In any writing classroom, my objective is to make the most of students’ existing knowledge, language, and experience to make progress in our time together. I do this using abolitionist pedagogical methods that simultaneously build student confidence and reinforce student competence. Because existing knowledge intertwines deeply with confidence and competence, in my classrooms I model and facilitate dialogues around texts, including those composed by student writers. The briefest description of my teaching philosophy, then, might be “student-centered.” This admirably concise but unfortunately abstract principle takes a different form in a developmental writing class than in a second-semester composition course than in an advanced creative writing workshop. For this reason, I’ll offer five assertions below describing the concrete forms of this approach in my classrooms: 

I offer students curated choices for their reading and writing tasks.

First, I offer students choices. They are given a small range of main texts to choose from, and I support this reading with research-based assignments to deepen and develop concepts through sourcework. By explicitly teaching reading skills like previewing a text, finding and assessing the reliability of secondary material, working with textual features in peer-reviewed writing (ie: abstracts, subheadings, keywords, and bibliographies), my students make informed choices before collaborating on reading and discussion tasks in groups at least partly of their design, during which they can try out and choose various roles. 

I prepare students for complexity by using community writing practices to develop their confidence and competence.

Second, I design for increased complexity. Like the increasingly complex reading tasks described above, the writing tasks I offer students vary from low-stakes, generative, in-class writing to higher stakes, more formalized, structured academic writing. Focused freewrites are a regular feature of my classroom, and drawing on the facilitation models of leading thinkers on community writing, I encourage students to work gently and generously with this new writing. This approach, like the method of contract grading discussed later, aims to encourage risk in academic writing. More advanced tasks to develop competency and confidence while increasing the complexity of their expressions involve full-class paragraph workshops, sentence pastiche, source-mixing, translanguaging, and multimodal composing. We also play with academic genres, including work with parodic models like Kate Vieira’s “Fieldwork with a Five-Year-Old: A Summative Report” and Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.”

I design with differentiation in mind for students historically excluded from academic discourse, and for a range of digital literacies.

Third, in addition to offering choice and gradually embracing complexity, I design my classroom with the awareness that not every student comes to college completely comfortable with academic discourse or with the newest digital tools. I myself arrived at my own public college lacking much comfort with either. To this end, in addition to offering choice, I carefully scaffold assignments in ways that go beyond the mere staging of drafts. In my classroom, scaffolding involves tracking and formatively assessing even the “little” assignments teachers give (to summarize or annotate a text, to share-out notes of a group’s discussion, to reply to a peer’s blog post or draft essay, etc). Informed by thinking from critical disability studies, I design class activities and homework assignments to make the most of our temporal resources—time together in the classroom, time between drafts, time away from the shared work, imagined time as a reflective space. (“What more would you have done if you’d had another week for this piece?”) Finally, I reflexively invoke the various technologies in our classroom, from the Zoom chat to the moveable desk, and I invite students over the semester to reflect on how those sites have changed through our various iterations of their use. What can student-writers do with the Zoom chat? The technology of the moveable desk?

I demystify the central literacy processes of academic writing, including its assessment.

Choice, complexity, and differentiation frame the most important work in any classroom of mine: the demystification of the central acts of academic literacy. This work emerges out of less-formal literacy tasks, including social reading in Hypothes.is, the composition of accessible, multimodal blog posts, and the critical use of open internet secondary sources like Wikipedia and Genius, as a means of preparing students to identify, listen in on, and join the ongoing conversations in the library databases. I also emphasize that reading works differently in a range of minds. In particular, I note that methods of reading multimodally, with sound and text working together to increase engagement, comprehension, and pleasure.  As much time as we spend on “good reading,” for first-year writers who sometimes assume the first words they read on the page are the first words the writer wrote, the demystification process extends to writing. “Writing is a practice,” I often say, “And writers make decisions about how it’s practiced.” That short-and-sweet philosophy informs what I design to be constructive and transparent peer and, importantly, instructor assessment of that work. 

Assessment is where these philosophical niceties most materially intersect with student experiences. Required courses like first year composition often use the blunt language of grades to transmit their most essential intentions. In this, I’m not so different from a traditional instructor with a draconian late policy. My own assessment policies, particularly contract grading and collaborative rubrics, encourage risk, reward growth, and celebrate voice. In the instructions to nearly all my assignments, I suggest possibilities for play with modality, voice, sourcework, and language. My assessment practices are open and transparent, designed carefully to include not just a grading contract at the start of the semester, but at each formal writing assignment the composition of a collaborative rubric composed following peer editing sessions. It’s an adjustment for some, but most students leap at the chance to write something meaningful to themselves for an attentive, authentic audience of 28. 

Choice, complexity, differentiation, and transparency all converge with the aim of guiding students towards transferring what they have learned to future endeavors—not just in their next classes here at Lehman, but in their professional lives and in the communities they are commuting from even as students.  That’s the final element of my teaching philosophy: evidence of potential student transfer. 

I measure my effectiveness through evidence that students might transfer their learning from my classroom to their future efforts–whether in college, at work, or alongside their neighbors.

It is a high standard, and one to which I am ultimately holding myself, not my students. Why would composition be required if it weren’t essential? Of course, I want to see students carry over these skills into advanced classes. But just as students bring their knowledge from home and their neighborhood into the classroom on our first day, after our last day I want my now-former students to find a way to meaningfully export that language, those concepts, from what was our classroom and into their presents and futures, where those ideas and the student who shaped them can truly become their own. 

As much as I want my students in my writing class to understand access, to experience access, and to benefit from access, what I really want is for them to redistribute access, to create it for others.