As registration begins for Winter Quarter 2023, the WRD blog is excited to showcase several upcoming course offerings, beginning with Dr. Erin Workman’s graduate course, WRD 540: Teaching Writing. Here, Dr. Workman offers her insights into this year’s installment of the class and what students can look forward to.
What has changed in the Teaching Writing course since its last blog Spotlight?
A lot! WRD 540 was last offered in-person-only in WQ20, and our finals week meeting was moved online in accordance with the university’s response to the pandemic. In WQ21, WRD 540 met synchronously online, and in WQ22, WRD 540 met in the Flex modality, with half attendance in person and half via Zoom. Teaching the course in new modalities and with some new/only slightly familiar technologies was challenging, but it also pushed me to be more explicitly attentive to accessibility, both in terms of my own course design and, in the upcoming WQ23 quarter, as a key concept for the course. [There are] new accommodations and access statement featured at the beginning of the syllabus, explicit and sustained attention to linguistic justice and antiracist pedagogy, and reduction in number and cost of required course texts.
While I typically revise the reading list each year to add recently published texts or to change out a text that didn’t work in the way that I’d hoped, comparing the WQ19 and 22 reading lists reveals quite a bit of change with 26 new reading assignments, 17 of which are attentive to a range of cultural rhetorics, rhetorical traditions, and literacies; offer historical and praxis-driven approaches to linguistic diversity and justice; engage antiracist and accessible pedagogical practices; and center students, student activism, and student agency both in and out of the classroom.
What are some of the theories or concepts you find most meaningful in this course?
That’s a good question, but also a difficult one to answer because I find them all meaningful! If I had to choose a few concepts, I would say learning incomes, linguistic justice, and writing. Most students are familiar enough with learning outcomes based on their prior experiences in the classroom, but learning incomes is a less familiar concept, one that centers students and values the experiences, knowledges, abilities, practices, processes, languages, values, beliefs, identities, discourses, etc. they bring to the classroom, figuring this as a valuable foundation on which students must continue to build in order to achieve the institution’s learning outcomes and their own goals for writing and learning about writing.
Linguistic Justice has become more prominent in composition studies scholarship following the July 2020 publication of the CCCC/NCTE’s This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! and April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Building from Elaine Richardson’s (2004) argument “that when ‘Black students [are] taught to hate Black speech, [it] indirectly [teaches] them to hate themselves’ (p. 161),” Baker-Bell writes, “This is the dehumanization that Linguistic Justice is concerned with and the problem that Anti-Black Linguistic Racism helps to name in an effort to show how Black children are marginalized, disdained, and disregarded in schools and educational spaces in and through their language” (p. 19). Outlining three approaches to language pedagogy, two of which have been and still are prevalent in writing instruction—eradicationist language pedagogies and respectability language pedagogies—Baker-Bell positions her antiracist Black Language pedagogy as an alternative and offers ten framing ideas for her approach.
Lastly, while writing might seem such an obvious choice as to not warrant explicit and sustained attention — we all know what writing is, right? — it’s that false familiarity and unexamined/unquestioned assumptions about writing that make it such a crucial concept to learn about, reflect on, and discuss. While WRD MA students who have taken Proseminar tend to be familiar with Linda Adler-Kassner and Liz Wardle’s Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts for Writing Studies, particularly their meta-concept that Writing is Both an Activity and Subject of Study, students from Education, English, and other units or disciplinary backgrounds are not. Recognizing that writing is a subject of study means understanding that there are entire disciplines/subfields that conduct empirical research on, theorize, and study writing, writers, writing development, and writing practices, processes, strategies. A central learning outcome for WRD 540 is the ability to “articulate a teaching philosophy informed by current Writing Studies research, theories, and best practices for teaching writing” and to “apply current theories and principles of writing pedagogy to the production and analysis of pedagogical materials,” respectively. Thus, acquiring and developing conceptual knowledge about writing is imperative for students planning to pursue a career in teaching writing.
Are there any major projects that students complete in this course?
Yes! There are several projects, but here I’ll focus on the midterm writing portfolio and the final teaching portfolio, each of which include some major and minor writing assignments and activities. For the first weeks, students focus on articulating their own understanding and conceptions of writing by reflecting on their literacy experiences, writing process and practices, and beliefs about and values for writing, and this unit culminates with the Midterm Writing Portfolio.
The second five weeks shift our attention to more practical pedagogical issues, such as supporting students’ writing development and processes, responding to and assessing student writing, being mindful of the language ideologies guiding response and assessment, designing and scaffolding writing assignments, and crafting a course and syllabus that are attentive to and informed by scholarship on antiracism and accessibility.
Who should take Teaching Writing?
In the past, students have come to WRD 540 from a range of backgrounds, including WRD MA students, adult learners from the School of New Learning (now called the School for Continuing and Professional Studies), MA students from the English Literature and Publishing and Writing and Publishing programs, graduate students from the College of Education, and students from the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Interdisciplinary Self-Designed graduate program. One quarter, a tenured faculty member from another department who was interested in strengthening their approach to helping students in their discipline become better disciplinary writers participated as a fully enrolled student in WRD 540. As this list illustrates, students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds with a variety of interests connected to writing and the teaching of writing should find the course valuable. I encourage anyone who thinks they may be interested in teaching writing, whether it be first-year writing or writing in a particular discipline, to take the course because the more diverse students and their interests are, the richer the class conversations become.
Why should students take Teaching Writing?
For students who are certain about pursuing a career in teaching writing, WRD 540 is an essential course, one that serves as a prerequisite for the Teaching Apprenticeship Program (TAP) and the Teaching English in Two-Year Colleges Graduate Certificate, both of which present opportunities for graduate students to either serve as instructor of record for WRD 103: Composition and Rhetoric I or to intern with a participating faculty member in a local two-year college. Aside from the valuable knowledge, skills, and practices that WRD 540 students develop and acquire, Teaching Writing also provides structured support and instruction in composing documents frequently required for applying to college-level teaching positions, such as a teaching philosophy informed by current composition studies scholarship, sample writing assignment and activities, and, in some cases, responses to student writing. Regardless of one’s intended career path, students who take 540 can expect to learn a lot about writing, writing development, writing processes and practices, writing technologies – and about themselves as writers. Even for students who have no plans to pursue teaching writing, the course offers a valuable opportunity for recognizing and challenging common misconceptions of writing, reflecting on and strengthening one’s own writing processes and practices, and trying out new approaches to writing and composing in the current moment.