transcript of audio

00:00 I remember sitting down at my desk after a conversation with the chair of my dissertation committee. I had shared a loose sketch of some ideas for the kind of first-year composition class I wanted to design as the foundation for my dissertation study, but I did not have much more to go on.

00:15 No solution to the problem. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m Generation X, or because of my deep affinity for old-school supplies, number 2 pencils, white chalk, spiral notebooks, which may also be a result of being Generation X, but either way, instead of opening a blank document on my computer, I pulled

00:33 out a yellow legal pad. But now that I think about it a bit more, I’m sure the reason I chose to write my notes instead of type them was instinct.

00:41 My father, born in 1940, was a commercial and industrial real estate broker before he retired. I can still see him working tirelessly at his desk, sharpened pencil in hand, a calculator, a yellow legal pad before him, his large square silver framed glasses perched at the tip of is not.

01:01 We sat down at my desk and began writing the design-focused approach to FYC syllabus. I must have known somewhere inside me that the yellow legal pad would be my springboard to a solution.

01:18 putting the pen to the paper and writing down each word. Typing just doesn’t do the same, for me at least.

01:23 Jotting words down, not even full thoughts, is often how I find myself working through any piece of writing. I write down all the important words, almost like a mini word cloud.

01:34 It helps me to get my thoughts focused. As I develop the words, and expand on the ideas, I keep returning to the words so that I can assure that I have a through line- a point.

01:43 The paper gives me the space to play with the words and mess around with ideas. Some are written in the margins on an angle, others circled for emphasis, but something about having written it with my hands on paper immerses me in the work.

01:55 Besides living pencils, chalk and notebooks, when I was a kid, I loved to sketch. When I was older, I loved watching artists sketch their work.

02:03 The process of making something, putting something together, was really exciting. I was impressed about how artists work to bring their vision to life.

02:12 Most recently, when I read the work of Palmieri, Purdy, Shipka. I knew there was something to all the things I had been interested in.

02:20 Artists and writers perform the same moves in their work. Sketching out the DFA to FYC syllabus, I knew I had to just go with my instincts.

02:30 Leave the department’s common syllabus aside and do something fresh. Blank canvas. Be intentional about not working from a model, but rather building from the bottom up.

02:40 Do the things that make sense to me. I gravitated to using analogies to draw on other disciplinary practices to prove to students that writing did not have to be how they had been taught it was.

02:51 And having been a high school ELA teacher myself, that meant lots of guidelines, lots of formatting, lots of this is right, that’s wrong, when writing could be expressive, unpredictable, and inspiring.

03:03 To work against formats and guidelines, I opened up the space for students to get creative, and that meant that I had to pull the writing element out altogether.

03:12 It would be important for me to show students how things that they interact with every day are sites of rhetoric, and that someone wrote those artifacts, designed those artifacts.

03:22 Song lyrics, ad campaigns, TikToks that went viral, these all had elements to think about and to discuss. What was different in this particular context, in the first-year writing classroom, I depended on the students to inform the conversation.

03:36 I suspected that they knew more than I did. And this would also help to establish a learning community, maybe even a little artist community, if I was lucky.

03:44 In the classroom, one that dismantled hierarchical structures that unfairly positioned me as the one with all the power, students had real familiarity with the artifacts.

03:54 And I wanted to work with them so that once I framed the discussion by writing theories, students could be positioned to achieve the learning outcomes of the course.

04:04 Although academic writing, such as essay or a report, has a place in the university, over time the monotonous weight placed on it has depleted student motivation to write.

04:13 The academy asks students to be critical thinkers, to be innovative, and then constrains their ability to make decisions for themselves and their projects and how they write through them.

04:22 Students are asked to read academic genres and mimic them by adhering to a predictable writing formula. Other than identifying a breakthrough concept or sharing an unexpected outcome, many of the academic essays, articles, and reports are much too dense to maintain the reader’s interest.

04:38 Let alone inspire a student to write the same kind of document. This forced me to think about the design of the English 1020 projects.

04:45 The students should do four or five projects over the semester, but what would get them excited? What would give them agency?

