Find summaries of PD sessions run by the faculty mentor, Hope Parisi.
College Policies of Impact in First-Year Composition (Feb. 7, 2025)
Who Invited AI? (Jan. 24, 2025)
Students In Distress (Jan. 17, 2025)
ALP-Cultivating a Key Asset of Writing Support (Sept. 27, 2024)
Professional Development Sessions, A Three-Part Series (January 19, February 12, June 7, 2024)
Progress at the Midterm: Special Instructors’ Edition (April 5, 2024)
Source Use: Emphasizing Purpose in Source Use for Better Research (May 5 2023)
Source Use Part 2: Styles for Blended Voices (May 19, 2023)
Concerns Coming Up (October 6, 2023)
Checking in with Students: Conveying Progress and Concern (October 20, 2023)
Including the Non-traditional Assignment in the Portfolio (November 3)
College Policies of Impact in First-Year Composition: Change and Constraint: Clarifying Our Roles While Staying Effective (Part 3) (Feb. 7, 2025)
On Friday, February 7, we had our third workshop in our winter series, “Change and Constraint,” with focus on “College Policies of Impact in First-Year Composition.” Even prior to Covid, college policies around grades and attendance seemed to shift, arising questions among faculty as to how best to navigate course and section policy and effectively advise students. This session aimed to share experiences and work out some of the questions.
Instructors agreed that many college policies impacting first-year composition are and have been located in a “gray area.” The conundrum of whether to recommend or assign a WU or F came up early, with one teacher sharing about a student disappearing before the mid-point, ceasing to submit work on Brightspace, re-emerging through email, and then submitting work during final exam week. Was that an F or a WU? Other instructors attested to the “W[U]/F struggle,” noting that students sometimes benefit more by the WU, which is not punitive and can even be later appealed, over the F which goes into the GPA and may affect probation status and financial aid. Based on a chart of routes to both grades from Lehman College, CUNY, we were reminded that the F is for students who stay and contribute some work even to the point of the “final culminating project” (though they may miss that project), and a WU is for students who just stop attending.
We acknowledged that while it is important just for us to know the difference between a WU and F, we can feel compelled to influence students’ thinking about one or the other grade. Does the student want to persist in the course despite the likelihood of not passing? Might a WU be better?
Matters of college policy are, of course, linked, as became evident the more we spoke of the WU. Conversations about WU are often initiated around the time of the drop-course date, now just eight weeks into the semester. This change is relatively recent; during Covid, the drop-date had been moved to the end of term and students could delay making a judgement about their progress. We recognized the importance of putting important college policy dates on the syllabus. But beyond this, what should we do? Here we were truly reflecting the “constraint” aspect of our series’ focus, “Change and Constraint.” To what extent were we working as college policy spokespersons, and thus beyond our classroom roles?
We shared this dilemma: We saw it was possible to resist our roles as institutional spokespersons, yet it seemed we all wanted to refine our knowledge about policy, presumably to safeguard and better advise our students. In other words, we were reaching for what Greg Bruno has called “policy literacy.” The lack of clarity around some policy issues at CUNY does not make this easy. Searching for specific policy language at one CUNY institution, for example, brings up posting at another CUNY institution, with no real predictability. Searching for information on the difference between a WU and an F at Kingsborough brought up a handy posting from Lehman, and searching for a statement on CUNY attendance policy brought up fairly open-ended wording from City College.
However, to some extent, staying effective as writing teachers means understanding our role to orient students to the academy. First-year composition, and basic writing especially, has always had that function, as the earliest histories of Composition verify. We tell students, “This is what writing for college, or developing a writing process for college, is like. . . “ It’s another facet of the “gray area” in which we work.
From another angle, having a handle on policy literacy can generate more confidence for students in first-year writing. Encouraging students to manage their institutional placements conveys the expectation that they can and will continue on. When Hope asked participants whether they planned to help students anticipate policy matters more, or pull back, most said they would continue to help students anticipate. We shared ways to highlight the now-earlier drop-course date at week eight, build in conversations about it, prepare students to evaluate their progress and the likelihood of their passing, and let them know what not-passing may mean for them next semester.
As for an attendance policy, we acknowledged that CUNY is still an officially non-attendance taking institution. Recently, KCC advisement officials confirmed the point with Hope. (Our version of Brightspace in fact recently disabled its attendance-taking function, one instructor pointed out.) At least one CUNY post online admits the fine line between no official policy and the need for one, offering that instructors may be guided by what was familiar language about attendance at CUNY some time ago: i.e. that students may miss no more than twice the number of hours the course meets weekly for the term. However that posting also adds that departments and programs should devise policy that speaks to their purposes.
For example, our department encourages a statement about class attendance policy on the syllabus, even as we might expect students to exceed that policy. A statement on the syllabus is a start-point; it values attendance and can support a teacher’s assignment of WU. Writing classrooms must also emphasize the importance of time in class practically. One approach is granting points for classwork or emphasizing classroom experiences that then build into—as a key aspect of–the higher stakes writing projects of the class.
What of the student who is on the outskirts of a hybrid or in-person class, doing assignments online, which “by the way does not show a comprehensive analysis of what was taught in class” (as one of us expressed it)? Such instances truly test our teaching mettle, pushing us to re-state and somehow re-teach our course and assignment goals in ways that will reach even this student. This may mean letting advisors know about these students through Navigate as soon as they get off track. Or sharpening our online communication through Brightspace. In all, we acknowledged, scenarios like these, though common, press us for a tailored response.
