that asks students to think about genre more capaciously. I made this video for my students to lay the groundwork for what I mean by a genre-centered approach. When we talk about a more capacious understanding of genre, I ask them to think about genre as any situation with a set of acknowledged conventions or expectations. Part of that is thinking about the English classroom itself as a genre. I ask students how we can gather our genre knowledge about this space in order to deconstruct and disrupt those expectations that we might take for granted.
Part of this process is an anti-racist approach which can take many forms: it’s a reading list that draws from a variety of voices, mediums, and genres. It’s course design that allows for various modes of engagement. Above all, it asks students to consider what voices, mediums, genres, and forms of engagement are privileged in this space. What are our preconceived notions about SWE and academic writing? Who and what do those notions privilege and why might that be problematic?
Alongside this is a problematizing of who and what has authority in my classroom. I tell my students that as we build a learning and writing community, I am more interested in being the “guide on the side than the sage on the stage.” And that means they need to think differently about what their peers have to offer them and what they have to offer their peers (like so many things, this is an ongoing project of unlearning).
Lastly, I’m very invested in striving for all forms of accessibility. To that end UDL, multimodality, and built-in flexibility are extremely important to my course construction. This means both how I allow students to demonstrate their learning and how I present course materials. I try not to rely exclusively on traditional lecture materials like PowerPoints, whiteboard notes, or assigned textbook readings. One thing I’ve done in the past is to take chapters from our text Writer/Thinker/Maker and convert them to videos or infographics and then make that and the written text available to students.
I also try to make all of these commitments transparent to students from the jump and throughout the quarter. I tell them that these are my aspirations and because I’m human and because I have also been very indoctrinated into the traditional conventions of this genre, I’m always liable to fail. And so, in inviting them into this project of deconstruction and disruption, I’m also asking them to help hold me accountable to my own commitments.
Sequence 1
The two charts shared here (the first is the image above which shows the progress of my first sequence from small assignment 1: Taking inventory of Your Incomes, to small assignment 2: Passage Based Paper, and finishing with major project 1: Genre analysis. The image also includes descriptions of each assignment in student-facing language) are what I show students at the beginning of the quarter. I’ll tell them “Starting in Week 2 and all the way through Week 8, we will have an assignment due every week. These assignments will be broken up into the following two sequences and then we’ll move onto the portfolio sequence.” To start off, I don’t like to have any writing assignments due in the first week. Instead, I try to focus on community building and setting the rules of engagement. This doesn’t mean that we’re doing empty ice breakers all week, but instead I try to tie that community-building into content. So for example, when we’re talking about genre and a genre-centered approach, I’ll do this activity where I ask students to think about a genre they enjoy. And again, genre here is super capacious, it could be a genre of music, movies, or writing, but it could also be a genre of place (like homes or churches). And I’ll tell them to go around the room and share their genre with folks until they find someone who chose the same genre they did. If they can’t find an exact match then it can be an approximation. So maybe they choose the genre of homes and can’t find someone else who chose homes, but someone else also chose a genre of place like schools or something similar. Then I’ll tell them to tell that person one example of the genre that they really love, the conventions that make up the genre, and how that example either abides or disrupts those conventions. For the music folks this is an album, for the movie folks a specific film, for the space people it gets more abstract. They might say “I really like homes as a genre, I love going to people’s homes and learning all those different conventions and nuances that make it theirs, maybe they ask everyone to take their shoes off or other things like that. My favorite example is my grandma’s house. I like it because she always greets everyone in a specific way and depending on the time of year, you know what kind of food the house will smell like when you get there.” So they’ll share, then I’ll ask them to find someone who has a genre they either aren’t familiar with or is really different to the one they chose.
Different activities like this set the stage for SA 1: Taking Inventory of Your Incomes. In this assignment I ask students to assess the knowledge they’re bringing into the classroom and spend some time thinking about how those knowledges will help them navigate this specific classroom space. I’ll ask them to spend time with these two charts featured here, as well as skimming the assignment prompts, so they have a general sense of the materials and skills we’ll cover. I’ll ask them to read the titles of our assigned readings, as well as the EWP outcomes and to reflect on the types of discussions and activities we did in week 1. How then do they see their existing knowledges being useful to this specific class? And they don’t have to have a clear answer yet, sometimes it’s as simple as “I was really struck during the activity where I thought about my grandma’s home as an example of the genre. I’m not sure why or how this will help me think about genres of writing, but I think it’s interesting that it was the first example of genre that came to me so I think that says something about how I engage the world or what my values are.” For this assignment, I give them two mediums to choose from either a written text or a PowerPoint presentation, but the genre is up to them. So they can write a letter to me or the class, or they can write either a personal or academic essay. For the PowerPoint, they can do an educational or business PowerPoint or they can do something like a PowerPoint-party style PowerPoint that’s more silly and geared towards entertainment and facetiousness. The assignment becomes a little bit of a time-capsule in that way, because later when I ask them to revisit their ideas, I also ask them to think about how they took up the genre/medium without spending too much time thinking about or breaking down the conventions (at least not in a class setting).
