scholar, editor, and designer
OWI Teaching Materials
Here, you will find my teaching philosophy and course materials for online writing instruction (OWI), developed during a graduate seminar at Florida State University regarding OWI.
Included below my OWI teaching philosophy is my course syllabus for a fully-online section of ENC 2135. ENC 2135 is the second and final course of Florida State University's College Composition Program. This syllabus—also referred to as course policy sheet—was composed with accessible design in mind, using Anne-Marie Womack's "Teaching is Accommodation: Universally Designing Syllabi and Composition Classrooms," published in CCC's in February of 2017. This document differs from my face-to-face course in many key ways, including, but not limited to, longer assignment descriptions, additional explanation towards course format, and additional course policies.
Also available are my course videos. These videos introduce an online ENC 2135 course, its assignments, and other elements of the course. I create these videos to compliment written assignment sheets, course documents, and more, so students might get verbal explanation in addition to written outlines. For a rationale exploring the choices I made in the creation of my fully online composition course, read my reflection.
Teaching Philosophy
When I approach Online Writing Instruction (OWI)—in my design of both hybrid and fully online courses—I understand OWI as a “unique setting,” a setting that is not a “variant” or “deficit model” of a traditional face-to-face course, but instead, a space that requires new pedagogical approaches (Snart 94). This is not to say elements of my face-to-face teaching do not inform my OWI; in fact, when designing an online course, I often consider what might transfer between settings. That said, I see online courses through their inherent relationship with and mediation through technology, as spaces that are vastly multimodal in ways that differ from face-to-face courses. Thus, my OWI pedagogy values community-building, accessibility, and flexibility. While these values are important in my face-to-face coursework, too, OWI settings—due to their unique context—demand that I reconsider and reevaluate them, building a reciprocal and recursive network between settings, spaces, modes, and more.
Flexibility & Student Experience
Elements of my face-to-face and OWI pedagogies are complementary, yet in flux, because they exist in kairotic spaces; spaces that Margaret Price says are “characterized by all or most of these criteria:
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Real-time unfolding of events
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Impromptu communication required or encouraged
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Participants are tele/present
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Strong social element
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High stakes” (“Defining Kairotic Space” (Price).
In other words, every space that I teach in, whether present or telepresent, will have immense amounts of variability, impromptu communication, social dynamics, and material constraints. Because of this, I understand that while I might try to anticipate the needs of my students, I will always fall short. Although this is a sobering reality, I know that, as an instructor, I should link my teaching to students’ material, lived experience—be it racialized experiences, queer experiences, disability experiences, and so on—as best as I can. Because I will have new students with new, unique experiences every semester, I understand universal course design as a place to start and always changing. There is no exhaustive checklist that will create the perfect, accessible course for every student that I will ever encounter; however, as I continue to engage with scholarship, test my course materials for accessibility, and dialogue with my students, I can try to close as many gaps as possible.
Community-Building
Due to the nature of online coursework, OWI will lack a physical classroom for a portion of, to the entirely of, the course. Because my students and I will be telepresent for at least a portion of the course, I find it important to build community.
One of the ways in which I build community is through my Introductory Assignment, using it as a space to discuss genre, multimodality, audience, and more. My assignment is structured to avoid a normative, “Hi, my name is…” discussion board post. Instead, I ask that students choose a specific genre, considering its constraints and audience expectations. Then, I ask them to consider what their fellow students might want to know from them. Once these two elements are decided, students are to compose and upload their text to a community discussion board so that we might engage with each unique text as it is uploaded. This way, students might identify their own strengths as it comes to multimodal composition, apply them, engage with several theoretical frameworks guiding the course, and, most importantly, get to know one another. Further, I participate in this assignment myself, using my own post not only as a model, but so students might also get to see me, their instructor, outside of the context of the stuffy, “Welcome to the Course!” introductory video.