With policy, we find ourselves at a crossroads—I’ll cite Greg again—of “learning on the job.” The intricacies of policy and how they impact students are not part of graduate practicums in teaching college writing or most teaching orientations when instructors join departments. Yet, as all three of our winter workshops have emphasized, the urgencies that students bring to the classroom become classroom urgencies. They help form the teaching context. Student distress, the appeal of AI, and college policy (our winter themes)–there’s no way to keep them at bay. We must integrate them into our pedagogies and our overall caring, expanding the picture of teaching first-year writing at our community college.
Who Invited AI?: Change and Constraint: Clarifying Our Roles While Staying Effective (Part 2) (Jan. 24, 2025)
On Friday, January 24, we had our second winter workshop of three as part of “Change and Constraint: Clarifying Our Roles While Staying Effective.” This was our session, “Who Invited AI?” Faculty have been seeing AI and ChatGPT for writing help as a pedagogical challenge for a few years now, so this was to continue the discussion. While we have acknowledged the assets of AI in academic work, faculty seem to need an ongoing forum to address how AI constrains the teaching of writing by trying to solve, even eradicate, writing as an endeavor of struggle. We know it’s essential to support student ownership of that writing process in first-year composition.
We began to cull some themes dealing with AI’s ubiquity with a text of magical realism, “There’s A Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella” by Fernando Sorrentino. It was easy to draw parallels between the speaker’s predicament and our own: similar to the umbrella-wielder, AI intrudes upon the space of the writing classroom. We try to intervene or engage it, but its force remains, exceeding the bounds we set for it. One of us remarked on its quality of “bullying”; another mentioned its unwelcome touting of writing “perfection.”
Moving on from associations of AI and incessant umbrella strikes, we looked to identify the source of the speaker’s anxiety at the story’s conclusion. We connected this anxiety with our own feelings of AI’s messing with the roles we set for ourselves, perhaps a sense of our centrality. To get in deeper, we broke down our professional position to some key roles that organize our teaching, for example, course designer; reader or responder to student writing; writer-creator of assignments and activities; and disciplinary-spokesperson and communicator (“This is what writing is like. .. “). Rachel added the role of modeler for all kinds of writing processes.
We saw that part of teaching with AI in the room means seeing each of these roles differently, adapting them to acknowledge and interpret for students—with students—how AI may be changing what we mean by writing (in some ways okay, some ways not). We talked about ways to surface AI as an entity potentially risking the values and rapport of our pedagogies, which implies that we might need to more deliberately foreground those values day to day.
For example, in our disciplinary-spokesperson role, we might speak more directly about writing as a kind of struggle, conveying it as positive struggle. Our pedagogy might help reveal AI as something that disguises or masks the need for mistake-making, and troubles “real-ness,” at the same time we might highlight human beings as the makers of mistakes. Mistake-making as a topic might then become “academic,” as we ask students to reflect on terms like “fails” or “fakes,” and how these are framed in our society or, by contrast, often turned to social media gold in some individuals’ online stories. Writing about writing approaches fit this frame as well (“Bad Ideas About Writing”), as would familiar norms of conformity and perfection, zero tolerance policies, and just generally, rigid rules for creativity and learning. All these may be critiqued to point out how AI catches us in countless dichotomies that paradoxically may limit our expression.
Making AI academic in this sense recalled past conversations with colleagues who have identified AI emergence as a critical lens in itself, a means for cultural understanding and critique. Acknowledging AI in the room, basically at every step of writing and thinking, is a pathway for richer and deeper conversations about values in writing and the writers we trust students aspire to be.
Rachel brought up the point that students may oppose our pedagogies contextualizing AI-assisted writing as “less than,” or as misaligned with community writing values. Some students are OK with turning in writing that does not translate to personal or collaborative growth: “I just want to get my grade, pass the course, and move on with my degree.” We agreed that emphasizing the critical growth aspect of writing was still part of our role and that students needed that “buy in” for a host of reasons. We also noted that such transactional views of writing did not yet seem to be the norm. Most students are interested in strong self-concepts of themselves as learners and meeting the objectives of their first-year writing course.
We left off that, in this time of AI, different instructors will adapt the roles that organize their teaching differently, but that considering these roles might spark innovation—for example, new ways of talking with students about writing; new and unique designs and materials for writing that AI would not have access to; new styles of rapport in our feedback to students that encourage the use of personal voice. We even spoke of “making it weird”—building out from unique terms specific to class discussions, or cultivating experiences very tailored to a particular ENG12 section. This is a pedagogy of creating “insiders” that puts AI on the margins overall. Rachel and Tony I. spoke about their emerging OER project to develop materials around AI contexts and constraints in first-year writing to start this spring. We look forward!
Students in Distress: Change and Constraint: Clarifying Our Roles While Staying Effective (Part 1) (Jan. 17, 2025)
The topic of “Students in Distress” hit home for instructors who attended the first of our three workshop series, “Change and Constraint: Clarifying Our Roles While Staying Effective.” We started out with a few reflective questions on a collaborative Google doc. One question asked instructors to recall a student in distress and the markers of that distress. Another question asked instructors to reflect on the extent to which they see dealing with students in distress as a constraint upon the course and, if so, how so.
In our discussion, we dealt with what “distress” means, in theory and in a community college setting. In addition, there’s the complexity of distress in an English class, where relationships are important and writing itself can be a stressor. We tried to sort out: What are important distinctions between students in distress and students in crisis? Should we read distress into behaviors that by now seem usual—for example, sleeping in class, lateness, erratic work submissions?
