In Winter Quarter 24, WRD 540 Teaching Writing, taught by Dr. Erin Workman, met to help students develop their understanding of how to teach writing. Students from both the MAWRD and MA in English programs and with different educational and professional goals took the class, which inspired a range of discussions and directions.
I met with two students from the course, Reina Ashley Nomura (“RN”) and Lindsay Wilson (“LW”) to gather their perspectives about what the course offers, what they achieved, and their directions moving forward. Reina Ashley Nomura is a student in the MAWRD program, and Lindsay Wilson is a MA in English student. I also provide my own (“LS”) answers to the questions I asked Nomura and Wilson, as I was in the class as well.
Read on to learn more about WRD 540 and what you might expect if you enroll in the course next year!
What are the key concepts or skills you have learned during this course?
LS: Throughout WRD 540, I learned how to engage with both the theory and application of writing pedagogy. I developed a better conception of students and teachers as participating in a mutual process of knowledge creation, rather than a traditional model of teachers as the knowledge givers and students as passive knowledge receivers. I think reframing this relationship is important to my future as a teacher because it positions students as experts with something to contribute to the classroom conversation, and positions myself as a teacher as always learning. As for practical application, I learned a lot about assessment and grading—especially in a way that respects students’ multifaceted and complex linguistic and personal backgrounds. The idea of a “standard” English dominating the classroom space is one that I reject as I hope to pave the way for alternate modes of writing, thinking, and being.
RN: Learning about how Standard English upholds and is informed by White Supremacy is one concept that I’ll definitely carry with me beyond this course. The responsibility to acknowledge the Englishes, languages, literacies, rhetorics, and discourses that are informed by cultures beyond those deemed dominant is something I wish more instructors – in writing courses and beyond – incorporated into their pedagogies more explicitly. I think the reason it’s so important to reframe writing studies classes like this is because of how rooted Standard English is in all of us. There’s a lot of unlearning to do before we can learn, and then teach, writing beyond Standard English.
Learning about the theoretical concepts of writing studies, like lifespan writing, teaching for transfer, and the multiple internal and external processes that make up writing practices is also a huge takeaway from the course for me. I didn’t realize how much theory there is behind something like writing and to have learned them makes me feel much more equipped to teach writing courses. It’s also a really great way to reflect back on my own progression of writing and learning/being taught how to write.
LW: In this class I learned a lot about how language can be used as a tool to perpetuate white supremacist values in education. I also learned about the idea of responding for transfer, or responding to student work in a way that will explicitly promote transfer of skills to other assignments and other classes.
How do you plan to apply what you’ve learned in this course to your future studies or career?
LS: Since I’ve officially been accepted to the Teaching Apprenticeship Program (TAP) for this Autumn Quarter 24, I am very excited to be able to apply my knowledge in the first-year-writing (FYW) context here at DePaul. I’m invigorated by the idea of not only using my rhetorical knowledge and expertise to teach students about how ideology is persistently at work, but also learning from my students in return. Beyond TAP, I think that my ability to communicate my ideas effectively and my ability to respond to others’ work in a constructive manner will prove helpful in any career I choose.
RN: I’m really excited to be participating in the Teaching Apprenticeship Program and teaching WRD 103 in Autumn 2024. I’ll definitely be looking to apply what I learned in 540 towards teaching this fall. Especially when it comes to responding to student work, I have the theory of transfer to work from now, whereas when I was responding to Common Hour assignments as a Staff Professional the past couple of years, I didn’t really have a theoretical approach grounding my practice.
I’d really like to apply what I’ve learned in this course to future study in Writing Across the Curriculum and how these theories of writing studies and instruction can be applicable to general education. Working within the Liberal Studies Program and supporting the faculty teaching those classes, I really see the value of incorporating what we learned in class towards an interdisciplinary collaboration on general education pedagogies.
LW: I am in the process of working to become a professor myself and am going to do the TAP program at DePaul in the fall. My main takeaway from the WRD 540 course was the importance of using writing education to support and empower students to partake in whatever discourses they may choose to engage with going forward. First Year Writing students come from varied backgrounds and will go on to all kinds of different programs even just within DePaul, not to mention their futures outside of the university. First Year Writing is a way of empowering students to really engage with their existing and future communities meaningfully.
Can you name a particular class activity, project, or reading that was your favorite? Why?
LS: My favorite class project was writing the literacy narrative. It got me to better understand how literacy functions (and has functioned) in my life to compose me as a whole now. And, it was super fun to write it in a narrative format. I came to understand myself better through this project, and it’s one I plan to employ in my FYW classroom this Autumn during TAP. It will not only help me understand my students’ backgrounds better, informing the way I approach the class, but also hopefully help my students learn something about themselves as well.
