Make it A Living, Changing Thing

Two questions frame how I look to broaden ideas about academic writing. How can we make room for language difference in academic discourse without marginalizing students’ identities; and what are the ways undergraduate students connect to the complex processes of research? Writing and research should be more than just merely processes students engage as an endless series of benchmarks; they should be events that engage us in the moment.

In my first year writing course the move to event-based pedagogy starts with looking at how writers respond to current social issues by watching a Black Mirror episode about a futuristic technology dystopia, or reading a range of writing including trenchant lyric poetry like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Students talk about how the genres of scholarly writing can be flexible, that the complex problems of our day may require the multivalent tools of science fiction or poetry as well as all our language resources to make our rhetoric resonate with readers or create change somewhere. In a similar way, I want students to experience research that opens to multiple, often erased voices and unconventional methodologies by using archives, artifacts and art galleries as well as traditional databases as resources. By pursuing their own and others’ personal connections to language and research, students leave my class with a more empowered and more critical relationship to language as embedded in historical, social and political networks.

This recognition of writing as diverse, material and historicized best emerges in a flexible dialogic classroom that blurs boundaries between school and the social world. Students in my first year writing class write about and research the rhetorical character of languages in vernacular and traditional texts, in social media and journalism, and in the visual languages of film, art and advertising. Another way this porous classroom boundary becomes legible is by using social media writing for critical engagement with issues. Students use familiar social writing spaces as annexes to their academic spaces and reflect in an Instagram-based journal on the ways language negotiates those spaces. For critical pedagogues the word is the world, and while as a scholar I may see the ways a critical study of social media literacies facilitates this Freirian discussion of the dialectic between language, institutionalized power and students’ lives, for their purposes, students become more deeply knowledgable about how their social media language shapes and is shaped by their academic and offline worlds.

With this sense of contact between the educational institution and the larger world, my classroom is a space for developing the dispositions of research and academic writing, and grappling with important issues through designing questions and completing longer writing assignments. A progression of classroom-based projects and writing exercises prioritizes a disposition of fluidity toward these academic skills by beginning with personal writing, such as literacy and research narratives in which students see their scholarly work as part of a continuum that is ever-evolving and growing more complex. Class time is prioritized as work time split between collaborative research and debate, and writing microthemes, summaries, annotated bibliographies and other exercises that challenge student writers to actively develop the habits of asking good questions and posing thoughtful inquiries. When they end the semester by engaging in archival research, they put all these habits of thinking into use as they design projects and outline inquiries that grow organically out of reading historical documents of student life at their university.

Throughout the semester students comment on and share their discoveries and progress with Twitter and Instagram posts, practicing condensing and restating their arguments and thoughts. Recently, one first year writing class had a concrete demonstration of the way digital literacies easily lead to a sense of writing as an event when one student’s Instagram journal received a comment from Raymond Santana, one of the young men once known as The Central Park Five, a now-exonerated man who works with The Innocence Project. When the student revealed her discovery, the class erupted in excited conversation. I raced to record on the whiteboard the questions they raised for further research: Why do you think he responded to you? How do hashtags connect my words to other people’s words? What are some other ways we create communities in the wide open internet? In this one moment the idea of writing as a process jumped to, as Ben Harley describes, “writing as an event that transforms those who engage in it” (Digital Pedagogy Lab). This is how I want students to experience their writing: as connected to the world, as acting on culture and changing in real time, as consequential. I want them to understand these things about the language they use and consume so that they will be more critically engaged students and citizens.