It was possible we were normalizing the struggle we see students undergo on a day to day basis, potentially missing distress. We asked, “Have practices of flexibility impacted our readiness to recognize and engage students in distress?” and, “Are there behaviors that we have become desensitized to?”
Instructors shared stories to highlight true distress. In one case, a student became loud and argumentative, disrupting class, when they received a paper back that asked for revisions they saw as overwhelming. In another case, a student freely interpreted their Access-Ability accommodation for regular breaks during class by putting on headphones, opening a laptop, and playing video games without leaving their seat. These incidents greatly incurred upon the safety and limits of the classroom, whether causing a feeling of unsafety for others or stirring confusion and distraction.
In sharing these experiences, instructors addressed the “constraint” of dealing with a heightened mix of needs converging on the composition classroom. While we couldn’t imagine a future time when the classroom would be spared these stressors, we discussed important steps for not letting distress impacts on our teaching be the norm.
We came up with these important steps:
- Know the KCC resources available to students. The CARE ACT Referral, a simple fill-in-the-blank process, brings KCC experts of student support quickly in contact with students. We reviewed the CARE team web pages, noting ease and usefulness. Direct contact with ARC services mobilizes help with housing needs or emergency aid. The Counseling Office and Access-Ability are also key supports. Try out their emails to receive their latest brochures.
- Integrate information about resources into the syllabus and curriculum. It works best when these services are already known to students even before they may sense their own distress. We reviewed Maxine Krenzel’s first-year assignment for getting to know campus services, and reiterated the familiar point that representatives from these services are happy to visit classrooms.
- To address our theme of “constraint”: Consider and create limits around our roles as a matter of pedagogy and practice. Karlene spoke about modelling the process of creating focus for oneself and others by sharing with students her own practice of getting in the zone for each class. (Please ask her how she does this, visibly, for students every day—unique and inspiring.) Her practice not only acknowledges students’ efforts to be here, to do the work, but also includes her own sense of making the effort and pushing through. In other words, she gets out in front of anticipated stressors by incorporating de-stressors that may have nothing to do with academic content: self-help quotes, talk of student interests and fun activities, words of affirmation and positive affect (“we’re doing it,” “you’re doing well,” “this was a great session!”) for every class.
- Anticipate familiar trigger points. Triggers may include the overload of work that’s now piled up by end of term, and our staying silent about it, or insisting students have “the book” or materials they need when just getting from home to class might have been a huge ordeal already. We can simplify a bit by taking away some assignments and saying, “Look, for now just do this. . . “ ?, or by anticipating that students will need extra copies, or a link to the book or articles posted on the LMS.
- Regularize, or routinize, course communication as much as possible. Finally, we spoke about regularizing stressful communications: Feedback from the instructor can be delivered as a predictable number of comments: say, four or five, set in a letter or list. Or students might know to check a to-do list set out each week in a Brightspace announcement.
Overall, we spoke about classrooms where the routines of submitting assignments are predictable, where courses are organized to allow students to easily know where they are in the semester and where they can “jump back in,” and where resources are highlighted. How we plan for and exhibit our understanding of student distress lays an important groundwork to keep the stress we induce to a minimum, including for ourselves. At the same time, the knowledge and readiness we gain in these practices make us prime resources for when students choose to reach out.
Professional Development Session: ALP-Cultivating a Key Asset of Writing Support (Sept. 27, 2024)
As we know, the ALP component of ENG12 is a standout attribute of first-year composition at CUNY. Still the fact that an ALP class ties closely to a particular ENG12 course section, and is unique in its own ways each semester, can seem to shift the thinking and doing of ALP, semester to semester.
ALP has a history of being open-ended, starting for example with Peter Adams’ version of ALP as a kind of support-services adjunct to a larger English course. That model has been interpreted and reshaped according to departmental and institutional need. In some places, for example, ALP is a separate writing course with a separate curriculum. It may be run by the classroom teacher, or not; students may be of a cohort of 8 to 10 students out of a larger first-year section, or not.
Not least, post-Covid, its delivery modes increasingly vary. It could be async or sync; online or in-person. We even heard that the full ENG12 might be in-person with the ALP being offered async. As well, there’s whether the ALP meets before or after the larger class, or in a classroom or computer space. It is not easy to garner takeaways for ALP instruction when ALP can feel so open-ended.
This was the challenge and excitement of our session on Friday, September 27, as a number of ALP instructors got together to discuss the thinking and doing of ALP. Discussing the history and variability of ALP, insights around “variability” as an asset to cultivate began to feel more comfortable and to actually make sense.
An early question of our session was whether or not ALP should add to students’ workload, with one instructor, new to ALP, indicating this bit of wisdom was making its way around. Once we deconstructed the “adding” and “workload” ends of the question, though, we saw that ALP allows us to individualize help for students, and that “adding to the workload” may be just asking a student to take on a task particular to their need for writing practice and development. Students are working and doing more “classwork” than they would otherwise, as part of ALP, and could/should be expected to take on special tasks. This can amount to additional work. (This is different than establishing a separate curriculum, though some instructors do have special assignments for all that they prioritize in ALP.)