Accessibility & Accessible Design
I ground my pedagogy in scholarship warning of the dangers of retrofitting and accommodation as it comes to course design, in both online and face-to-face settings (Price; Kerschbaum; Yergeau; Wyatt; Dolmage). As Margaret Price writes, “We do not need help participating. We need ethical infrastructures” (“Toward and Ethical Infrastructure”). Further, Melanie Yergeau writes, “To accommodate is to retrofit; it is to assume normative bodies as default and to build spaces and infrastructures around those normative default bodies…. Accommodation, I'd suggest, presumes that disabled people do not exist unless they reveal themselves—at which point, they need able-bodied people to help them assimilate” (“Reason”; “Rehabilitation ≠ to What We Do”).
Thus, my courses are not designed around the technology that supports it; instead, I design my courses around the anticipated needs of my students, understanding that while I may not always get it right, there are many places to start.
To make my coursework more accessible, I ensure all of my course materials, like syllabi, assignment descriptions, and more, are produced in a variety of modes. The documents themselves are uploaded as screen-readable PDFs, formatted in Adobe Acrobat’s Accessibility Setup Assistant and checked with screen-reading software. Further, my document design follows the recommendations found in Anne-Marie Womack's "Teaching is Accommodation: Universally Designing Syllabi and Composition Classrooms," published in CCC's in February of 2017. I am guided not only by Womack’s essay, but also Jay Dolmage’s “Universal Design: Places to Start.” I use many of his recommendations—redundancy, flexibility, delivery, translation, and more—in order to guide the choices that I make. For example, I contextualize course documents through explanatory text on Canvas, my institution’s Learning Management System, and I create captioned, procedural and information videos videos to further explain the document. When used, external online resources are checked in the WAVE Accessibility Tool to ensure navigability; if resources are not easy to navigate, I create an alternative resource to use instead for the entire student body, or, find a better resource. Additionally, I accept assignments in a variety of formats; although I have institutional constraints (for example, a 6,000 polished word count), I allow students to use voice dictation software and other tools that might make the composition of an essay easier to achieve.
While these are the moves I might make in my online courses, this is by no means a comprehensive list; again, these are places to start. In a way, as I remember CCCC’s OWI Principle 15—“OWI/OWL administrators and teachers/tutors should be committed to ongoing research into their programs and courses as well as the very principles in this document.”—this philosophy itself is a place to start. Accessible course design, online or face-to-face, is not about a certain destination; it’s a process, a journey.
ENC 2135 Fully Online Course Policy Sheet
Embedded element: An embedded, downloadable, and/or printable syllabus.
ENC 2135 Course Videos
Notes on my OWI Materials
Before reading Online Writing Instruction (OWI) scholarship and preparing instructional materials for an online course, my personal experience with online courses were indicative of their stereotype: as an undergraduate, I was in an online section of art history, one of the options for my core fine arts requirement. The course had a large number of students, it was self-paced, I had no idea who my classmates were, and I primarily communicated with my classmates through discussion boards. Course instruction occurred through narrated PowerPoints, PowerPoints that, for all I knew, had been used for the last ten years without any revision. I never saw my instructor’s face, knew almost nothing about her, and, aside from a few sentences of feedback on the final project, never felt her presence outside of her pre-recorded lectures. I made assumptions from that course, believing that most online courses followed this same template: I saw them as modular, self-paced, static monoliths of the educational world, their only liveliness being the ghost of some distant instructor who graded half-hearted discussion board participation.
It wasn’t until Jason Snart that I understood what an online course could be. In his chapter of Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction, Snart contends that online courses, whether hybrid or fully online, are unique spaces requiring their own pedagogies and course development. He argues that they’re not just “variant” models of a “traditional” face-to-face course, but, instead, a space that contain synchronous and asynchronous elements, a space with access issues, issues that require new lenses and ideas in order to properly address them (94). Snart’s piece began chiseling away at some of my preconceptions and opened my mind to further scholarship.
