Description
Currently, in my writing courses I have an assignment called the Writer’s Journal. Students maintain a blog where they record their experiences and writing process throughout the semester. They then use that journal as primary source material for their end-of-semester reflective Autoethnography project.
In its current format, students create a Blogs@Baruch site that they host and then share as a link in a Blackboard assignment. Each week, students get a prompt that they respond to. In addition to their response, they compose a Writing Log where they describe the writing they did that week, what worked or what went well, what was hard and didn’t go well, their to-do list for the next week, where they left off/the last thing they did, and how they felt about the week, their project, or writing in general.
Currently the project is low-bandwidth and low-immediacy.
I’ve also attached the current assignment sheet for this project to this post.
Learning Goals
This writing task reflects the following course learning goals:
- Write your own texts critically
- Compose as a process
“Through recording, analyzing, and reflecting on writing, you will better understand not only your process but the components that comprise strong academic writing.”
More informally, I want students to see writing as a social process wherein they pull from multiple places and perspectives, even if that social nature doesn’t happen in real time.
Rationale
I think I do a good job of humanizing my course generally, but this aspect of the course could be stronger. This semester, I noticed that using the blog format did not foster as much engagement as I thought it would. I anticipated students being able to view each other’s blogs and give each other feedback but that didn’t happen to the degree I wanted it to. Instead, the student blogs felt and feel more like individual silos that give students space to write about their writing but not effectively communicate with each other or with me.
To change this ongoing project, I want to keep the prompts in Blogs@Baruch, but instead of asking students to create their own blogs, have them reply to a post/page on our main course blog. I’d create the prompt there and then students can reply via the comment feature.
To also encourage more interactivity, I want to create multiple avenues of participating and interacting with the prompts. Since I’ll have a synchronous session this semester, I want to create three methods for interacting with these posts:
- Before our synchronous session, students post their initial thoughts. A specific question or piece of the prompt will engage students in this activity. It will be clearly labeled “Before Synchronous Session” or “Initial Thoughts.”
- During the synchronous session students will read through their colleagues’ posts and we’ll either summarize them as a group or discuss particularly compelling posts and responses.
- After the synchronous session students will follow up by engaging with a piece of the prompt labeled “After Synchronous Session” or “Dig Deeper.” This will include the prompt for their Writing Log, but also a secondary prompt that asks them to reflect on the session or take their response one step further.
In this way students aren’t forced to “respond to two of your peers” or “comment on each other’s posts!” but instead meaningfully engage in real time and then return to their own writing. This reinforces the idea that writing is social but that the social nature of that work can be created in many ways. Likewise, it encourages students to “write their texts critically” and engage with other texts critically. They can see their colleagues’ writing develop from initial ideas to further developed drafts and note “compose as a process.”
This revision shifts the workload from pre-semester/Week 1 and individual student labor to a more equally spaced out workload that is dependent on instructor labor. Though the activity is still low-bandwidth, it does add some higher immediacy to the activity by giving us a way to engage with the Writer’s Journal in real time. I think this shift will cut down on some of what was frustrating for students (and me) at the beginning of the semester: trying determine which Baruch/CUNY accounts allow access to which tools; how to create a Blogs@Baruch site; and how to submit their links for their blog. It also reinforces the learning goals more clearly.
The current assignment sheet for the Writer’s Journal can be found here.
6 replies on “Lauren Salisbury: Writer’s Journal”
Hello Molly, You sound so adept already in the use of technology to promote writing and communication among your students. The following is thought provoking “social nature of that work can be created in many ways.” As a writer, it took me decades to recognize the social aspect of writing – sharing, conversing, publishing. Perhaps among your student writers there are others who like me were/are called to write in order to expresswhat they are feeling or thinking but are not ready to share with others..
Tonia, yes there have definitely been students resistant to sharing writing. That’s why I think it’s important to reinforce that writing that is social doesn’t necessarily have to be publication all the time. They can write privately too.
Hi Lauren!
You’re assignment sounds so cool and I love how you already incorporate Blogs@Baruch (I’m currently trying to find how I can do this for my Psychology course). I also like how you have learning goals for your assignment. I have course learning goals but I like the idea of have specific goals for my own teaching artifact. Thanks for the inspiration!
-Wiston
Wiston, yeah I really like doing LG/LOs for each major project. I don’t know how much students pay attention to them other than just to see it as part of the assignment sheet, but it helps me align my content and remind me of the goals I have too. At times it’s helped me cut out assignments that aren’t doing what I want them to.
Hi Lauren,
I really liked your idea of providing different avenues for interactivity instead of the typical “respond to two of your peers” or “comment on each other’s posts!” which might not be as meaningful. Thanks for the inspiration.
-P
I remember you talking about this activity during the breakout sessions at our first webinar. I thought it was a great idea. Thanks for sharing the details of it here. It sounds like students in a writing course would engage with this. I particularly like that it focuses on students, their writing, and them as writers. This has to be particularly meaningful to them and make the other aspects of the class also more meaningful.