Category: Spring 2021

Takeaways from the First-Year Writing Spring Symposium

by Harold Ramdass

The Baruch College Writing Program Spring Symposium 2021, Countering Monolingualism: Translingual & Anti-Racist Pedagogy, presents 3 half-hour sessions on cultivating a pedagogically inclusive approach and practice responsive to our diverse students’ unique linguistic strengths that should be recognized and developed to better achieve our goals in first-year composition classes.

Continue reading “Countering Monolingualism: Translingual & Anti-Racist Pedagogy” →

Challenges and successes in teaching T sections online

ELL (English Language Learner) Director Kamal Belmihoub met with two Writing Across the Curriculum Fellows to discuss his own process of moving online, getting the most out of synchronous sessions, and adapting to the needs of the online experience.

Watch the video or read the transcript below—

Continue reading “Interview with Kamal Belmihoub, ELL Director” →

Multimodal Assignments in the Time of COVID-19

by Thomas Watters

As a composition instructor concerned with how students make meaning across a variety of technologies, I’m seeking to leverage my students’ increasingly enforced engagement with digital platforms during this unusual time to develop a sense of how “composition” can be conceptualized alongside more traditionally, essay-based course assignments. This is why I am invested in implementing a version of the relatively popular (at Baruch) multimodal or multi-media Re/Mix or Remediation assignment in my current 2150 course.

Continue reading “Mapping Our Digital Enclosures” →

Some notes on accommodation and course design

by Agnes Eshak

As I write this, I’ve already missed the submission deadline. This post should have been completed a week ago, primed for the PiP newsletter to land in your mailbox. Missing deadlines isn’t new for me; I’ve missed many before this one, and I’ll probably miss many more (although the stress over it never goes away). But this isn’t just about poor planning, it’s that living with a chronic illness means plans often don’t work out in the first place.  

Continue reading “Accessible Teaching” →

An online writing movement 

by Damele Elliott Collier

I began the Our Lives Matter movement as a freewriting assignment in a First-Year Writing classroom at Baruch College. It embodies the idea that we achieve liberation, and consequently an improved society, when we develop the individual, as well as when we form a coalition of people with the common goal of liberation and social uplift. Our Lives Matter encourages students to ask themselves a simple-yet-complex question: Why do their lives matter?

Continue reading “Digital Interventions: Our Lives Matter” →

Helping students find and narrow down a topic

by Lisa Blankenship

Staseis refer to questions you can ask to find where you agree and disagree with an audience on a topic, helping you know where you need to begin and what you need to focus on in your arguments. Stasis refers to the point where things stop, or where you disagree with someone. As rhetorical scholars Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee explain, “The most satisfactory modern equivalent for stasis seems to be the term issue, which we define as the point about which all parties to an argument can agree to disagree: this is what is at issue” (72).

Continue reading “Stasis Theory and Research” →

Somewhere between text and email, but better than either

by Christopher Campbell

You may have caught wind of Slack in recent months but decided that adding yet another platform to your online presence could overcomplicate your course. However, despite the fact that yes, this is an additional platform, I’d like to explain how and why I’ve implemented and benefited from using Slack in the last year.

Continue reading “The Case for Slack” →

An interactive tutorial

by Seth Graves

An interactive guide for setting up a Hypothesis account, practice annotating content, and create an annotation group for a course section.

Continue reading “Getting Started with Hypothesis” →

Collaborative writing and conferencing

By Lisa Blankenship

I’ve used Google Docs and Google Drive for more than ten years for a number of things in writing classes, some of which I’ll share here, along with a practical section on getting up and running with these platforms.

Continue reading “Using Google Docs in Class” →