Further, our discussion crystalized ALP as a space for deepening contexts around both the “how’s” and the “why’s” of ENG12. The “how’s” of ENG12 feel like a given for ALP—its ties to developmental education are right for task generation, development, and scaffolding. But the “why’s”, if optimized, hold another key. Why ENG12, and why are we doing the things we’re doing in ENG12 as anything at all connected to, say, academic values for writing and critical thinking?
At this point, we pinpointed the CLOs as a key element of ALP classroom talk. Elaborating how any particular task within a project for ENG12 connects to one or more of the CLOs helps to decode the valued processes and mindsets of ENG12 and college writing. In this way, it is a part of backward design. Creating these mini-, duplicate, or alternate versions of large-class ENG12 activities within ALP helps clarify for students that they belong in ENG12. It is as if to convey, “Yes, this kind of thing is what writing for college is like; this is what it’s about, and you’re doing it! See, we just did a version of it, now, here, in this ALP class.”
Hermina gave a great interpretation of all this: In ALP, we’re working to help “eliminate the blank stare.” Imagining the new world of composition from the student’s perspective is an excellent starting-point for helping students see the work of ENG12 as something fun and interesting, in which they should become invested. This might include, as instructors named: decoding Brightspace and the ways that LMS allows them to highlight their work and check their progress; learning OneDrive, Hypothes.is or Google Docs; engaging reading differently, as in reading parts of a long text aloud, with real expression, or playing out an actual debate; exploring close-up a helpful database; honing a paragraph; exploring their discussion boards and seeing classmates’ writing as critical “text.” And so much more.
At the same time, as we also said, since students are enrolled in their ALP section as a separate course, it’s important that they feel each ALP session they attend has been planned in advance, by us, the instructor. It should go beyond any impromptu sense of “Let’s see what we will do today.” Instead, deliberately leading from the previous class, whether the previous ALP class or the larger ENG12 one, conveys purpose and direction. It’s something easy to plan for (even, as we said, it might be a certain student’s turn to have their work shared and workshopped by the group).
By the end of the session, as Maria noted, it makes sense to understand our ALPs as particular to our students, our modes, our course sections, and our larger goals (linked to the CLOs). There is no script limiting this highly generative space for teaching. We cannot compel students to attend, though generally, we said, consistent attendance by most enrolled students is the norm. For those who miss sessions, we can let them know that here was work that was fun, interesting, and valuable, that they missed. They were missed! For our regular attendees, they are fortunate to utilize such an asset.
Professional Development Sessions, A Three-Part Series (January 19, February 2, June 7)
“Building Inclusive Syllabi for Sense of Belonging in Freshman Writing”
Building inclusive syllabi is one of those professional development topics that seems to reference a particular set of concepts and practices, but actually opens a full spectrum of pedagogical thought. The topic is highly apropos of this current moment in academia and freshman writing. Administrations across community colleges nationwide are recognizing the need for greater welcome and belonging in classroom experiences and institutional culture, especially as the diversity of students continues to grow. At the same time, first-year writing programs can feel to be narrowing spaces for welcome and belonging, as students are challenged to “accelerate” their writing needs and as a long-established base of welcome for new college students with writing needs—basic writing—has transformed.
Taking up an opportunity by the KCC Office of the President to receive a “Sense of Belonging” grant to support a more thematic approach to professional development, Hope saw the possibilities in shaping a workshop series, starting in winter 2024, on the topic of welcome, belonging, and the syllabus, broadly conceived.
College-wide opportunities at Kingsborough, through KCEL, KCTL, HURFS Resource Center, and Student Support Services, for example, have been highlighting inclusion for some time. Of note: an in-depth project-based workshop in Universal Design for Learning run in summers 2022 and 2023 through KCEL (Loretta Taras and Susan Lambert were the facilitators). For Hope, this summer experience in UDL syllabus design was eye-opening, encompassing countless goals for creating a sense of belonging and welcome for students. While it would hardly be possible to transport all the learning of that summer into a three-session series, this semester’s “Building Inclusive Syllabi for Sense of Belonging in Freshman Writing” aimed to convey some of the main practices and values of the belonging “literature” now current, and generate thinking about syllabus layout, variety, tone, and design.
Not far into the workshops Hope facilitated, we saw that an inclusive syllabus both is, and is more than, the syllabus itself. As a sign-post and vehicle of welcome into the course, the syllabus speaks volumes about how the student-instructor relationship may be regarded and the priority of students, who rightfully belong and contribute to the course. Just this notion—of conveying “You belong here” and “It’s a moment to celebrate that you are here!”—sparks nearly endless potential for how instructors may represent the course to students and get them excited about learning.
Plenty of instructors nationwide have already caught the fervor of infusing the syllabus with welcome, and so in the first workshop, we had many interesting examples of syllabi to look at. (See a materials document here.)
For example, we explored: a syllabus on hip-hop as one professor’s literature course focus, with images of hip-hop artists new and veteran, a “playlist” of course topics ready to “spin,” and hip-hop terminology enlivening the explanation of course routines. We observed a history syllabus that had assumed the look of a newspaper, with photos from the archives meant to generate first-day of class discussion. We observed composition syllabi that “displayed” the types of assignments in pie-chart form, sidebars announcing course essentials, and eye-catching icons marking various course pathways (e.g. weekly course structure, tips on how to succeed, and “what you need to do now this first week”). Not least was an art syllabus whose fonts and design were clearly artfully done, and which also featured original artwork by the course instructor.