The article coming from Miami University—Kairotic Design: Building Flexible Networks for Online Composition, by Lance Cummings, Renea Frey, Ryan Ireland, Caitlin Martin, Heidi McKee, Jason Palmeri, and James Porter—alongside the Yergeau, Brewer, Kerschbaum, Oswal, Price, Salvo, Selfe, and Howes piece, “Multimodality in Motion: Disability and Kairotic Spaces,” began shaping my newfound openness into course design and praxis.
Reading the Cummings et al. piece, I became particularly attuned to issues of space: home spaces, synchronous course design, and asynchronous activities. In particular, I became attuned to the importance of choosing a software that acts as an organizing principle for students; the home space, a landing page so students might access announcements and links to outside websites supplementary course materials. Cummings et al. advocate for a “network approach to online platforms and interfaces—using different ones for different kinds of instruction,” a model that I admire (“Space Decisions”). While I do use my institution’s Learning Management System Canvas as my home space, Canvas acts as a place to congregate links to other sites we might use. Additionally, I appreciate Cummings et al.’s belief that any sites branching from the home space have a rational attached to them, a rational that answers to a new kind of instruction.
Yergeau et al.’s held a variety of threshold concepts for me. I find their discussions of retrofitting and accommodation perhaps most engaging. My institution—Florida State University—does have a variety of policies and resources in place to assure courses meet ADA compliance; however, after reading the scholarship presented in the Yergeau et al. piece, I understand that meeting these standards should not be my end goal. With the Yergeau et al. piece being informed by Jay Dolmage’s “Universal Design: Places to Start” in Disability Studies Quarterly, I have begun to consider my role as an instructor in vastly different ways. Dolmage, Yergeau et al., and others all advocate for the benefits of redundancy, flexibility, and multimodality as a benefit, allowing students to receive information through a variety of texts that privilege different abilities, or submit a myriad of different texts for the same reason. In my classroom, I’m now hyperaware of the means in which I deliver information and require students to submit work to me; for example, I ensure that whatever I write on the board in my face-to-face courses are verbally stated, and I also ensure that my course materials have supplementary texts to go alongside them to meet a variety of learning styles and abilities.
As I consider the materials I’ve developed thus far, the scholarship that I draw from, and the experience with OWI that I’ve had thus far, I’ve noticed a recurring theme in my own personal pedagogy: the centering of my students. Ultimately, when I teach, I want to ensure that my students can connect to the material, engage with it, and complete it on their own terms. I want my students to see themselves in their work: I want them to know that writing considers issues of race, disability, and other elements of identity. I want my students to compose texts that are indicative of their interests and strengths. Further, I want my students to feel welcome in my course. One of the ways I’ve seen this enacted is through my “Introduce Yourself” assignment. In this assignment, students are asked to consider genre, rhetorical situation, and appropriate response; thus, students must pick a genre, creating any text they can think of that adequately responds to the goal of the assignment: the self introduction. I believe the freedom this assignment allows at the beginning of the course sets a precedent that the students’ prior knowledge and ability they bring to the composition classroom will be honored and sharpened through rhetorical inquiry.
Finally, looking forward, I intend to create more engaging videos now that I am comfortable with the screen recording software. It’s my hope that as I continue to develop my own academic identity, I can bring a sense of branding to these videos. I’d like to incorporate music, perhaps and introduction to each video, and more visuals; further, I’d like to explore more tools like the WAVE Accessibility Plug-In online. I’m very curious what software offerings exist in the likes of the WAVE tool, and am especially interested in testing my own course materials out through various screen-reading software. It is my hope that as I continue to use the tools that my students may use to engage with my course, I can better craft course materials that meet their needs. Ultimately, I teach for my students: I’m here because I find joy in teaching writing, and I want them to feel that joy themselves. It is my goal, then, in a face-to-face or online classroom, that this joy is fostered through accessible course design, an acknowledgement of their identity, a fostering of their prior knowledge, and a course that subverts the rhythm of my prior section of online art history.