First-year writing courses through the University of Connecticut have six essential components that undergird the entire class: (1) course inquiry; (2) field research; (3) studio pedagogy; (4) multimodal composition; (5) information, digital, and media literacy; and (6) reflective writing. Over the last few blog posts, we’ve been assessing how Gholdy Muhammad’s four aspects of historically responsive literacy can engage in feedback and the habits of practice. For this blog post, we’ll be considering Muhammad’s fifth aspect, joy, developed in her book Unearthing Joy, in relation to each of the essential components and how they might be used to create a joyful experience in the writing classroom.

For Muhammad, joy is not simply happiness or a rush of endorphins; joy is uplifting “beauty, aesthetics, truth, ease, wonder, [and] wellness,” forming “solutions to the problems of the world,” and finding “personal fulfillment” (Introduction). A fun classroom can be a part of bringing in the aspect of joy, but the real work of joy comes in developing purpose and passion. In the writing classroom, this could mean encouraging students to form a relationship with writing that shows them how it can affect the world around them and their own selves. 

Joy in Inquiry

Course inquiries guide each version of first-year writing, giving enough railing for students to be pointed in the right direction but also enough room for the students to guide their personal inquiries and learning. In the baseline syllabus for the Storrs campus, the collective inquiry is, “What does an education do?” For the semester, readings and discussions are based around education, but each student develops their own questions and lines of inquiry in relation to the class’s guiding question (or questions). “What does an education do?” is broad enough that it can expand to fit each student’s questions.

Students can find joy in inquiry by discovering their own passions and interests. The inquiry is meant to allow a student to follow their own wonder, developing their writing projects as answers to their own questions. With the educational inquiry, for example, a student who is passionate about mental health might lead out in asking questions about mental health in education and how it can be improved, while a student who is passionate about sports and fitness might use their writing and research to uncover ways of integrating fitness more into the classroom. In this way, all the students are learning about education and what it does, but they are pursuing their own inquiries. This solo pursuit supporting a group inquiry creates an atmosphere of finding joy in discovery—whether that discovery is your own answers or someone else’s in the classroom.

Additionally, a collective inquiry for the course allows students to discover alongside each other new voices and projects that are pursuing similar work, if perhaps at a scale larger than the course itself. As students dive into the archive, read up on their chosen inquiry, and learn new things, they find joy in finding out that they can put their voice alongside the voice of those in a chosen scholarly field and those in the classroom around them. Inquiries—both individual and collective—mean that knowledge is growing within the classroom atmosphere and with those in the discipline.

Joy in Field Research

First-year writing is meant to support students developing a wide range of skills that allow them to practice the philosophies and methodologies forwarded in discovering, learning, and researching. It is meant to help students think about how to solve problems and develop their writing on their own. A lot of answers can come from books and articles, but answering questions sometimes requires more than just reading. Sometimes it requires students to do field research.

Field research develops different approaches to questions and finding answers. While the skills of close reading (or listening) and good note-taking are important to field research, field research also encourages students to think critically in the moment. If, for example, you have a project built on the Humans of Education project, in which students interview people in the field and discover what their opinions are, the students will discover that they have to think quickly in the moment of the interview—especially when the person doesn’t provide a lot of in-depth information that can be collected and curated into the final project. This quick-thinking can bring joy in a student’s work because they’re having to stay engaged in the conversation and not lose any threads of thought while talking. Juggling between the different ideas that must happen when performing field research adds a purpose to the execution of this essential component.

Joyful Studio Pedagogies

Studio pedagogy is meant to be fun! It encourages creativity and messiness and messing up and doing things wrong and failing and also winning and finishing and being proud of making. All of these things can evoke joy in our classroom. By getting messy—from using glue sticks and poster board to remixing work through Canva or Adobe Express—students engage in “active and accessible learning, play, design, and digital literacies.” But even more, they get to see what’s possible and how they can all find different ways of sharing ideas and finding those ideas in what their peers make. Joy in studio pedagogy also comes from engaging in projects as a group, developing talents alongside each other and seeing how other people think.