In all this variety, it was easy to critique by comparison the staidness of what students usually receive as their syllabus the first day. The plainness of just print, and the emphasis on what students should and must do through the term—the contract model of syllabi—were now exposed for claiming the course for the institution rather than for the students. Of course, we clarified, the syllabus does need to contain some essential features, such as course learning objectives, office hour information, and required course readings. But how we mark those features—how we frame them—communicates beyond data points. Medium is message in this case, helping to construct the social atmosphere that spotlights welcome and inclusion, or not.
Further in, it was important to define the “building” part of the workshop as more than a set of steps or techniques, and to regard the sample syllabi as more than templates to use and apply. Rather we needed to see “inclusive syllabi” as not what we hand students (or in the case of a “liquid” or “digital” syllabus, what we post and open for students), but as a set of values we try to express throughout the course, starting with the syllabus.
Getting value-focused, we collaborated to name and define eight values that seemed for us to denote the dimension of “inclusive.” (See our value document here.) Among these values: partnering (“I will be a partner to you in your learning”); welcome (“You are welcome here!”); connection (“I want to get to know you, and your classmates do too”), and more. To build an inclusive syllabus might mean starting from the values we want our teaching to exhibit and express; in other words, appreciating inclusive values for the room they provide to build materially inclusive classrooms.
Hope Parisi
Progress at the Midterm: Special Instructors’ Edition (April 5, 2024)
A familiar PD session at the midpoint of the semester is one on ways to use reflection and a variety of measures to help students gain a sense of their progress in their writing course. But writing instructors, likewise, have a need to step back and reflect on how they are doing according to the teaching goals they set for themselves, whether it may be for trying out new approaches or reaching toward exciting, more epistemological, teaching frameworks.
To commend and support these aspirations, the familiar “progress at the midterm” PD session turned toward instructors’ own sharing and reflection on their progress at the midpoint. How was it going, we asked, with that goal or aspiration that you’ve been centering in your teaching this semester? Instructors shared goals, including: increase turnaround time for feedback (Stephanie); use class time more efficiently and creatively (Heather); incorporate technology better (Laura); strengthen the “care” element of teaching (Laura); and integrate more of the instructor’s personal and academic interests into teaching to make their teaching more dynamic (Joe).
While these goals were essentially shared as questions, it was clear that instructors had been working on them as focuses already having an impact. The goal of “us[ing] class time more efficiently” grabbed our attention for quite a while, since what we do during class is actually the core of connecting with students, scaffolding assignments, revealing ourselves and our special interests to students, and so much more. As an instructor with an expertise in journalism, Heather felt encouraged to bring the exercises and awarenesses of community observation to the classroom, as something uniquely emanating from the instructor’s background. Connecting to the goal of “integrat[ing] more of the instructor’s personal and academic interests into teaching,” we noted that when students learn of their instructor’s distinct and valuable interests, the classroom feels more special and geared to them. Hope spoke of her original training in teaching writing as a teacher in a grade school where graduate education students and teacher trainers from Teachers College Writing Project regularly visited. From this experience come many “write like real writers” strategies and approaches that can be tailored for the “writer’s workshop” of English composition. So while these approaches may feel off the page of what’s typically done during class time in an ENG12 or ENG24 course, they can all be seen to use class time “efficiently and creatively” and connect to the “personal and academic interests” of the instructor.
Another way we conceived of professional goals and aspirations this semester was to think backwards—from a moment that exemplified what the goal was. Joe related a student arriving before class started one day, intent on capturing some one-on-one time with the instructor. Couldn’t it have been “this other factor” that drove Esther in The Bell Jar? The student had been wondering since the previous class. In fact the student could not wait to raise the question until the beginning of class. Another faculty in the room, actually there to observe the class, was impressed: How had the instructor created such carry-over and interest? Yet another participant, Laura, shared that the epitome for walking backwards from a goal stemmed from the recent winter model, when she took time to really check in on students who missed even one class, sending emails of concern and attachments of missed work. This focus on care was influencing the current semester as well, through the instructor’s set up of Google student folders that now function as a conveyance of classroom community. Referring to and building these folders tells students we all have a stake in creating something tangible and worthy. We all belong.
This approach related to Hope’s aspiration for a tangible place, on Blackboard, where students can reliably access the classwork of any class that they are absent for as a way to always be connected to the course.
Again, so much of the discussion kept circling back to class time as the large creative space for actualizing teacher presence and community. To recap Stephanie’s goal for speedier feedback, we noted that regularly making individuals’ feedback the center point of whole class discussion is feedback to all (For example, “Here’s the letter of comments I wrote for Samar. What seems prioritized in my feedback to Samar? How do these comments apply to goals of ENG12, or to you?”). At the same time, the threads of rapport become more visible. Class time becomes all these windows into how and what students are doing in their writing; the words and feedback they are receiving back; and conversation “about” writing. In this kind of sharing, there’s also more room for instructors to reveal themselves, their interests, and their own writing process and evolution. In all, this PD session fostered many connections worthy of our aspiring.
