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Graduate Students’ Development of Academic Identities
The Goals and Mission of EnglWrit111
The Goals and Mission of EnglWrit111
The history of EnglWrit111 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is intertwined with a larger institutional history of student activism, basic writing, and critical pedagogy. The course first began in 1982 as a basic writing course that functioned as a prerequisite to first year writing for students who did not meet placement standards for that class (Writing Program). In the late 1980s, UMass Amherst students staged a series of protests in response to a campus culture of racism and discrimination, demanding that the university take action. The UMass Amherst Writing Program – directed by Anne Herrington and Marcia Curtis – debuted a new EnglWrit111 curriculum in 1990, designed to “incorporate civility and diversity” (Herrington) including a revised course text list, which featured stories about social identity and discrimination (Watkins). Herrington and Curtis’ vision laid the foundation for future curricular updates, which follow general trends in the field of basic writing to move beyond a focus on correcting perceived student errors through the teaching of rote mechanical skills to a field that centers student writing development through critical pedagogy (Gilyard; Horner; Shaughnessy; Shor).
Throughout the course’s history, there has been a strong focus on critical pedagogy as a way of supporting students’ self-reflection and writing growth (Herrington and Curtis; Lee; Moran). Past instructors have emphasized the opportunity to focus on how students’ identities and their social contexts are inseparable from their experiences of writing, noting in particular that these classes can be “contact zones” (Lee 182). This is a history we have learned about in coursework and professional development we’ve received as graduate instructors. Furthermore, in recent years, the course was outwardly revised in order to recognize the work already happening within the 111 classrooms. In response to critiques that developmental courses delay student progress towards degree without offering skill-building opportunities (Morales and Reid; Kim; Weaver), the course is now a credit-bearing course that carries Interdisciplinary and United States Diversity designations, meaning it fulfills graduation requirements and does not slow down degree progression. Additionally, the Writing Program has moved away from a placement exam to a directed self-placement model, where students knowingly self-select into taking this course. Finally, in order to more accurately reflect its content and purpose, the course was renamed to Writing, Identity, and Power.
In accordance with these curricular shifts, each section of the course shares learning objectives. Rather than copy them here in full, we highlight a few that are especially relevant to our teaching experiences. In the course, students will:
- Explore different disciplinary perspectives on writing, language, and literacy;
- Understand that writing is socially and culturally situated, and that the ways in which writing practices are valued are tied to larger systems of power and privilege;
- Become familiar with practices used in process-oriented writing courses. . .;
- Practice respectful and ethical ways of engaging with others’ ideas. . .;
- Develop lines of intellectual inquiry through reading, writing, and primary source research… (Writing Program 23)
We, as instructors at UMass Amherst, are shaped by our program’s focus and history, especially given the extensive support and training we receive in the teaching of writing. However, we hope to show how we are co-creating these learning objectives by taking them up in our classrooms differently, based on our own areas of research. In what follows, we offer three narratives of our teaching to highlight how we also bring our own scholarly investments in writing into our classes and thus meet the course’s learning objectives in different but valuable ways. We show how we each negotiate the experienced-teacher/emergent-researcher dynamic from within the space offered to us by this course.