Shaping a Writing Community with an Interactive Website for First-year Writing Courses

Our Project To design  An interactive website for our freshman writing courses, an alternative to our campus LMS, working from within the specific context of our composition curriculum  A space for a writing community that values the prior knowledge students bring and that facilitates their interaction as they reshape and extend that knowledge

The Writing Community Underpinnings from composition and discourse theory.  All student writers bring competence as language users from their prior experiences with communication in other settings (Kutz, Groden, Zamel).  Such competence involves knowing how to use language to make meaning (Berthoff), in context-specific ways associated with a Discourse (Gee), drawing on the ways of thinking, believing, and valuing shared within any cultural setting and the “ways with words” (Heath) shared by insiders to particular discourse communities.

In Our Writing Communities  Students are positioned as participants in a new communicative setting, where they can acquire and shape new insider ways. The writing classroom provides a bridge that connects prior ways and new ones through ongoing participation.  Online expansion of the classroom provides a bridge between the online worlds they experience outside the classroom and the new ones they will encounter in academia.

Our Goals in Developing the Website To create a digital space that would  Be interactive, intuitive, and relevant to the learning experience of the students.  Contribute to a vibrant discourse community, extending its contact beyond class meeting hours.  Provide a space that students would choose to visit.  Defamiliarize the standard digital contact zones (Selfe and Selfe) that students encounter in other spaces.

Design Decisions We wanted to situate the work that our students would be doing in our individual sections within a larger academic context, that of the Freshman English Program at our university, one that, like other academic settings, has its own shared beliefs, values, and ways.

Design Decisions We wanted to provide a welcoming entryway into the technologically-mediated academic discourse community of the university and to draw on students’ existing or more easily learnable technological literacy.

Design Decisions In contrast to the unengaging interface of Prometheus, the university-supported LMS, we wanted our interface to feel familiar and intuitive.

Design Decisions We wanted to foreground the real diversity of our classrooms, making a place for students’ very different voices and experiences to be equally and visibly represented through student profile pages and writing portfolios.

Design Decisions  We wanted the space to support key elements in our curriculum (from Exploring Literacy, Longman 2004): The ethnographic study of familiar discourse communities The sharing of transcribed conversations and analyses, and of observations of insider genres, styles, shared knowledge and values The development of meta-level understandings of how communication works along with a deeper awareness of their own and their classmates’ discourse competence across different settings

Design Decisions  We wanted to build a space to support a genuine writing community that would keep students involved in the process of thinking, writing, and reading and responding to each others’ writing in ways that can only be started within the time limits of the class period offer a safe environment (in password-protected sections) for sharing writing within a community provide, for our commuter students, a way to extend their connection beyond the walls of our classrooms and keep the ideas of the course alive while students are away from campus

How the website supports and enhances our pedagogies Portfolios Peer Response Assessment

Portfolios Allow collection of writing at different stages of completion, over time Take emphasis off individual graded assignments Make the writing, not a justification of a grade, the focus of comments Give students “an opportunity to explore, experiment, and compose across a body of work without receiving a summative evaluation of their efforts” (Huot)

Peer Response Can create supportive and critical readers of the writing of self and others (cf. Elbow and Belanoff, Sharing and Responding) Can help writers develop a sense of audience: beyond the teacher, for more than evaluative (grading) purposes (Harris) Can help readers develop descriptive, analytical, and evaluative approaches to a text (Bruffee)

Common peer response practices Typical focus is on complete drafts of formal papers Students often respond to teacher’s guiding questions Teacher does not typically participate in a response group, but responds separately or to later drafts

Assessment Even with portfolios and peer response, the teacher’s comments are most often separate, private, and directly linked to grading We need a discourse of assessment that’s separate from the discourse of grading (Huot), a discourse that can be used by both teachers and students

Some pedagogical goals To address limitations of hardcopy portfolios (range of work not easily available to other readers) To expand boundaries of peer response, beyond teacher-directed response to full drafts of formal papers To begin to shape and share a supportive and constructive response discourse and a separate evaluation/grading discourse for both students and teachers

How our goals are supported by the website Individual portfolio spaces where students can post their work in an ongoing way A comment function that allows peer and teacher responses to all of that work A class portfolio that shows all student postings for a particular task

Website environment Online portfolios are available all the time to all class participants for reading and commenting Online portfolios make all writing available to other student readers, informal writing as well as drafts of formal essays A class portfolio creates a sense of shared enterprise, allowing students to see many other approaches to a writing task When teachers comment online, their comments, like student comments, are available for all to read

Changes in our responding practices Sometimes taking our cues from the groups— responding as other students do Sometimes re-presenting (describing) what we see Sometimes modeling constructive analytical and evaluative responses Sometimes working with the writer, to add what we see (modeling ways to extend the work the writer has begun) Doing more and more of this in public

Changes in our assessment and grading practices Naming expectations in rubrics Developing those rubrics with students Posting rubrics as a reference point, to guide final, formal papers Inviting students to self-assess, using those rubrics

Students’ Responses to the Website Most students visit the website frequently and use it to extend their contact with the classroom community. They gain a richer understanding of others’ communities. They appreciate the ways in which it has made a conversation about writing and growth in writing one that is shared by all.