One thing to think about while assessing Gholdy Muhammad’s approach to teaching is how the different aspects of historically responsive literacy might intersect and interweave with each other to bolster and support your and your students’ work. How might we focalize each individual identity in our classroom while building the students’ skillsets—especially their habits of practice? In last Friday’s blog post, I wrote about two of the four ideas forwarded in Cultivating Genius. In this blog post, I want to think about some specifics on how we might bring those two aspects—identity and skills—into conversation with the University of Connecticut first-year writing habits of practice—collecting and curating, engaging, contextualizing, theorizing, and circulating. Below you’ll find some ideas that’ll hopefully help to get you started on how you can bring these two pedagogical frameworks into conversation in your own praxis.

How can we bring out their identity when thinking about collecting and curating?

We could consider a collecting and curating activity in which they represent themselves by creating a collage from old magazines. After this in-class activity, we could lead them through a discussion of the strengths and difficulties it took to collect, curate, and even circulate their identities in this way.

How can we bring out their identity when thinking about engaging?

One possible way is to invite them to write about someone in their life. They should use their words to describe the person, their relationship to them, and how they engage with that person. Then, the students could reach out to that person and share what they wrote, asking the person about what they wrote about them. Once they’ve done this, we could lead a classroom discussion about what the students noticed and what they might’ve engaged in a different way than their subject. This can lead to a discussion about engaging with a source and how engagement is based on point of view but also on trying to represent the author’s point of view accurately and correctly.

How can we bring out their identity when thinking about contextualizing?

Set a timer for 5 minutes and have the students write down everything that contextualizes them and their family. (If you want to make it even more interesting, you could give the class a single letter and every word has to start with that letter, like in Scattergories). Pair up the students and have them share their list with each other. Is there anything the same? Similar? Different? Have them discuss those similarities and differences to see that contexts change based on each person (but sometimes they’re the same too).

How can we bring out their identity when thinking about theorizing?

Watch a short episode or read a short story. As a class, choose a character depicted in the media (or split the class into different groups and assign them different characters). Ask the students to then create two columns on a piece of paper. On the left-side column, ask them to write things about that character, either from their past or in their future after the story has concluded. How did the character grow up? What happens to the character after “the end”? The students will be theorizing about the character. In the right column, have them write down the evidence for that theory. What is said in the story or shown on the screen that lends to that theory about the character’s identity? Share with the class what may happen to the character and the reason for those theorizations.

How can we bring out their identity when thinking about circulating?

Ask students to reflectively write about how they circulate themselves in the world. How do they pick their clothes? Their interaction spaces? Their online spaces? Their choice of social media apps? Lead them in a discussion about how that is them circulating their own identity through different media.

While these are just a few ideas of bringing Muhammad’s work into the framework of first-year writing curriculum at the University of Connecticut, I’d love to hear more about what you think about the two. Feel free to reach out to me at the ECE English email address. I hope your week is going great!

Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius is focused on bringing out historical approaches to literacy to improve the learning experiences of, specifically, students with marginalized identities, but also students of all identities. Her book invites teachers to engage deeply with the identity and legacy of each of their students, being mindful of how this history, genealogy, and atmosphere can be utilized to improve the learning experience in the classroom. She forwards “historically responsive literacy,” which “responds to the histories, identities, and literacy and language practices of students” (Ch. 2). For each of her assignments, lesson plans, and evaluative methods of education she focuses on four aspects: identity, skills, intellect, and criticality.

In this blog post, I focus on the first two aspects—identity and skills—to discuss possibilities of how they might be engaged in our writing classrooms. I conclude with some thoughts on how identity and skills might be brought together in different classroom activities.

Identity

The identity aspect of historically responsive literacy emphasizes the meaning-making that occurs through literacy—in other words, how words, texts, and, to think through multimodality, ways of communication shape our individual self. Muhammad centers this in “the ability to read one’s world,” which means “understanding the self within local and broader contexts and reading the signs of the time to inform . . . actions and behaviors” (Ch. 2).

Lesson Idea: Developing Identity through Interviews

If you have a project that utilizes interviewing skills, try out this exercise with students (for more, see Ch. 3 in Cultivating Genius; adapted from Muhammad’s “Brief ‘Who Are You?’ Exercise”)

• Pair students up and have them decide who is “a” and who is “b”
• Have the students take turns asking the other “Who are you?” The other student can only respond with one sentence, and it must be different than what was previously stated. Have them answer quickly and get as many answers within one minute as they can give.
• Have the students write down what they remember the other student said, as though they are reporting on the other person’s “Who Are You?”
• Invite the students to share with each other their short paragraphs on the other person. How did the person’s recollection match up to their partner’s words?
• This activity can lead into a discussion about interview integrity and representing other people on the page. Reporting on what other people say (and who they are) doesn’t always work perfectly, but it’s worth the practice.