04:52 How can I force them to think for themselves, make decisions, and justify those decisions? I spent the time again with Marback’s article, “Embracing Wicked Problems: The Turn to Design and Composition Studies,” to determine a way to practice putting parts together and making different things with those

05:08 parts. He referenced the show’s top chef, an American chopper, which really made a lot of sense to me. I didn’t want to give students a set of things.

05:16 Instead, I wanted to stick to the idea of completeness. Freedom. Blank canvas. So, I decided that rhetorical elements would be the parts that I provided to the students.

05:25 They would learn about the appeals, the rhetorical situation, exigence, context. They would analyze scenes from movies, Twitter threads that they had read, Instagram stories their friends posted.

05:35 They’d think about media, modes, and McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message,” and then they would be ready. They would be ready to actively watch a movie, respond to threads on Twitter, and create their own Instagram stories.

05:48 I figured throwing them into the deep end was best. Their first project would be to make a thing. I knew that students could figure it out.

05:57 It would just take time to acclimate. They were accustomed to being told exactly what to do and how to do it.

06:02 I eliminated both. Students had an opportunity to do whatever they wanted. They just had to identify their rhetorical situation, their positionality in the conversation about an issue or topic, and how they wanted to share it out to their fellow peers.

06:16 They could inform, persuade, entertain, but their heads were had to be a discernible purpose. Returning to the concept of wicked problems in design, I was in essence telling students that they could bake a dessert, paint a mural, DIY an herb garden, but in the context of performing the objectives they

06:31 learned during the unit, I hope students could explain for whom the dessert was intended and why they chose that particular dish, how did they do to use what their guests said about the dessert to make improvements to the recipe.

06:43 I was excited for the prospect of all the fun and exciting projects students would create and it would undoubtedly be the perfect setup for a redo.

06:50 I wanted students to redesign the first project, but I would save it for last. In between, as I instructed more about visual theory, modal apneas circulation rate.

06:59 Rhetorical listening and performing empathy, among many other concepts, students would work through an analysis and an argumentative piece. I plotted the rhetorical analysis immediately following the first project.

07:11 It would benefit the students to return to the Aristotelian appeals and rhetorical strategies. They could examine an artifact and discuss how the writer-designer of that artifact would perform writerly strategies into what effect.

07:22 I called it pulling things apart. Having practiced analytic skills would support the students in returning to their first projects for a redesign later in the semester.

07:31 They would be better equipped to use the appeals, find evocative language, choose a suitable mode for their remix because they had a better understanding of what works.

07:41 This left some space between projects two and four. I designed project three to be an argument, discussing things, but I knew that writing up a traditional argumentative essay would not necessarily teach them to be effective writers.

07:54 I developed the project rationale so that students recognized how to argue, how to listen to arguments, and they will learn how to qualify arguments as well.

08:03 So much of what students see in here is in fact an argument, they just don’t realize it. So I felt it was my job in a rhetoric-centered course to design an opportunity for students to perform argumentation in an everyday space.

08:17 At that point, I had my four big projects. Then I had to think about how to move the students from point A to point B using the design-focused approach.

08:27 I created a set of small tasks and objectives and chunked them, which was not necessarily a novel idea, but a deliberate attempt to move away from four big formats, templates, and outlines.

08:38 I was finally getting to the solution. I had students designing their projects, putting together parts, pulling them apart, putting them back together, but something obvious was missing.

08:49 Using the process to define, to ideate, then plan, and prototype, type, test it, and finally improve. All had to echo through each of the four projects, and that would only happen if I developed a recursive process myself.

09:03 A pattern of moves for students to do each time, like a cycle. But they wouldn’t necessarily have to stay in sequence, they could fall out of order, or students may come back to particular moves again and again to help make decisions for the project.

09:16 The process had to be non-linear. For example, a student may begin a project by researching a topic of interest but realize further into revising their draft that they are missing critical information, and they need to research more again.

09:30 I thought a lot about semiotics, how this design-focused approach to FYC grew from multimodal pedagogy. How do students learn? What kind of process could be structured enough to push projects forward, but loose enough for a student’s ideas to move in a variety of directions?

09:52 A diary-like space. A place to collect thoughts, but I had to improvise. I implement the structure to be certain their thoughts were moving things along.

10:00 Narrowing a project’s focus. Gathering content. Shaping the content. The solution was the design journal.