- by Amanda Wray
UNC Asheville’s writing program teaches approximately 676 students a year in our first year writing course (LANG 120). Through this course, we engage roughly 75% of the student body at some point during their tenure at our liberal arts university. We build our courses around a common set of student learning objectives focused on developing critical and creative thinking abilities, conducting and using academic research productively, building information literacy, and constructing new knowledge by writing for a variety of rhetorical situations. Our teaching faculty hold a wide range of graduate degrees (including MFAs, professional writers, theologians, rhetoricians, compositionists, and literature specialists), which results in a breadth of approaches to achieving the aims of LANG 120, each section reflecting unique learning experiences, themes, and rhetorical projects.
Cynn Chadwick, for example, relies heavily on a workshop model of teaching, holding thirty-minute conferences with individual students multiple times during the semester in order to work more intimately on craft and knowledge-formation. She builds group-based projects into her class in several ways. First, she asks students to read and study the rhetorical conventions of comics before they collaboratively create a comic to be presented to class. Additionally, Chadwick develops research labs that involve students meeting together in the library to work on collecting, annotating, and writing bibliographies. Students then produce a photo narrative project where they share their research findings during final exams.
Brian Graves emphasizes a “rhetorical perspective” in his LANG 120 courses. A central question that drives the course readings, discussions, activities, and projects is: How might critical attention to language—in context, as a toolbox of choices, and as an element of what and how we think—help us to participate more effectively, ethically, and meaningfully in our public discourse? To this end, Graves crafts projects that allow students to engage in genuine inquiry, dealing with real questions that matter to them. Students write personal narratives (focused on themselves as writers and learners) and rhetorical analyses of a public discourse text. Graves works to integrate attention to style (with the hope that playing with ways of saying things can make the writing class more pleasurable), critical thinking (as a reflective investigation of students’ and their audience’s assumptions), and contemplative practices (as a means of developing students’ capacities for listening, attention, and focus).
Dee James offers a portfolio-based class designed to help writers develop whatever skills they bring to the classroom. Her class focuses on searching for and developing ideas to write about and on revision as a means of sharpening and clarifying communication. This means students write a lot: in almost every class students write informally for the first ten minutes; they follow a blog of their choice and share responses to that blog; and they do a good bit of reflective and analytical writing. In addition, formal assignments exist, including annotated bibliographies and academic research papers coupled with research narratives that blend narrative techniques with research. In short, students write a variety of pieces for an array of communication situations, they get as much feedback as possible, and then revise, revise, revise. At mid-term and at the end of the course, students select pieces that demonstrate their development as writers according to the Student Learning Outcomes the program has articulated as well as articulate the processes that have helped them achieve their writing goals.
Anne Jansen organizes her LANG 120 course around the theme of Monsters (specifically zombies and vampires). This semester, she is teaching it as a film studies course where they look at contemporary films and talk about monsters as representations of cultural anxieties. Course texts include films, a writing guide (They Say, I Say), critical essays, and some foundational texts on how to write about and analyze films. Students complete an annotated bibliography, a research proposal, two formal academic essays (one shorter, one longer and requiring library research), and a less formal presentation on the role of writing or monsters (their choice) in contemporary life (they’re required to conduct interviews and rehearse their presentations, ultimately presenting to their classmates). Jansen tries to emphasize the idea that writing is not an act that is / should be / has to be completed in isolation, but is instead about engaging in a “conversation” with peers, scholars, and “regular” people. She believes the success of her class rests on the relevance of the theme and texts to students’ everyday lives as well as the idea that looking at movies can be an exercise in critical thinking. Also, who doesn’t want to talk about monsters?
Jessica Pisano builds service-learning experiences into her courses, focusing in a most explicit way on community engagement. Students choose a topic that they are passionate about as the focus of their writing, research, and service for the semester. Cultivating and sustaining relationships with a variety of community partners is a time-intensive endeavor, but such labor ensures that the students’ required twenty hours of service during the semester is equally productive for community partners and for students as they actively develop their writing, research, and critical thinking skills.
Erica Abrams-Locklear aims to teach students how to do good research and to communicate what they have learned through writing. She encourages students to select paths of inquiry that interest them and to continually revise their research questions as they gather new information about their topics. Students learn how to search catalogs and databases, as well as the ins and outs of discipline-specific citation methods. She assigns prompts that require students to put their sources in conversation with one another since doing so helps students organize what can seem like disparate information when writing research papers.
Amanda Wray’s LANG 120 curriculum asks students to invest in their lived experiences as a research tool and place for inquiry and critical thinking. Students engage in regular mindfulness practices throughout the semester, presenting to the class a monthly zine of reflection about their experiences. Formal assignments include a rhetorical analysis of a text, place, or visual that the student has encountered as a public discourse and a written research-based essay on a topic of their choice (with a proposal and annotated bibliography), which is repurposed into a multi-modal public argument for the university community.
Amanda Wray is an Assistant Professor at University of North Carolina – Asheville. She earned her PhD in Rhetoric, Composition and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Her research interests involve oral history, feminism, public scholarship, rhetorical practices of consciousness, visual rhetoric, professional writing, and creative nonfiction. She serves as faculty advisor for Roc(ky) the Mic Slam Poetry Organization and the Feminist Collective at UNCA, which is a student organization open to any student interested in equality, social activism, and/or feminist networking. She also works regularly with Undergraduate Research students conducting ethnographic, community-based, and/or activist-based research.