Joyful Multimodal Compositions

Students participate in multimodality on a daily basis. As they scroll through social media, walk around a grocery store, or watch a television show, they are experiencing multimodal compositions. Multimodal composition reflects how the world around us has changed from one in which we get information from ink and paper to one in which we learn and communicate through small rectangular black boxes that bring video, images, and sound to the palm of our hands. Being able to participate—even make a change through—this method of communication and interaction is an important part of multimodal composition; it’s meant to not only ask students to think outside the box but also to analyze and rhetorically understand outside the box too.

Joy in Information, Digital, and Media Literacy

While information, digital, and media literacy is about learning the skill of navigating the library system, it’s also about learning how to assess and understand what is being presented to us in our information overload society. How does one take time out of their scrolling to answer the age-old question, “Why”? This form of literacy teaches the skills of academic research—diving into library databases, grasping how to read an academic article, and developing an approach to learning more about an article’s research genealogy. It also helps students form a deeper understanding of what they are consuming—from TikTok videos to informational YouTube videos to Instagram posts to news articles—and how to learn more. This exploration can bring joy into the classroom by exciting students about different ideas that are all around them. 

Reflective Writing for Joy

Reflective writing can be used in many parts of the first-year writing classroom—from self-assessment of an assignment to preparing thoughts for a discussion to starting a writing assignment. Self-assessment reflective writing can be a way for students to find joy by discovering a truth about their own writing process. When students engage in reflective writing to help them prepare their thoughts for a classroom discussion, they are untethered from having to have a clear, coherent, and polished presentation and can engage in the joyful process of wondering and exploring ideas. 

In the last two posts on Gholdy Muhammad’s historically responsive literacy, I focused on the first two of four aspects she puts forward in Cultivating Genius: identity and skills. I offered possibilities for how those two aspects might be considered in light of our habits of practice. Now we turn to the last two aspects of HRL (intellect/intellectualism and criticality) along with some concluding thoughts on this series of posts.

Intellectualism

Intellectualism, for Muhammad, is about understanding things and knowing how those things affect the world around someone. It is knowledge, and it is knowledge in action. A person with intellect is someone who understands the information they’ve accumulated through an education and does something with that knowledge to better the world around them. 

In many ways, Muhammad’s approach to intellectualism could be brought into conversation with the habit of practice “contextualizing.” To contextualize writing means to put it into relationship with what is happening around it. It is an acknowledgment that writing doesn’t happen away from or without culture but that writing is the very middle of what is happening. 

Muhammad does warn: “I find that intellectualism can be minimized in schools as the focus shifts to skills and test prep” (Ch. 5). Intellect is more than learning how to do something; it’s also about learning why to do something and why we learn how to do it. Muhammad uses the following example to illustrate her point:

“As an example, teachers should teach students on the subject of ‘What does mathematics mean?’ I asked this question once to large group of high school math teachers, and no one knew, but they all saw the importance of learning the ways mathematics is defined. Mathematics (like all content areas or disciplines) has a rich history, and the ways it was conceptualized has changed over time. Teachers ought to teach the history of their discipline . . . as an intellectual endeavor.” (Ch. 5)

We can apply this example to the writing classroom. “What does writing mean?” The answer will be different to each person and their understanding of the history of writing, but there are specific ways writing has been used throughout history—for instruction, for communication, for philosophy, for personal thought and record, for history, for procedure, for propaganda—that Muhammad invites us to bring into our classrooms. 

We might consider teaching the history of a multimodal project. How, for example, did social media come about, if we’re asking students to make a TikTok video? We could also talk about how social media can be used for data collection, political influence, and social change and ask students to reflect on their experience with social media and their reasons for making certain choices in their project creation. 

One way this pursuit of intellectualism could be brought into feedback is through a modified peer review. Have students partner up with another person creating the same type of multimodal project. The student peer then writes a short response to the peer’s work. What historical contexts or concepts do the students see in their peers’ works? How does their peers’ works engage in a broader conversation around that media? In providing feedback attuned to the context and engagement a multimodal project is doing, students will gain a deeper understanding of how their writing and other people’s writings are in conversation with others—or how they might be able to bring their work into more conversation with others.

