Composition Studies

During the pandemic, a first-year writing student named Ann picked up Animal Crossing and found something there her writing class wasn't giving her. She kept running into the gap a lot of multilingual writers know, between what she wanted to say and what landed on the page. In the game, that pressure lifted, and she found room to, in her words, "freely express" herself. She called it "a reset button."

That feeling is what Charissa Che built a whole course around. She designed Writing for Intercultural Communicative Competence for English 101 at Queensborough Community College, where students come from more than a hundred countries. T

he course runs on an idea from Claire Kramsch: the third place, a real, imagined, or online space you enter out of desire, where you stand both inside and outside other people's ways of speaking. Che takes those worlds seriously, as places where writing and identity are already happening, and asks what a first-year writing class looks like when it starts there.

Over four assignments, Che's students pick one of their own and write their way through it. The course aims at something before proficiency: whether a student can say who they are and feel like they belong. Desire, she argues, is what moves a writer.

The full course design: https://bit.ly/53-2_09
The syllabus: https://bit.ly/53-2_09_Syllabus

Most of the writing instructors Jennifer Sheppard surveyed said they would still choose to teach online or hybrid if they had the option. They also described work that had become hard to sustain.

Sheppard surveyed 98 instructors across 19 campuses in one large public university system, over the first two years of pandemic teaching. The benefits were concrete. Schedules grew more flexible, and students who'd been quiet in person finally spoke up in a chat box. So were the costs. The hours added up: 85% reported at least four extra hours a week, and nearly half put it at seven to eleven.

Three kinds of work rose at once. The course design of rebuilding writing instruction for a screen. The emotional labor of carrying students through what one instructor called teaching through trauma. And professional development to keep current, much of it uncompensated. As one participant put it: "I have worked harder than I ever have before. The amount of resources I had to shell out for instructional triage during the first year online is astronomical."

About a quarter of respondents said their best support came from colleagues, through department and writing-program presentations and regular online meetings to share experiences, approaches, and materials. Sheppard's final section argues for collaborative models that keep the same few people from carrying everything, for counting care work in how faculty are evaluated, for paying instructors for the training they're asked to complete, and for giving them real say in how they teach. The goal, she writes, is to keep what online writing instruction makes possible "without overburdening the instructors who sustain it."

What part of your teaching load has never shown up in the official record? Tell us how you're thinking about it.

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/CS_53-2