WRT 105 is the class I have taught the most, and, as with WRT 205, it is one of my more developed versions of the course. When I first taught WRT 105, I had no experience teaching writing and leaned considerably on the suggestions of my teaching mentor (who happened to be the Director of Teaching Assistant Education). My first iteration of the course focused on three units: a literacy unit, a visual rhetoric unit, and genre analysis and academic research unit. While this first version of the course does touch on intertextuality, the relationship between text and image, and remediation, these concepts become core values in my next two iterations. The current version of this course is informed by my seminar projects from three different graduate courses, informal feedback from my students, and discussions with my peers.
The first unit now focuses on the connections between language, ethos, and power. It taps into hip hop feminist principles to engage students in different ways of knowing and/or deliberating on social issues, but it also looks at how ethos and language are connected to an audience and their expectations (their prior knowledge and community expectations). The unit project is a more developed version of an assignment from WRT 104, one that asks students to map out the influences on their thinking and composing in a project that considers the intersections between images and text in making meaning.
Largely inspired by my final project from the Game Studies course I took in Fall of 2016, the second unit examines the role that medium and form has in shaping genre. This unit introduces the concept of remediation, the transformation of a project from one medium to another. In order to give important space for students to create projects tied to their interests and prior knowledge, I have them adapt one of their influences into a more realized project. For example, one of my students included a lesser known Broadway choreographer as an important influence on his interest in theater. He then remediated this portion of his influence map into a a video essay which examined this figures unique contributions, a micro-documentary which allowed him to cultivate video editing skills. Risk taking is an important part of this unit, as students developing an awareness of their composing process. While most of their outside of class work focuses on the unit project, they also complete audio logs which tracks their thinking as they develop their project in addition to accounting for their compositional tasks. This work culminates in an integral component of their unit project, the Director’s Commentary Reflection, a behind-the-scenes look at the intentions for their project, the hurdles and challenges that surfaced as they worked on the project, and anticipated uptakes of their work. Provided a space to explain their compositional moves and what impacts they intended these decisions to have, I find students are more likely to take risks and to try new things, the anxieties of uptake somewhat assuaged.
The last unit asks them to take the skills they developed in the previous two units and apply them to an academic article. Drawing from my final seminar project in the Writing Pedagogies course I took in Fall of 2016, this final unit investigates the distributed nature of expertise and research writing. During this third and final unit, students take a deep and critical dive into the academic article genre but remediating an article from their major (or one they are interested in declaring) into a form that caters to the needs of a non-academic audience of their choosing. Essentially, the design for this third unit project is heavily inspired by the original final project of my very first iteration of the course; albeit the focus is more on nonacademic genres and composers (stand-up comedians for instance) who do critical intellectual work similar to more traditional scholarship. In the process of working through their chosen academic article–selecting the essential information and choosing a suitable form–students are also learning how their respective academic articles “work” – the best ways to approach strategically reading them in addition to considering issues of access. In nudging the porous boundaries between academic and nonacademic compositions (i.e. popular culture) students are given important space to discuss expertise, credibility, different ways of knowing, and the ways purpose is embedded in genres themselves.
Perhaps what my development of WRT 105 best demonstrates is my shift from designing courses with discreet, somewhat isolated, units towards courses with more seamlessly interconnected units. My current iteration of WRT 105 maintains the important project scaffolding of previous versions, but it now more consistently addresses genre, audience, knowledges, composing processes, and multimodality across the entire course. The result is a course that I feel teaches students different skills in each unit but in less “ham-fisted” ways. There are far more opportunities for students to explore and show their learning rather then telling me what they think they were supposed to get out of the course.
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