Course Spotlight – WRD 309: Writing a Socially-Just DePaul

Dr. Erin Workman, WRD professor and Director of First-Year Writing, was recently awarded the Thomas and Carol Dammrich Faculty Innovation Award for her course design of WRD 309: Writing a Socially-Just DePaul. This undergraduate course will be offered for the first time in Spring Quarter 2023 and will culminate in a conference to share its work and findings with the larger DePaul community.

Read on for Dr. Workman’s insights on the course, and find additional logistics here.

Can you tell us a bit about this course?

This special topics course on writing a socially-just DePaul will provide an inclusive learning community for studying social justice discourses in higher education; learning from DePaul students, faculty, staff, and alumni about their social justice efforts; conducting research that reveals, critiques, and/or aims to change discriminatory institutional structures and policies; and organizing and sharing our work at the end of the quarter in a conference for the larger DePaul community. With support from the Thomas and Carol Dammrich Faculty Innovation Award, the course will provide the following hands-on research opportunities:

  • participating in an expert-led consultation/workshop on research methods and methodologies
  • engaging in a workshop with diversity practitioners
  • developing and funding qualitative studies
  • presenting original research in a culminating conference, symposium, installation, or exhibit

What inspired you to create this course?

Lots of things, but I’ll highlight just a few.

My interest in institutional critique and change began in one of the first English M.A. courses I took at the University of Maine with Dylan Dryer—Rhetorical Production of the Everyday—a course he described as follows: “my research and pedagogical agendas are to emphasize the material conditions of composing practices: the spaces, genres, resources, atmospheres, personalities, and lived experiences of writing, and to try to do something about the inequities of access inherent in all of the above (emphasis added).” Our final project was an institutional critique informed by rhetorical and sociological methods and methodologies for studying and intervening in problematic institutional policies and practices that fly below the radar, and I’ve incorporated some of the texts we read and aspects of the final project into WRD 309.

More recently, I directed a graduate-level independent study on disability rhetorics, and that work has informed my revision of courses I regularly teach (e.g., Teaching Writing) as well as my design of new courses like WRD 550 last spring and WRD 309 in the upcoming quarter. Engaging more with scholarship on disability, accessibility, and ableism—especially as disability intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class—has contoured my research on writing development and pedagogy as well, such that my teaching and research continuously inform one another. Concurrently with developing WRD 550, I drafted a chapter for a forthcoming edited collection, Improvisations: Methods and Methodologies in Lifespan Writing Research, entitled “Centering Positionality in Lifespan Writing Research through Institutional and Auto/Ethnographic Methodologies.” As the title suggests, I take up Institutional Ethnography and Autoethnography as methodologies for centering positionality and embodiment in lifespan writing research, emphasizing the social justice work these methodologies can enable when taken up in research and teaching.

More generally, this course was inspired by DePaul’s Vincentian Mission and the social justice work taking place in units across the university with the end goal of mapping where on campus sustainable efforts toward social justice are happening, where they aren’t happening, where they should be happening, and how we can collectively take up the Vincentian question of “what must be done” to write a socially-just DePaul.

What types of projects will your students craft?

The first major project is a multimodal positionality narrative in which learners will critically reflect on and explore their intersectional identities, cultural literacies, and rhetorical traditions by experimenting with autoethnography, critical race theory counterstorytelling, and/or arts-based research methodologies. Having carefully explored our identities and positionalities, we will then shift our gaze to the local institutional contexts and exigencies meaningful to us, using critical research methodologies like institutional ethnography, institutional critique, rhetorical reclamation, and/or community-based research to develop Social Justice projects geared toward institutional change at DePaul. This work will be shared with wider DePaul community in a culminating mini-conference, symposium, or installation/exhibit.

Which topics/events/authors are you particularly looking forward to highlighting?

I’m most excited about engaging authors and texts that are directly connected to DePaul, including an M.A. thesis by WGS alumna and current faculty member in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies, Victoria Agunod, on Searching for Sustainable, Intergenerational, and Multiracial Coalitions on the Neoliberal Campus: A Case Study; excerpts from Women’s Center Director Ann Russo’s Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power; and selections from alumna Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot.

In your perspective, how does this course fit into larger conversations about equity and justice at DePaul?

As I noted above, there are many social justice efforts happening at the university level as well as in departments, programs, centers, colleges, and units across DePaul, and this course aims to map those initiatives and their intersections to develop a holistic view of equity and justice at DePaul. Understanding where social justice work is and isn’t happening and how we can use rhetorical and sociological method/ologies for critiquing and changing institutions will enable us to have informed conversations about social justice and to enact changes necessary for making DePaul an equitable and inclusive learning space for all.