I chose SOC 334, Urban Sociology in a Global Perspective as my Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) course. I had taught it the semester before, and already had some ideas about what assignments would benefit from WAC principles. For a few semesters now, I have been feeling ambivalent about the traditional research paper. I like that it introduces students to the norms of the discipline, and asks them to explore what other scholars and experts in the subject have thought about it. But I also sensed that students are unaware of this larger vision, struggling with topics to focus on, grappling with indecipherable research articles, and getting frustrated with the whole process. The final papers I usually received were unorganized, did not have a central point or argument, and were oftentimes packed with ‘data dumps’(1). My students were not learning how to engage with sources, let alone producing a highly analytical and organized research paper.
So I shifted my assignments to incorporate more creative elements, where I called upon students’ ability to connect course concepts to their personal lives. However, I still needed to teach my students about the usefulness of engaging in a discourse community. In other words, I wanted my students to both think about how they could apply course content to their own lives, but also play the role of expert by engaging with and building on work already done by other scholars.
WAC allowed me to think about writing as a tool students could use to think sociologically. For me, thinking sociologically includes both imagining yourself and your life as part of a larger social pattern, as well as thinking of sociology as a discourse community where knowledge is contested through engagement with previous work. Given this frame, I wanted to explore how writing could help my students think sociologically, both as an individual and as an expert. More precisely, I wanted to help students bring together sources and how they speak to each other (discourse community), think about credibility, and connect their personal experiences to course content in a meaningful way.
A little bit about the class I decided to use for my WAC experience: SOC 334 is an upper-level Sociology course, and is centered around the global urban experience. Students learn about basic urban sociological processes, the significance of urban planning, globalization and corporatization of urban places and experiences, the emergence of global cities, the experiences of urban slum dwellers, gentrification, and about the movement for the right to the city. The class met once a week for about 3 hours, and 28 students were registered for the course. The core writing requirements of the course included weekly reflection posts on Blackboard and a class project divided up into 3 parts. I also had students do a lot of low-stakes in-class writing, or small take-home assignments, inspired by recommendations from the WAC seminars. I envisioned that students would do 3 types of writing in the course: low-stakes summative writing (through weekly reflections), low-stakes creative writing (through letters and in-class activities), and high-stakes analytic and argumentative writing (through the 3-part class project).
In this portfolio, I have attached samples of student work from all of the above writing categories. Students ended up writing a lot, but also in various genres. Letter-writing really helped the students connect their personal stories to the stories of people we read about, and gave them a chance to reflect and contemplate. Writing can be a powerful tool for reflection(2), which in turn can help with incorporating new information. The letters students wrote to me, or their best friend, or their favorite character in a book we read, all showed me that they were actively thinking and connecting information in new and exciting ways. It may be a good idea to make this into a more core part of the course requirements, but on the other hand, it may have worked well precisely because it was low-stakes and not graded.
WAC also inspired me to think about in-class writing as another low-stakes tool to get the students to think through writing. Unlike letter-writing, which is usually better for reflective thinking, I used in-class writing to practice more formative thinking. It allowed students to center their thoughts and focus on the material for the day. In this way, it was almost a meditative exercise before we started class discussions. I coupled this with think-pair-share techniques, which led to many fruitful and engaged discussions. I also used in-class writing to encourage note-taking, as we did while watching the documentary My Brooklyn. I found that, with the right guiding questions, students were ready to take meticulous notes and were even able to construct insightful summaries. An added bonus was that, after taking notes and thinking actively about the documentary, students were able to fully and precisely articulate the main arguments from the documentary, leading to a deep discussion on the history and processes of gentrification.
In the past, I’ve had students write summaries of readings every week before the class session, but WAC allowed me to think about this process in a more meaningful way. I encouraged students to think of this as a low-stakes assignment (though it was still graded), and told them explicitly that I was not looking for spelling, grammar or writing skills, but would be looking for thoughtfulness and understanding. I changed the requirements for this task, and pushed students to integrate their thoughts about all of the texts instead of just summarizing one or two. Many students rose up to the challenge and accomplished this, and others even went further to integrate readings from different weeks or from other classes. I also gave clear prompts (the same for each week), which helped address the task and routinized it as well.
In future classes, I would like to experiment with making this into more of a discussion, where students can respond to each other or themselves (after they’ve learned more during class). However, these weekly posts accomplished the goal of having students do at least some reading, and write down some preliminary thoughts about the texts. I commented on students’ posts for the first couple of weeks, which encouraged them to keep going, and indicated to them that I was actively checking and grading them. This, in addition to weekly scheduled reminders helped increase the response rate from previous semesters.
The high-stakes project for the course was divided up into 3 parts: the first part was a call to brainstorm and put down some initial thoughts about a city they may wish to explore. The second part asked students to gather sources and build themes for their syllabus. And the third and final part asked students to finalize the syllabus, and defend their choices for themes and readings to a fictive chair of the Sociology department (based on the global cities scholar Saskia Sassen). I initially thought about this project in my Fall 2016 course, but this time, with a lot of help from my WAC Fellow Gabby Kappes, I scaffolded it, wrote very specific and detailed instructions, created templates, and introduced other creative elements.
Gabby and I constructed very specific goals for this project, and made those goals clear to the students: learning how to locate, summarize and synthesize information on any object of study (in this case, a global city); learning how to develop a central argument about their object of study based on the information they gathered or their particular interests; and presenting that central argument and convincing various stakeholders that this argument makes sense. By clarifying the goals in this way, I focused on giving students the appropriate tools for those goals. So, for example, since one goal was to locate information, I spent some time in class discussing and practicing how to locate credible sources. Class time was also allotted for students to find sources, as Gabby and I conferenced with each student about their research.
Students struggled with trying to figure out which non-academic sources could be considered credible enough. But after practicing multiple times, most did find good, interesting, and credible sources to eventually include in their syllabus. The earlier drafts showcased in this portfolio show signs of that struggle. However, by the time they submitted their final draft (part 3), most students were confident in their choices, as indicated by their final cover letters where they wrote why they included certain texts in their syllabus. Overall, I observed that the students took ownership of their object of study (a global city), researched it thoroughly but also focused within the literature of the field, and were able to successfully articulate why it was important to learn about that city through a sociological lens.
WAC-ifying SOC 334 gave me the opportunity to really explore the different ways in which writing can help students think sociologically. I wanted my students to connect our readings on urban sociology to their lives, but also see the bigger picture and practice being an expert themselves. By the end of the course, I witnessed students, through their written work, become increasingly confident in both areas. In fact, many went beyond the clear division of personal versus expert, and combined both aspects in their writing and thinking. WAC was a great resource for helping me help the students accomplish this higher level learning, and I look forward to using more WAC principles in future classes.
Footnotes:
(1) See John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas, 2nd edition, pg. 27. (2011)
(2) See Mary Diez, The Portfolio: Sonnet, Mirror and Map. (1994)