[As another Fall
semester kicks off, a series of preview posts—this time focusing on new things
I’ll be trying this semester. Leading up to a special pedagogy post this
weekend!]
On two ways to
bring the digital to a traditional writing classroom.
For the Spring 2014
semester, I created an entirely
new syllabus for my First-Year Writing II course, one focused on Analyzing
21st Century America. As you would expect, that course focused
significantly on digital topics and elements: from units on social media and analyzing
movies and TV shows watched online to near-constant conversations about online
identities, communities, communication, and more. Yet at the same time, partly
by design but mostly because there’s only so much overhauling one can do of one’s
pedagogy in any given moment, I kept my assignment types and their
semester-long scaffolding much closer to what I had employed in my prior
Writing II courses, and much more traditional (in the sense of the pre-digital
composition classroom, that is) than were the syllabus and its units, readings,
and conversations.
This fall, for
my next section of First-Year Writing I, I’m trying a complicated experiment—not
overhauling the syllabus I’ve used successfully for many years and sections,
yet still both bringing one of my favorite aspects of that digital Writing II into
this one and (I hope) improving on that course’s one less innovative element. For
the former, I’m going to try to use digital resources to provide students with
many more options for our units and readings than has been the case in prior
sections. For example, we start with a unit on personal essays (reading and then
writing/analyzing them), and I’ve always used a handful of examples from the Seagull
Reader: Essays anthology. I’ve still ordered that book and will have us
read and discuss some of those example essays, to give us a shared group of
core texts; but I will also highlight pieces of personal writing on blogs and
tumblrs and other websites, as well as examples in other media (such as YouTube
channels and Ted talks). Each of those forms and genres comes with its own
specific elements and choices, of course—but there’s no reason why we can’t
discuss and analyze each of them, and why I can’t give students the choice of with
which ones they most want to work.
That final point
comprises the way I’m hoping to improve on my digital-centric Writing II
course: by offering students creative assignment options that similarly utilize
the digital. That is, if a student wants to create his or her Assignment 1
personal essay as a tumblr post, or a YouTube video, or in some other digital
or multimedia form, it seems to me that I should be encouraging rather than
limiting such a range of choices; and that the students can then apply their
analytical skills and writing to that work with equal rigor and depth in any
case. I don’t think a First-Year Writing course can or should forego
analytical, academic writing in its more traditional forms, but as with the creative
survey assignments about which I wrote in Monday’s post, I don’t think it’s
either-or: that, indeed, allowing for a greater range of creative assignment
options and responses can help students develop their analytical skills
alongside and in conjunction with their unique voices and skills. I have no
idea what the results of this hypothesis will be in the Writing I experiment on
which I’m about to embark—but I’m excited to find out, and, as always, will
keep you posted!
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Things you’re hoping to try or do this fall?
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