A thought, after returning from CCCC

Last week I returned from CCCC in Atlanta. As usual, after coming back from the C's, my mind was chock full of ideas, and this time was no exception. For me, going to the C's is like going to church: it refreshes me and invigorates my thinking about teaching. It makes me question why I do what I do.

The more I go to C's, the more I'm beginning to view the five-paragraph essay as a thing of the past for first-year composition students. But if it is a thing of the past, why is it so stressed in textbooks? And even, to some extent, in my own evaluation rubrics? I really need to think about answers to these questions.

In the meantime, what I decided to do is to change my major individual writing assignments for my English 0090 and 1021 students--my individual "Writing Tasks"--to incorporate more digital options. Instead of just having the assignments be fairly open-ended, what I'm going to do is give the class about 6 or so options for each Writing Task, and many (but not all) of these options will have some sort of digital writing emphasis. The purpose behind this is to remind the students that most writing these days is done digitally and/or for Internet purposes. Furthermore, the specific assignments will remind them that writing has specific purposes and specific audiences. It has to be more than just "write a narrative essay." Why? For whom?

I still will keep the "Group Technology project" (the custom books are done, so it's too late to change that now, anyway). Besides, I want to make sure that the students do something with collaboration and technology--at least one assignment like this. I'd also like to mention that the assignments for the 0090 students will be a bit more formalized than for the 1021 students: 0090 students need to learn to move from paragraphs to short essays, which (in my view) is more of a dramatic move than moving from short essays to research-based writing (which is what 1021 students do). So there's more flexibility and sophistication in terms of what 1021 students may accomplish.


I am mentioning this here because my CTL work has been so focused on assignment creation. When I return, I want to ensure that the assignment I give are creative and innovative for students, while ALSO fulfilling course objectives, and I think the changes that I'm making will fulfill that goal.