Hope Parisi
Source Use: Emphasizing Purpose in Source Use for Better Research (Friday May 5, 2023)
This workshop addressed the course learning outcome of ENG 12 composition courses, “Compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those of other texts.” Instructors discussed their concerns around teaching research and source integration, which may in some cases take the focus away from students’ purposes for writing in the effort to demonstrate research according to academic conventions. The session emphasized how to keep students’ purposes for writing central in writing projects that include research. Early on, instructors stressed the academy’s overshadowing influence on student dispositions toward research as it can feel overwhelming and alienating in the overall context of a writing project. It is possible for students to resist research if it disrupts other priorities for writing and thinking and feels too academic. To this point, much of the session cultivated ideas for connecting students to their purposes for writing. These include: integrating research into personal essays (and building out from the personal); having students develop inquiry projects that prioritize research as a process; having students note and work from questions that arise for them organically; encouraging students, as part of research, to write from their social communities perspectives as a way to share with others social trends and dynamics they see happening (but which are not yet part of academic discourse). Our discussion took up the notion that situating students at the center of their research process includes making room for a wide range of sources that can be considered research. Often databases and New York Times-level sources are emphasized, but in an information age, what constitutes a “source” can and should be expanded, including video, artwork, excerpts from interviews, social media posts, and even other students’ writing. While instructors might wish to stress a source’s reliability, students can be helped to wonder about a much wider variety. For example, students may opt for sources that reflect social trends, cultural norms, and personal experience. While these sources might fall outside the range of “reliable,” depending on the project and its aims, they still speak to the need for sharp and analytic contemporary observations. This point led us to think about the research process much more broadly. One example: a neighborhood resident might “research” how neighbors are working to follow NYC’s new mandates for curbside garbage collection by walking around the blocking, doing some noticing, and drawing conclusions. It is possibly to document in a Works Cited nearly every sort of source consulted. (It nearly always captures students’ attention when they see that correct MLA Works Cited form exists even for tweets.) Good research method should help students to see themselves and others as constant creators of new knowledge and thus sources of and for research. Instructors agreed that more time for students to explore and share their research process during particular projects was essential, and students should be encouraged to reflect on the research process in its increments. As Daniel noted, students should also be permitted to change the direction of their writing, and their topics altogether, due to the discoveries of their research, and that such opportunities depend on students being helped to understand that research must fit their purposes as writers. Doreen shared the sense of excitement around research that an instructor’s own research position may also convey. Instructors reviewed a helpful template for reflecting on research: transactional and rhetorical annotations, a rubric by Greg Bruno. Overall, instructors shared a more expansive understanding of what it means for students to do and include research and source use in their work, a key link between research and purpose in writing.
Hope Parisi
Source Use Part 2: Styles for Blended Voices (Friday, May 19, 2023)
This session was the second workshop in a series of two on research and source use, in support of the ENG 12 CLO, “Compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those of other texts.” While in the first workshop, faculty discussed the range of research sources appropriate for ENG12 in view of students’ interests and purposes, this second workshop focused on the actual demonstrating of research as “voice” and “blended style.”
The session started with faculty observations around students’ typical use of research and research writing styles. Question: What do students think they are doing as they incorporate research into their writing? It was apparent that students see the research endeavor as something weighty, mechanical, or academic. Donna-lyn noted that students feel involved in “learning something my teacher wants me to learn about,” where students are abstracting research as a thing in itself. Ashiza shared that students are providing “extra support” that “proves” they know what the author is talking about. Hermina shared that students may focus on a discovery process where knowledge—the best article, the best knowledge—is something to obtain. John related students’ sense of acquiring “tools” of the academic trade, with databases as a gateway to academic community and belonging.
All these perceptions made sense in light of how research is required, isolated, and taught in college (and, likely, going back to high school), where it may be hard for students to hear our emphasis on attaching meaning and purpose to their writing.. To get even closer to students’ ideas about research, Hope suggested investigating our students’ writing to understand how they are actually using research, and to what extent they are resonating a “voice” of their own.
Hope shared two samples of students using research. In one, it was possible to see the student imitating some very strict notion of conveying research, sans any investment of real purpose or voice. In the other, the approach was more allusion-like, with the student lightly pointing to research while keeping their voice and concerns at the center. The first example was essentially just a string of disembodied claims, based on several articles, which made the research feel cramped. It felt like a “claims show and tell.” One instructor raised the possibility of ChatGPT in this case, which similarly demonstrates faceless writing. (The writing had actually been revised to tie-in unique concepts from the course.) The other example, from a similar assignment, was personal experience supported by some details from a small-town online newspaper from where the experience took place. Just a bit of research, as context, rounded out and enriched the telling of experience.
The two approaches to research brought out differences not only in supporting voice and purposes, but also in creatively imagining where support for one’s ideas might be searched for and found.
As we talked more, we realized that voice and purpose in writing were really about transparency of a writerly self, and that instructors might use the question of “seeing the student in the writing” to foster this value. Certainly, there is a place in academic writing for paragraphs that are a “show and tell” of claims, and students may find such examples in articles from the sciences and social sciences. (Elaine asked in fact whether the student of the more mechanistic writing was a science major.) There’s room for discussions of source use according to various disciplines.
Instructors agreed, however, that they want to emphasize a more slowly-paced, thoughtful, personally meaningful style to source use. Laura spoke of those days visiting the library with students where instructors and students worked together to find sources.
Thinking of transparency in writing also led us to consider empathy; often empathy is implicit in the way invested writers interpret sources (ChatGPT, not so much), and also maintain voice. To notice and value the implied empathy of students’ source use, when it happens, means valuing both “objective and subjective understanding” of knowledge—a distinction Donna-lyn made. Donna-lyn gave us a wonderful question: “How are [students] keeping their voice prominent?” and offered, “Connecting up the dots is more skillful than their demonstrating” this or that research point.
Thinking ahead to the self-assessments students must write for ENG12 portfolios, we acknowledged it may be too late to talk about research process once they’ve already completed a writing project—they may have already jumped the “show and tell of claims” line. So it’s important to help students process their research before submitting a first or second draft.
