This was my first time teaching a summer course and my only time teaching WRT 104 specifically. This course is required of students who are not able to be placed into a WRT 105 section until the fall, but rather than see this as a restriction I saw it as an opportunity to try something new. Several of my core assignments in WRT 105 and WRT 205 started as ideas here that were later developed into more developed, versions specific to those other courses.
This being a six-week course, albeit on students attended four days consecutively, I knew that I had to scale and scaffold their projects differently. One of my primary priorities in this specific course were to increase their exposure to writing as more than alphabetic texts, for them to see their daily communication practices as sophisticated as what they assumed of academic writing. My other goal was to make space for students to bring their own prior knowledge and interests into the classroom, to make the classroom a space where they could learn from each other. Provided my background as a Residence Director, I knew students’ acclimation to campus but also those immediate local “secret spots” were essential to their feeling a sense of belonging to a college campus.
In order to give students a sense of consistency, I replaced unit projects with smaller-scale weekly projects which I only assigned over the weekends. The first unit project was meant to try out an assignment I developed in my final project from the Hip Hop Feminism course I completed during the Maymester before teaching this course. Students had a chance to interact with music, to delve into how artists draw from the musical styles of other artist as a way to add an additional layer of meaning to their songs. I have since developed with assignment into the cornerstone of my current iteration of WRT 205 where I position this sampling as an analog for citational practices (as a way to teach students about academic research). As it pertains to 104, this first assignment is meant to be a scaffolded version of their second weekly project, their literacy assemblage.
The literacy assemblage project is a precursor to the Influence Map unit project I developed for my current iteration of WRT 105. In addition to a change in name, what is different about this latter version of the assignment is an emphasis on their charting the trajectories, the connections between the people, events, and texts they feel are foundational to their thinking, connections they might not have seen without mapping them out.
Two other assignments I had students work through have since become smaller scale assignments in regular courses. Having students compare news stories about the same event (to explore bias and standards of evidence across different news outlets), and then also strategically reading academic articles and summarizing their findings.
The last project is the most distinct to 104. As a class we create a map of the “hidden gems” of Syracuse. I have students do this assignment exclusively in WRT 104 not just because the weather is ideal for it, but because it requires all of the previous skills they practiced in order to complete. Students identify a place off campus they feel drawn to (whether that is because it reminds them of something back home or it serves a function they feel like they will need during the semester), and then spend time at this place. Together as a class we decide what consistent features we should be documenting and “reviewing” across all of the places we are visiting. Each student takes this template, completes a more thorough visit, and then creates a slide with the agreed upon information. In the end, I pull all of their slides together to create a google map of our class “hidden gems,” a practical and digital representation of our aggregate knowledge.
I truly enjoyed working with the student in WRT 104. Their willingness to try experimental things meant I had the space to be a co-learner in the classroom as I tried out ideas I had been working on after my first year of teaching. It comes as no surprise to me that the core of my ongoing development as a teacher and my own distinct pedagogy really started with this class.
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