Identity can be integrated into every activity because writing allows students to put their identity on their page—no matter what they are writing. One of the tasks for us as teachers is to point out how a student’s self comes through in writing and how their identity affects what they say and how they say it (for good!).

Skills

Muhammad’s book pulls on her training as a historian and illustrates her four aspects of historically responsive literacy through the history of Black literary groups from the 1800s. “Sharing and shaping their writings through . . . peer critique,” Muhammad writes, describing a particular writing group led by William Garrison of The Liberator, “created stronger compositions—and exemplifies the skill development that took place in the literary societies” (Ch. 4). Peer review and feedback, critiquing and revising drafts, is a long and treasured process of developing writing skills.

Muhammad offers the following two-pronged approach to develop skill in writing: “First, the teacher should teach the genre of the writing, whether students are writing responses to literature or a word problem or writing poetry or essays. This is best accomplished by using several examples of authentic and meaningful texts. Then it is important to craft elements and assessment language of that particular genre and connect them to the learning standards. Then students need to learn those elements and practice their writing with several stages of feedback from peers and the teacher” (Ch. 3). Key for Muhammad in this relationship is not only working with students on the genre they’re writing but also teaching them how to assess their writing so they have a vocabulary of skills to match up when they are talking with their peers and with you.

For example, if you’re focusing the teaching of writing on the habits of practice (what we’ve called Writing Moves), you might develop vocabulary to explain the habits of practice and to assess the habits of practice, as seen in the table below. In the “skills to learn” column, I have taken one of the learning objectives from the table provided on the writing moves page linked earlier in this paragraph. In the “Language of Assessment” column, I have tried to provide a way that you might explain your assessment process of that learning objective to your students, while still trying to give students the freedom to play with their assignments.

Habit of Practice	Skills to Learn	Language of Assessment
Collecting and Curating	Create a purposeful assemblage using collected artifacts for your audience.	A “purposeful assemblage” is something created with an intention or reason. Your intention or reason will be clearly stated in your curation note of the assignment.
Engaging	Determine a text or texts’ set of ideas and questions to find a way into other texts/to formulate a response to it/to make use of a text	You will be assessed on how well you introduce a text, quote or paraphrase the text, and analyze the text. To introduce a text, you should tell us a little bit about the text. To quote or paraphrase the text, you should choose a short part that encapsulates what you’re pointing to. To analyze or respond to the text, you will need to write how that text applies to what you’re saying overall. You will be assessed on these three components of engaging.
Contextualizing	Situate your project, issue, or event within the relevant context(s)	Throughout your project, do you explain how the text you’re engaging or the idea you’re discussing relates to broader communities, arguments, or ideas. You will be assessed on whether or not you do this at least once in your assignment.
Theorizing	Intervene, contribute to, change, or provide new ways of seeing a conversation, question, topic, or issue	You will be assessed on whether or not you say something about the information you’ve collected. This does not need to be an argument, but you do need to offer a new idea or new way of looking at things. This should be done in your own words, not through a quote or idea of someone else.
Circulating	Experiment with different platforms to determine how audiences might interact with your text on those platforms.	You will be assessed on your reflection on circulating that you do after the project. You should answer how your process changed with the different way that you shared the information.

Muhammad outlines further ways of giving students different ideas to support their development of their writing skills. If you have any ways of developing skills in your classroom that create a vocabulary and teach that language of assessment, we’d love to hear about it! We can share it with other teachers through the blog or through a recording of you explaining it.

---

We’d love to hear about any examples of bringing optimism, positivity, and joy into your critiquing process. Please email us about your experiences, and we can highlight them on the blog and share them with your fellow first-year writing teachers.

Registration is open for our October 6 Conference. We’d love to see you there!

If you missed it, Jason Courtmanche in The Write Space wrote about some weird and interesting experiences in a reflection on his teaching career.

Please remember to upload your course materials on our website.

Welcome to the new school year, 2023–2024! As you get into the rhythm of the year, we hope you’re starting it’s starting well. At ECE English, we have a new graduate assistant, Adam McLain (he/they), who will work on a few initiatives to support you and your classrooms. Adam is in their second year as a graduate student and studies utopian and dystopian literature. He’s excited to learn more about teaching from all the outstanding teachers working with first-year writing in high school.