RN: Reading sarah madoka currie and Ada Hubrig’s “Care Work Through Course Design: Shifting the Labor of Resilience” was one of my favorites from the class because it really spoke to my personal relationships to core course documents as a neurodivergent disabled student. It also perfectly connected to a reading from my independent study, “The Rhetorical Role of Syllabi in Student Conversations about Disability Accommodations” by Neil Simpkins. Both of these and a few other readings helped me to develop my Teaching and Learning conference session, “(Re)Writing Course Documents to Center Our Teaching and Pedagogical Philosophies.”
I also really enjoyed designing my original assignment, the scaffolded Education Memoir. This assignment was inspired by reading Nancy Mack’s “Marginalized Students Need to Write about Their Lives: Meaningful Assignments for Analysis and Affirmation” and other writing studies scholarship like Rosanne Carlo’s “Countering Institutional Success Stores: Outlaw Emotions in the Literacy Narrative” and “Storytelling as Anti-Ableist Activism: Using Disabled Graduate Student Narratives to Reexamine Accessibility in Higher Education” by Millie Hizer, Meredith Persin, and Megan Bronson, alongside my independent study reading materials, from which I read chapters from bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress. I wanted to develop an assignment that engaged in discussion about education, using scholarship from writing studies to inform it, to acknowledge students’ prior knowledge and experiences about education and learning.
LW: I really enjoyed a lot of things in this course. I think, though, the most meaningful to me were the three Writing Concept Maps. On the first night of class, we created these maps with key terms we identified regarding writing. I think my first map had like seven terms in it that were all connected in some way. We revisited this map at Midterms after we had been studying teaching writing intensely for a few weeks, and by that point my map had been simplified a little, but still had a handful of terms. But by the time we created our final key terms maps for the final portfolio, my map was very simple. After reading, annotating, and analyzing work from my classmates and other scholars, I realized that to me, writing is just a way of interacting with, mirroring, and crafting community. My final map was just a big circle with the word “Community” and a smaller circle within that with the word “writing.”
Can you describe the goal and process of your final project, a comprehensive portfolio of the work completed in class?
LS: My goal for the final portfolio was to develop the materials necessary for the TAP application. Beyond that, I also wanted to create a visually appealing and rhetorically moving artifact of my time in WRD 540 and what I learned. My process was to compile the necessary projects, like an original assignment design, teaching philosophy, writing concept maps, responses to student feedback, reflections, and more into Digication with a relatively easy to use user-interface and then compose the visual elements like backgrounds, typefaces, colors, and photos.
RN: My primary goal with my final project was to develop a teaching philosophy that continued the threads of the previous education and pedagogical philosophies I’d written for previous classes. I knew that there were concepts from these previous iterations that I definitely wanted to keep, while also building in the new ideas I’d learned from this course. The philosophy to me is like a promise to praxis – a commitment to the theories and practices that will guide our work as teachers. It was also a way for me to acknowledge those who have already done so much in the field of writing studies and bring them into conversation with scholars from other disciplines.
My process for the final project was really messy because as I mentioned, I am a neurodivergent disabled student and process is one of the things that I personally continue to struggle with. I kept getting distracted by the affordances and limitations of the Digication platform, wanting the colors to look a certain way and being frustrated by the way the navigation bar looks. One thing I’ve learned about myself though is that I appreciate having examples or models to work off of, so using the samples that Erin provided alongside the instruction sheets, I made a checklist of steps involved in completing the portfolio. From breaking down the response to sample feedback into mini steps (read the sample work, respond to it, annotate the response, reflect on the experience, repeat for each type of sample work) to prioritizing starting the class observation report over perfecting my literacy narrative again, I had to create strategies that helped me get things done.
LW: Because I knew I wanted to apply to TAP, the goal of my final portfolio project for me was to really solidify my perception and approach to teaching First Year Writing. The portfolio included my concept maps, my feedback to sample student work, a classroom observation report, my teaching philosophy, and my original assignment design with an annotated bibliography. Most of these pieces I had already begun for earlier assignments, so the process of assembling the portfolio was largely one of refinement and expansion on existing work. I am most proud of my original assignment design, which was a comic about where one of the student’s identities was challenged or affirmed during their first week at DePaul with a voluntary “symposium” at the end to give students the opportunity to share their work and really build a learning community.
If you’re willing, would you make your final portfolio public and share the link?
LS: The link to my portfolio is: https://depaul.digication.com/leo-swearingens-final-teaching-portfolio
RN: Yeah! Here’s the link, https://depaul.digication.com/reina-540-portfolio/home/published. The password for non-DePaul users is “reinateaching”