From there, I assign a passage based paper (which I adapted from Ellen C. Carillo’s “Securing a Place for Reading in Composition”) which asks students to choose one of our assigned texts, then they’ll pick a short passage from the text and do a close rhetorical analysis of that passage. This asks them to really think about how language and argument work on a small scale and then at the end they’ll tie that analysis into the text’s larger argument. This one should be academic in MLA format.
From there, they’ll do a genre analysis which is setting the stage for major project 2. Major project 2 is a position project that asks them to choose a social issue and argue for a specific position regarding that issue. Here they’re just deciding on a genre they want to use for that project (I usually give a few specific genres to choose from). For this analysis, I ask them to focus on audience and let that guide their genre: who would need this information about the genre and why? I’ve had students write an article for Higher Ed magazine where they’re explaining why teachers might find podcasts useful for instructional purposes.
**In retrospect, the passage based paper and genre analysis favor written assignments and I think that’s because of my own assumptions about how analysis should be performed, so in future I might change up these prompts to give opportunities for other forms of engagement.
Sequence 2
In the second sequence (Illustrated in the image above which shows sequence 2: small assignment 3: idea pitch, small assignment 4: annotated bibliography, small assignment 5: position project skeleton, and major project 2: position project) the small assignments are a lot more clearly scaffolded into major project 2. Small assignment 3: the idea pitch, is a written paper in MLA format, but It’s very low stakes. It asks them to think through a few possible topics for major project 2: what interests you about the topic and how do you intend to conduct your research? Where are you going to look for sources- UW libraries? Google scholar? The reference section of a wikipedia article? The works cited of an article that really interested you? What keywords will you search? What challenges do you anticipate?
The audience here is me and the rest of the class, so I ask them to think about how this assignment can help guide their research and drafting process. Part of that is how it elicits guidance as well, so I make it clear that I want them to be really frank about confusion or indecisiveness so that when we workshop in class and when I give individual feedback, there are specific things we can all talk through.
The next assignment is a pretty traditional annotated bibliography, but what I ask them to do a little differently is to use this as an opportunity to make their research process transparent. So I ask for 6 sources, which is a lot given they’ve only been thinking about this project for a week or two. I tell them they don’t need to read all the sources, and they shouldn’t expect to use all of them in your final project. Rather, I want them to start off really big and figure out how that open-endedness can help them conduct research and narrow down their thinking. So they might have sources on there that they’re thinking “this was not useful because it looks at UK laws, but I’m focused on the US. So even though I’m not using this source it made clear to me that 1) I’m only interested in how this works in the US and 2) I need to make that more clear in my searches or be more discerning in how I”m clicking on sources” or “This source wasn’t particularly useful because it’s approaching this topic from a weird angle, but it did introduce me to this term which has helped me reconfigure my keyword searches to include this.” But it might also be that a source helped them realize, they don’t actually care about a topic and change their topic altogether. All of that is what I”m looking for here, rather than a strict engagement with sources that will be used in major project 2. Often students think they can do a search on their topic and just cherry pick the perfect four sources from the top of the results list, so I try to disrupt that habit.
Next is the position project skeleton, this is basically just an outline, but the outline is very academic argument centered. It asks for things like topic sentences and quotes with an interpretation of the quote and how it supports their argument. So they build the skeleton with the anticipation that they’ll “flesh it out” for major project 2. For students who aren’t doing an academic essay, I tell them that they should think about the move from small assignment 5 to major project 2 as an act of genre translation: If you’re not writing an academic essay, what is the equivalent of a topic sentence in your genre? And how will you figure out how to translate the material from genre to genre.
At this point we will have done a variety of small, low stakes genre translations as class activities, so we’ll talk a lot during workshop about how we anticipate those translations happening. And then, finally, for Major project 2, the position project where they will use their chosen genre from major project 1 to discuss a social issue of their choosing. I will have scaffolded this kind of position-taking throughout the quarter in both our class readings and activities. I carefully select readings that showcase the kind of argument I want students to make: one where they take a position on an issue that matters to them and mediate the discussion of that issue through some sort of cultural project. Our in-class discussions and activities are aimed at helping them think critically about the rhetorical choices in these pieces and narrowing down their own values and convictions to find a social issue they are passionate about.
Conclusion
Like all teaching, this sequence is always in flux as I adapt to different student’s/course’s needs, but for the most part I’ve enjoyed teaching it and had warm receptions from students. Feel free to reach out for any of these prompts, adapt any of the ideas featured here, or come into AD office hours to discuss your own sequence!