ENGL 1101 – First-year Writing
Syllabus Design and Layout
Access was one of my primary concerns in the design and layout of the syllabus. The style I chose uses clear headings, appropriately coded in html, to allow for reading ease, emphasize organization, and to support screen-readers. The text is plain, and I have chosen to forgo images because many students (myself included) can be distracted and overwhelmed by an excess of information on the page. Images also tend to introduce extra problems for screen-readers, and while memes or fun pictures may amuse some students, they may be a stumbling block for others.
I have also included menu buttons at the top of the page to allow students to jump straight to the section they’re interested in. Though a small addition, I have found it useful in navigating the website myself, especially as the webpages can seem long and overwhelming: in other words, I can imagine a student feeling overwhelmed as they scroll (and scroll and scroll); the buttons make the syllabus seem more manageable and help students navigate a potentially overwhelming amount of information. This aspect of design was important to me particularly because it serves a first-year course. In my experience, many students find the excess of information on college syllabi overwhelming, and few take the time to read it carefully. I hope that the buttons will encourage students to browse on their own and feel less intimidated by the amount of information on the page.
The layout of the syllabus required quite a bit of thought, and in some ways still feels awkward to me. Previously, all my syllabi were laid out on roughly the same plan. As I read Margaret Price’s Mad at School, however, I realized that the order in which I presented course information was sending my students messages about what was most important in my class, whether they realized it or not. In the past, I tended to follow “Required Texts” and “Course Goals” with sections on grading, assignments, absences, etc.: looking back, I see that my syllabi emphasized grades and the punitive measure I would take if students weren’t living up to my expectations. Accessibility concerns, accommodations, and civil language were all grouped together at the bottom, sometimes under the heading “Administrative Concerns.” Price encouraged me to ask, “What does this tell my students?” Unsurprisingly, it told them that their accommodation and accessibility needs were almost an afterthought, something on the syllabus we’d get to if we had time, after the important stuff, like grades and assignments: the “retrofit,” as Jay Dolmage calls it. Often, I as covered these old syllabi in classes, I’d get to that point and sort of wave it away: “And the rest is stuff that’s on every syllabus. Read it on your own if you have time. Or don’t.” This positioning, combined with the language I was using to talk about accommodations, sent a clear message to my students about what was important in my class—and it wasn’t their access or success.
This syllabus, and indeed the others that I have created for this directive, revise that way of thinking. “Accessibility, Accommodations, & Mental Health” comes directly after the standardized course goals provided by the FYW office. The section includes the traditional syllabus language offered by the university, but is also supplemented by a paragraph emphasizing my willingness to work with students to promote success and accessibility. You’ll noticed that I encourage students to talk to me whether or not they have a DRC letter: often, the accommodations process is difficult, time-consuming, and ineffective. Most DRC letters that I receive from students allow them more testing time, which is irrelevant in my class, so I strive to find ways to promote accessibility from the ground up (universal design).
The “Participation” section follows up these ideas, inspired by Margaret Price and my own undergraduate instructors. Participation looks different on everyone: as a first- and second-year undergraduate, I barely spoke in classes, but most of my professors quickly realized that it didn’t mean I was slacking off or indifferent. They supported me and valued my contributions regardless of whether or not my social anxiety allowed me to speak up, and it was their support that gradually made me more comfortable with my own voice. Now, as a graduate student coming to terms with a number of mental disabilities that I was unaware of as an undergraduate, I realize that my college career would not have been successful had not those professors chosen to look past my struggle to speak and value my presence in the classroom regardless.
Reading Mary M. Reda’s book Between Speaking and Silence: A Study on Quiet Students helped me conceptualize the difference between how professors tend to see quiet students and how those same students see themselves. As I recognized myself in some of the students interviewed for the study, I realized that my pedagogical practice had no doubt been punishing students who were, in reality, a lot like I was: smart, conscientious, over-working, but genuinely terrified. Many days, it took me a solid ten minutes to prepare a simple comment, and by that time I was shaking, sweating, and losing focus. Often, by the time I’d gotten up enough courage to speak, the conversation had moved on and my remark was no longer relevant.
As I read Reda’s study, I also recalled my experience as a TA in my MA program: for the first three semesters, I taught every single one of my three classes on the verge of hyperventilating. I didn’t know what was happening to me, why my chest felt tight and my breathing shallow. I didn’t know at the time that it was a product of my anxiety that had followed me through childhood to undergrad and into grad school. I didn’t get help until I experienced a panic attack in one of my grad classes, when a professor forced me to improvise in a difficult theoretical conversation, even after I admitted I had nothing constructive to say at the moment. Looking back, I could cry for my younger self. I wish someone had noticed. I wish I had gotten help sooner. And I wonder how much healthier some of my past students would have been had I not punished them for choosing to be present in a different way.