Some takeaways: 1. Help students see their choice of sources as something unique and helpful to their purposes for writing; 2. Offer that students may choose one or two sources rather than several; 3. Make it possible for students to process what the source is about, where it converges with their interests, and how it could be effective in their writing; 4. Build in reflection related to research throughout the term.
Hope Parisi
Professional Development Session Friday 6 October 2023, Concerns Coming Up
Today’s session focused on a range of concerns instructors are bringing to the classroom at the start of the semester. In one sense, many start-up concerns feel familiar. But in another, this does feel like a special moment, with a new LMS on the horizon; ChatGPT bringing its impacts; the college emphasizing a greater need for accessibility in our courses; and CLOs for ENG12 that still feel new in some ways.
We started the session with John Raymond’s question about Brightspace entering our arenas, as we’re now hearing about some opportunities for becoming oriented to it and there’s been a central-CUNY committee to help manage the transition. Hope mentioned that our department likewise has a liaison, Neil Kernis, who will be helping to communicate the changes emanating from CUNY. We tried to imagine the reasons for the change, and had only some guesses: it could be that the contract for Blackboard is up and it’s time for a change: Brightspace may be more responsive to some of the stuck-spots in Blackboard; Brightspace may allow for more data views; the possible reasons are many.
ChatGPT occupied a good bit of our attention during the session, as it has been doing more generally. We reviewed some of the points and approaches that were covered in the recent session for English faculty offered by Matthew Gartner and Steve Amarnick. Mostly, we discussed the awkwardness—at this stage—of ChatGPT’s linguistic style. It doesn’t write like our students write and can be detected fairly easily, especially in its uptake of writing “personally” about friends or family members who are often bestowed short, 4-letter names, like Rose or Jake.
We agreed that a key to teaching in an ChatGPT world is to stage assignments in ways that make students’ steady participation in their own process of writing very transparent and interactional; for example, discussion posts, class activities, and class discussions can be incorporated into students’ larger projects, with advanced stages of their work clearly building from these earlier, smaller and unique inputs. This is a way to “close out” ChatGPT as a player in our writing courses. Instructors also spoke about the importance of clear policies on work by ChatGPT submitted as one’s own, and using the occasion as a teachable moment.
Hope posited that the shadow of ChatGPT is also an occasion for affirming when students are truly authentic in their writing. John talked about including more reflection in the course, now to describe their real true involvement and interest. Ashiza conveyed an easy tone about it, having made an “if I suspect” kind of deal with students, where students likely would have another chance to re-do their work.
Recognizing ChatGPT’s potential to inspire better teaching has been a theme across our faculty meetings generally, and at this session too. John spoke about more time for reading personal writing, such as a recent piece of environmental writing by Terry Tempest Williams. A close analysis of the rhetorical moves of such writing is not only helpful for genre study, but also encourages students toward the kind of writing that AI can only attempt. In a way, we have another reason to be grateful for students’ individual writing styles and our attunement to them. They are the writing of real, learning humans.
Accessibility issues dovetail the impersonality of ChatGPT, we noted, as courses that are tailored to students’ learning styles, interests, and needs may lessen the temptation to reach beyond the course for easy solutions. Accessibility centers students as diverse learners, and we must make that value apparent.
We all noted that the new CLOs also emphasize reflection. Since the new CLOs, reflection feels weighted more heavily in the portfolio evaluation. Hope discussed the “Add Comments” feature of the Submission Pages of BB Assignments for reflection. The box on the submission page with that tag allows for students to describe their process of crafting their submission, and comes up exactly alongside their assignment when their instructor opens that BB page. It could figure into the points awarded for the assignment, in fact, and students can be reminded of these reflections when it’s time to write the reflection for the portfolio. John discussed having students come up with their own ideas for revision, discussion board posts, and reflection as a key type of writing for the course.
A helpful workshop by which to start the semester!
Hope Parisi
Professional Development Session – Friday, October 20 – 11am-12:30pm –
“Checking in with Students: Conveying Progress and Concern”
It’s a familiar step to check in with students at the mid-point. When students are given time and tools to reflect on their progress, it’s not only a reality-check or CLO objective, but also a reminder of our care and concern. It may be something particularly needed now, in the light of the atrocities overseas, that we help them “check in” about the affects that may be impacting their ability to do the work. How can we combine some tools for checking in, such as Starfish, Blackboard grade reviews, and reflections, among others, with humanistic and sensitive approaches to how they might be feeling, generally, and towards the course?
We really did get to the heart of how many of the generative changes around writing in our department are influencing our teaching, and the feeling is positive overall (with some anxiety still mixed in). How students will ultimately represent themselves as writers come the time of the portfolio is still open, but the hope is that they will conclude that ENG12 engaged them in meaningful and literate activities. I think, for us, we will feel pride for having created greater latitude for them to write and to explore what writing is and can be.
But as noted, recent events overseas (and, as we’re feeling, close to home) have been impacting the spirit and practicalities of our teaching, so our mid-point check-in on student progress encompassed an especially caring approach to how we confer with students on progress. This shift to a more questioning, “so maybe you tell me how you’re doing,” rather than centering a teacherly stance on student progress, makes sense too in light of how our new CLOs continue to inspire more student-centered and varied inroads into writing.