Criticality

Criticality encourages people to take an anti-oppressive stance in their activism and writing about the society around them. Because there are various forms of oppression in society—sexism, racism, etc.—criticality encourages rooting them out, interrogating where, how, and why they are, and pursuing a way toward a just future. It creates a “transformative purpose for change and liberation” (Ch. 2), recognizing that in this world, we all face oppression and subjugation. 

When providing feedback, we might use criticality as a way to push our students to apply their writing more to an engagement with the world around them. How, we might ask the student, does this part of the essay or multimodal assignment invest them in helping to improve society? It may not cause a great change or the end of oppression, but it is a small way—within the community they’ve grown up and within the community of the classroom—to oppose oppression.

Criticality could also be used as a way to provide guidance in peer review. Muhammad writes that criticality includes “reading print texts and contexts with an understanding of how power, anti-oppression, and equity operates throughout society. Criticality enables us to question both the world and texts within it to better understand the truth in history, power, and equity” (Ch. 6). Along this vein, we might consider having our students read each other’s work and respond to the following questions:

• How does this work understand and negotiate power?
• How does this work oppose oppression and encourage equity?
• How does this work question the world around us?
• How does this work improve our understanding of history, power, and equity?

While this might not work with every writing assignment, it could lead to interesting conversations between students about the application of their written and designed work.

Conclusion to Cultivating Genius and HRL

Muhammad’s work in Cultivating Genius has given us four specific aspects to think about and consider in relation to the various concepts used in the first-year writing classroom through the University of Connecticut. These ideas have helped us analyze how we might expand our use of the habits of practice, the essential components of the FYW classroom, and feedback and response to our student writers. 

HRL reminds us to think about how we are encouraging our student’s to use their entire being to develop themselves as thinkers and engagers in the world. How, HRL asks in the first-year writing classroom, might we use this writing project or that multimodal assignment to affect the world around us? This effect might not be grand or large—each writing assignment does not need to change the entire world. But HRL does help us focus on how a writing assignment might affect two or more students in conversation with each other about a topic or assignment. 

By asking ourselves how each writing assignment encourages identity formation, skill acquisition, intellectual engagement, and criticality opposed to oppression, we integrate into our pedagogy a way of making each assignment and lesson applicable.

Questions to Consider About HRL in the Writing Classroom

Muhammad invites us to think about how we might reframe and reassess our lesson plans. Identity, skills, intellect, and criticality are all things we are emphasizing in our teaching of writing, but by using Muhammad’s new vocabulary and historically influenced approach, we might see new ways we can highlight different aspects that can support our students’ writing.

Muhammad offers four questions around the four aspects of historically responsive literacy (qtd. from Ch. 2):

• Identity: How will my instruction help students to learn something about themselves and/or about others?
• Skills: How will my instruction build students’ skills for the content area?
• Intellect: How will my instruction build students’ skills for the content area?
• Criticality: How will my instruction engage students’ thinking about power and equity and the disruption of oppression?

To end this blog series on Cultivating Genius, I want to leave you with some questions to consider in your writing classroom:

• How does your feedback to students invite them to expand their own identity?
• How do your interactions with students engage them in developing their skills?
• How might a peer review session increase a student’s intellect? How can you point to that in the post-peer review lesson?
• Are your students thinking critically about their own writing and their peers’ writings? How can you model that for students? How can you invite them to question each other in a way that is inviting and increasing criticality?

I really enjoyed sitting in a room with so many of you and feeling your enthusiasm and deduction to education. Because I am new to this position, I wanted to create a conference in which the experience in the room was shared between each teacher. There is so much knowledge within the many years of classroom teaching that combine when we all get together, and I hoped that in getting us to reflect, converse, and engage with each other, we were able—and continue to be able—to utilize and share that vast amount of wisdom.

For our Fall 2023 Conference, we had an animated conversation about feedback and how we provide it to students. The conference favored an egalitarian approach to learning about feedback, focusing on sharing with each other and then with the group different ideas for providing feedback within the first-year writing classroom.