Thus, while I do softly “require” speaking in class from time to time, I leave that up to the discretion of my students. In addition to three mandatory participation methods, I have my students choose two or three of their own that fit their personalities, abilities, and learning styles. They communicate these methods to me at the beginning of the semester and are required to complete written check-ins each unit to self-grade and consider their participation. I have found that my students want to do well, and so far, all have been brutally honest about their participation: in many cases, I increase their participation grades by a point or two because they’re far more strict than I would be.
I have also chosen to greatly expand what was originally a short paragraph on civility and inclusiveness of speech. Reading texts like the Critical Pedagogy Primer; Repurposing Composition: Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age; Who Can Afford a Critical Consciousness; Teaching Queer; and the work of Asaou Inoue, among others, convinced me that I was not doing enough to simply and briefly mandate “civility.” I needed to actively acknowledge privilege, address inequality, and encourage my students to question their discourse in ways that moved beyond questions of civility and introduced ideas of respect. But how to do this? Everything I wrote seemed to fall short of the mark. One day, I was working with a social work student in the Writing Center who brought her professor’s syllabus with her. Right away, I noticed the hefty “Responsibility and Respect” section—this was exactly what I was looking for!
Several weeks later, I was able to chat with the professor, Dr. Jennifer Elkins, and received her permission to take her paragraphs and adjust them for my own context: she shared that she had done the same, learning from people wiser than herself, and that the paragraphs on respect as I saw them had been the product of many years of work and the care of many people. She joyfully agreed to share her words with me, and we plan on getting together over coffee to talk more about equitable course design once I finish comps. This experience not only enriched my syllabus, but also taught me the importance of dialogue, collaboration, and mentorship, all of which are significant marks of Black feminism specifically and are encouraged by scholars like Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Aja Martinez, Shari Stenburg, and others. I therefore include the words of Dr. Elkins and others as a celebration of collaboration and community that works to effect justice in my classroom.
Course Content
I want to turn now to address the content of the course: assignments and prompts. Here I draw from a variety of scholars as well as my own experience both and student and instructor. In The Meaningful Writing Project, Eodice, Geller, and Lerner argue that meaningful assignments promote agency, engagement, and transfer. Similarly, I have found that students are quite literally better writers when they have power over their writing, take ownership of it, and find ways to engage in the content as their own. These are in turn the attitudes that promote transfer.
Finally, in “Sharing the Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar: The Effects of Making Disciplinary Conventions Explicit in Undergraduate Writing about Literature Courses,” Wilder and Wolfe show that students become more engaged in course materials, produce better writing, and transfer skills better when implicit knowledge is made explicit. This study, along with my experience teaching ENGL 1101 in Fall 2021 and taking Academic Writing in Fall 2020, prompted me to consider the possibility of a FYW class that actually centered writing. Thus, it’s a course in which my students will write about writing.
One of the primary components of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the idea that personal experience is valuable as a form of knowing—just as valuable as that of empirical studies or long-dead experts. Aja Martinez both considers this idea and embodies it in her book Counterstory, which considers the outcomes of including traditional scholarship alongside of Martinez’s own story of raising her daughter to be a more thoughtful, curious, and critical person. As a white instructor from a middle-class background working at a primarily-white institution (PWI), I worry that making use of counterstory in its original form could constitute an appropriation of a significant and special genre for and by people of color. Thus, while I do encourage my students to write about themselves (and their writing), to find personal engagement in their work, I did not choose to adopt specific genre characteristics of counterstory—writing about an experience of oppression, for example. Rather, I broadly encourage students to consider their own experiences as important and valid forms of knowledge-making.
This is evident especially in Major Assignment 1 and Major Assignment 3, both of which ask students to track, analyze, and draw conclusions from personal experience as a means of producing knowledge about their writing habits and skills. I assigned MA1 in my Fall 2021 class, to great success. The majority of the class was intrigued going in, as they had never been asked to so closely consider their own writing habits before. Many were excited by the opportunity to try out strategies that didn’t fit with the ways they’d always been taught to write. Even students who were skeptical at first soon discovered that writing came easier to them when they simply used a different planning strategy or wrote in a new location. Their essays were timid but rich as they explored their own writing selves in ways that often surprised them.
It is my hope that MA3, in asking students to look at their own writing as valid texts for analysis, accomplishes a similar goal in assisting students to find value in their own work, become aware of their skills and weaknesses, and to take seriously their future writing and writing selves. MA2 sets up this thoughtful engagement by asking students to do the same with “mentor texts,” a more traditional form of analysis that allows students to exercise their critical thinking muscles before turning to their own work. Most importantly, I hope students will ask provocative and compelling questions about who they are as writers that will carry through to other courses and contexts.