Among participants of this workshop, it was easy to see that a caring approach to students’ affects around their writing, and an emphasis on enabling students to do more of the kind of writing they might find meaningful, across genres, are going hand in hand. Instructors shared the ways in which they are making this greater latitude possible, whether it be through a wider genre approach (oral histories, podcasts, comic strips, media postings), and/or through directly getting at the heart of writing, with poignant statement-writing, such as “My Life Has Meaning”—an Instagram project by Damele Elliott-Hubbard (in attendance). The first hour of our the discussion highlighted a large existential question around writing, asking what is writing becoming today, via all the options now current across media, which make writing just as much a “writing about writing” (and “writing about creating”) experience as it is an exploration about knowledge in the disciplines. While we couldn’t settle this question of what is writing, we knew and expressed that our courses were creating meaningful—and CLO-specific—experiences around writing, varied as they might be.
There was consensus that instructors were proceeding in the new latitude toward more genre and rhetorical choices without all the answers; however, participants agreed that likely clearer definitions for both ourselves and students would emerge as students gained strong understandings of writing as communication. That communication, for example, could reflect long-held notions of writing as a performative argument, thesis-based, as in well-tried essay-writing, alongside “newer” assignments, such as oral histories, mixed media collage, or even podcasts—all forms relevant to “writing about writing” and self-reflection. We also agreed that more models for these newer venues for writing were needed, especially as students might wish to describe and represent their work to portfolio readers as having met the criteria of the new CLOs.
As one faculty member in our session pointed out, bringing more openness to writing in these ways is additive, not subtractive or in substitution of one sort of writing for another. Students are building a “rhetorical arsenal” that we may further support through reflective activities, ala the new ENG 12 CLOs, to help them better understand the widened approaches to writing they are exploring.
So while our topic was “progress at the mid-point,” it felt like we needed to first reaffirm for ourselves values and objectives that were guiding us at this still-early point of enacting new CLOs.
Strategies discussed for checking in with students included: conferencing with students one-on-one while the class engaged in a writing activity; notes and emails to students that recognize their work to this point and, for students who are behind, make the request that they create a plan for catching up; Starfish (demonstration) as an institutional “high-touch” point by a friendly adviser; ways to publicize and recommend some of KCC’s most essential academic, financial, and student support resources; and Blackboard functionalities for students to directly keep track of their progress. We also discussed means for making the perennial challenge of access easier, such as students’ use of Google docs, if they prefer; choice in assignments; and a point system for acknowledging completion of student work that does not conflict with the policy of not grading writing projects for portfolio sections.
Hope Parisi
Professional Development Session – Friday, November 3, 12:00pm -2pm-
“Including the Non-Traditional Assignment in the Portfolio.”
The new CLOs for ENG12 expand composition by emphasizing practical understanding of rhetorical strategies and genre concepts, including purpose and audience. We may feel encouraged in our teaching to include assignments that go beyond college-type or print-based texts. But students’ opting to include this work in the portfolio may find us hesitating: How can students successfully represent these experiences (visual, sonic, digital, class-presentational, multimodal?) in the portfolio? In what ways can we enlist student self-assessment to show portfolio readers that students are meeting the CLOs through these alternative or non-traditional assignments?
This workshop explored the kinds of assignments instructors have been trying out since the new CLOs were put in place, reflecting new encouragements toward a wider range of genres and forms. Prior to the session, Hope had queried some faculty whom she had heard were using non-traditional activities and genres for the portfolio and created a chart detailing both the non-traditional assignment and how it was represented for portfolio readers. In some cases, the actual assignment was included in the portfolio and students described their experience in creating the assignment in the Self-Reflection. In this way, including the assignment in the portfolio fit the usual pattern of how assignments generally are and have been featured in the portfolio for readers to assess. In other cases, though, the non-traditional assignment was not actually included, or only partially included, and a separate piece of reflection, tailored specifically to the doing of that assignment (and serving as a demonstration of good writing in itself) served as its main representation.
In other words, to answer a question that has seemed to stand in for the quandary of having portfolio readers assess non-traditional assignments in light of the CLOs, the way one might include a podcast, for example, in the portfolio might be to have students do any one or a combination of things, like: include a transcript or transcribed excerpt; write about their planning and difficulties of process, as in choosing their interview subjects or fine-tuning their questions; compare their podcast to another podcast in terms of style or other features, or analyze how the podcast is actually in conversation with another source (whether an article or other podcast) on a closely related topic.
So yes, we found, it’s possible to include a podcast in the portfolio for readers to assess. While some non-traditional assignments come close enough to essays to make a unique and separate meta-commentary (apart from the required Self-Assessment) unnecessary, such as power-points and transcriptions of oral presentations, many other non-traditional assignments might follow the same sort of “writing about” model as we discussed for podcasts. Again, the goal is to critically capture a process and demonstrate the achievement of CLOs to the portfolio readers.
Along the way, as we noted, providing students with options for representing their process opens the door to new genres of reflection. These include: reports or accompanying essays that describe the questions, planning, surprises, frustrations, and take-aways of their projects; excerpts of projects, such as interviews or oral histories, which students can use as evidence in essays that encompass the topics of those interviews; scripts and explanations for visual projects; and a Reflection Remix in which students input meta-commentary into a second version of their project, such as a flyer, as a kind of self-reflective overwrite on it. (Thank you, Greg, for making us away of this uber-texting of a work’s text and visuals.) Not least, for where students produce two different versions of a project—via two genres–they can compare each for audience, purpose, and other rhetorical elements.
Hope Parisi