Feedback is essential to the writing process, especially as we help to encourage and point new writers toward improving their writing craft and taking charge of their writing. Our course emphasizes writing as communication, and our feedback therefore models attentive, engaged reading. The conference was based on a think-pair-share methodology, with each workshop supporting reflective writing, pairing or grouping up, and then sharing with the entire collective. Many participants use feedback to support students questioning and interrogating their own work, conversing with students if a lot of feedback is needed, and coaxing out of students new ideas and approaches, especially while supporting and praising vulnerability in writing.

A core question we considered was how to give positive feedback that encourages students in a direction that can improve their writing rather than just correcting them into the right direction. Many teachers talked about their difficulty of remembering to provide positive and encouraging feedback to a paper, especially when the paper isn’t written that well. As we talked about how we might expand a paper that didn’t go into much personal detail, some of the participants reminded us to thank a student when they share or attempt to share something vulnerable or personal in their writing. I think this is a really great thing to engage in. When do we thank our students for taking time to work on their essays? When do we thank them for thinking through ideas that are difficult and sometimes personal? This approach of gratitude toward writing can be used to highlight good things done in an essay—a personal anecdote, an idea or method that is unique to the student, etc.—and thereby encourage that student to continue being personal in their writing. Putting attention on social, affective parts of writing can help students see writing as more than just a formal exercise.

We also collectively considered giving feedback to multimodal projects, something that I’ll continue to write on in these blog posts since the approach is still new to many and is multifaceted. How, we asked, do we assess and thereby give feedback to a project that isn’t in our wheelhouse, like a website, a podcast, or a digital creation? In our group conversation, we talked about focusing on the concrete aspects of writing, commenting on the creativity, developing rubrics that guide students, and engaging in conversations with our students. One of my favorite feedback suggestions was to just sit down with a student and ask them questions. Another response favored having the student ask questions of their own work, inviting them to point out what they think might not be the best or can be improved upon. This way of helping and supporting the student to become their own critic is helpful in developing them as a writer or creator without a classroom support system. And not everything needs to be assessed and quantified. We might worry less about how to “rank” multimodal projects and keep our focus on providing commentary, response, and reaction. What is this thing and how does it work? 

Many teachers favor talking to students in one-on-one settings, but this feedback practice can be close to impossible with the large number of students and limited time that we have. Are there ways to provide feedback to the entire class or to converse with students who might not be the best at talking with others? One of the things I want to work on providing over the next few months is different methods of giving general feedback, the positives and negatives for this approach, and how to manage the large teaching amount that’s asked of us within our programs (even twenty students is a lot to give feedback to!). I don’t believe generalized feedback should be applied in every situation, but I want to dive into the research to provide some thoughts and methods that have been studied and disseminated in the scholarly community.

Because styles and methods of feedback vary so widely, we would love to hear from you about what you want and need from us. What would you like us to research, share, and consider with the entire community when it comes to pedagogy? Where do you need help in your classroom and your approach to first-year writing? Send us an email (eceenglish@uconn.edu) for your voice to be heard! I see my purpose as the graduate assistant to support you in your teaching by providing scholarship, ideas, and provocations in order to develop pedagogy and praxis.

If you haven’t turned in the materials for your course, please do so ASAP. You can turn them in using this form.

On The Write Space, Jason talks about international and first-gen students, discussing some cool cross-cultural activities he’s been engaged in and how teaching Phyllis Wheatley relates to these students.

TL;DR Concrete Things to Apply in Your Teaching from the Conference (Text of the Above Image)

• Feedback can and should be both positive and constructive.
• Thank students who share personal experiences or specific details about their lives—they’re being vulnerable in writing and that should be applauded and appreciated.
• If you’re not sure how to give feedback on a multimodal project, have a meeting with a student and have them point to things they think they can improve. Let them lead the feedback process with their own eyes and knowledge.
• When sitting down to a feedback session with a student, be prepared to just ask them questions rather than providing them with specific feedback.
• Try to break down the hierarchy between teacher and student by letting the student take charge of their revisions.