All three assignments center agency and engagement. When students aren’t writing about their own writing, they’re writing about “mentor texts” that they choose: that is, texts from writers they admire in an array of genres and mediums. In the past, students have commented that having agency in their choice of topic made the class more interesting—in turn improving their level of engagement with the material, which in its turn leads to stronger assignments and transferrable skills.
The assignment prompts themselves introduce more questions of access. I have endeavored here to follow the goals I laid out above, but also to make sure I was providing students with the information they needed to succeed. This was an area that required a lot of my time: after spending a semester in the Writing Center repeatedly seeing students near tears over ineffective (or nonexistent) prompts and even less helpful feedback from professors, I was resolved to pay closer attention to the writing that I was doing as part of the course building process. My assignment prompts contain a header with the assignment expectations; a description (which also functions as a sort of rationale); explicit instructions, and a rough timeline of the project that gives students an “at-a-glance” schedule to follow. In class, we read and annotate the prompts together, breaking them down and making sure they’re clear and accessible. Any student concerns are then addressed in a revision of the prompt made in class and with the input of the students themselves. Again, these strategies seek to involve students in the process in ways that are both feasible and equitable. And while it may mean a little more day-to-day work for me as the instructor, it ensures that the class is student-centered and actually provides the resources they need to learn to write successfully.
Assessment and Grading
Assessment is a tricky beast. While I would have preferred experimenting with labor-based contract grading (as I do in the other classes I created), the FYW guidelines must be adhered to. I have thus created a compromise: process is heavily weighted for all four projects (three major assignments and a final portfolio), allowing me to fairly recognize the labor of my students. The focus on labor also begins to undermine the inherent classism and racism of traditional grading, which often uses a single standard to judge the writing of all students—and that single standard is emphatically white, male, and middle- and upper-class. According to Inoue, “this project (to assess everyone by standards of the same discourse, the same English) is an inherently racist project” (Antiracist 56) because it does not recognize the many Englishes that are spoken today, and instead reinscribes boundaries that exclude people of color (especially) from “academic discourse.” In refusing to privilege Standard Academic English (SAE), I hope to open my classroom to a variety of discourses. Displacing SAE to make room for labor is, for me, a way to acknowledge the different types of knowing that my students do; to promote a variety of approaches to learning and to writing; and to encourage my students to see themselves as writers with something important to share, rather than as outsiders who must shrink their voices to fit a box much too small for them.
This method also encourages students to take risks in areas that aren’t being assessed. Those risks can be taken in part thanks to the special FYW committee that created these “rubric blocks.” In emphasizing only three or four aspects of writing during assessment, I have seen students (rather than slacking off in other areas) take responsibility of their work and try new strategies, styles, and habits—and in my opinion, freedom to experiment makes students more confident about not only their writing abilities, but also their ability to meet expectations and write successfully for professors in other classes.
Finally, each assessment rubric contains a “Student Goals” section worth 10 points, or 10%. At the beginning of each unit and at least by the time of one-with-one conferences, students choose an area or aspect of writing they want to work on in the upcoming assignment. Often, this goal will grow out of feedback students received on a previous assignment. Students then submit a short reflection addressing their experience in working toward that goal, and include a grade (0-10). That grade then makes up 10% of the assignment grade; while I reserve the right to adjust the grade, I’ve never done so except to increase it: in my experience, students either grade themselves about where I’d put them, or lower. I include this responsibility for my students because, as Inoue points out, “healthy writing assessment ecologies have at their core dialogue about what students and teachers know, how students and teachers judge language differently, so that students are also agents in the ecology, not simply objects to be measured” (Antiracist 84). I have found that students appreciate the opportunity to be involved in the process and tend to be more understanding of and happier about their grades because it forces them to consider the evaluation process beyond “gut reaction.”
Final Thoughts
There is, of course, so much more that could be said here. A good syllabus doesn’t guarantee a good course, but it does lay important foundations for the class. I want my syllabi to invite students into a process of active and collaborative learning; to encourage them to take risks and believe in themselves as writers; to hold out a hand of welcome to students especially who have been excluded or sidelined by other classes, syllabi, and instructors. So much of this, however, happens in the classroom: the syllabus can form an invitation, but in the classroom, community forms. Had I time and space here, I would discuss my ideas for bringing the ideals of agency, engagement, transfer, and equity into the lived classroom. They are many, but I have learned through this directive to love the process: it’s often messy, frantic, and time consuming—it’s often a wild guess in a sea of possibilities—but gradually, through collaboration and trust, something beautiful emerges: a classroom of curiosity, respect, and confidence, made up of students and an instructor who are themselves learning to trust the process and to build community.