First and foremost is our upcoming conference on October 6. If you’re able to attend, please remember to register. Our conference theme is “Salutations, Congratulations, and Critiques: Praise and Optimism in the Writing Classroom.” Over the next three months, from September to November, our programming—blog posts, emails, outreach events like the October conference, and more—will focus on critiquing and feedback. Specifically, we’ll be thinking of how to integrate praise and optimism into our criticism and responses to and between students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In our introduction to the conference, we pointed to four different texts—Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy; Deonna Smith’s Rooted in Joy; and Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. With our blog, we will focus on these texts and how the principles taught within can be utilized to bring praise and optimism into the first-year writing text. Each book applies anti-racist frameworks to think about how to support all students in the classroom.

Gholdy Muhammad, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Response Literacy

In Cultivating Genius, Gholdy Muhammad uses her background in studying 19^th-century Black literacy societies to develop a framework called “historically responsive literacy,” which utilizes four key aspects—identity, skill, intelligence, and criticality—as a new catalyst to understanding if our course materials are supporting the whole student. Instead of making these into numbered standards, she places them as developmental focuses—how does this lesson develop the student’s identity, skill, intelligence, or criticality?

Gholdy Muhammad, Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning

Muhammad adds to her four-aspect framework from Cultivating Genius with a fifth developmental axis: joy. How are we invoking, preserving, and sparking joy in the lives of our students? How are we helping them increase their joy in learning and living? With this follow-up, Muhammad focuses on the intricacies of genius, justice, and joy.

Deonna Smith, Rooted in Joy: Creating a Classroom Culture of Equity, Belonging, and Care

Joy can be a part of our work toward justice, Deonna Smith argues in this book that blends theory and praxis. Indeed, our work in front of the classroom and working with our students should be one with a foundation in joy. Smith reframes equity and belonging not as a checklist of things to do but as a happy place where we bring optimism into our classrooms, schools, and communities.

Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom

Felica Rose Chavez pulls on anti-racist and decolonial frameworks to offer a new perspective on what the writing classroom should look like. In it, she offers a writing classroom divorced from the hierarchy of tearing down writing (to build one’s writing up) and forwards a workshop that builds a community of like-minded writers, striving to improve self and the written word.

We invite you to read along with us in our blogging as we use these four books to support our three-month theme of critiquing and feedback. We’ll be starting with Cultivating Genius, then moving to Rooted in Joy, then The Anti-Racist Workshop, and concluding with Unearthing Joy. With each of our posts, we’ll focus on how principles taught within the books can support the first-year writing classroom. Emphasizing critique and feedback, we’ll see how Muhammad’s, Smith’s, and Chavez’s work relates to and engages with current theoretical conversations around critique and criticism. We’ll also discuss how their pedagogical approaches bolster our understanding of our multimodal, studio pedagogy, first-year writing classroom that engages with the five habits of practice—collecting and curating, engaging, contextualizing, theorizing, and circulating.

Critique and feedback—circulation, more broadly—is integral to the first-year writing curriculum through the University of Connecticut. Circulation is the habit of practice that emphasizes sharing work. Through peer review, class workshops, and turning in work, our students circulate their work in a classroom-insulated space. How might we invoke not only critical critique but also how might we create a space that engenders positive and optimistic engagement with our students? How do we create a space where our students and we respond optimistically to each others’ writings? How do we measure our praise with our critique? How do we make critical comments a positive instead of a negative experience?

With this focus on positivity and optimism, the hope is not to apply a thin layer of toxic positivity or faked optimism. We want to inspire real love and joy in our students’ approach to writing—and we hope to develop being able to do that more by integrating feedback into our courses. We hope this theme over the next few months will support your reflections on the feedback avenues within your classroom and how they inspire and bring happiness into students’ lives.

We hope this start to the year is going well and that you’ll join us for our conference in October.

---

We’d love to hear about any examples of bringing optimism, positivity, and joy into your critiquing process. Please email us about your experiences, and we can highlight them on the blog and share them with your fellow first-year writing teachers.

If you’re interested in advising the programming and support that ECE provides first-year writing teachers in our program, please fill out the form about joining our advisory board.

If you missed it, Jason Courtmanche in The Write Space wrote about teaching Asian American and Pacific Islander literature in his blog this week.

Please remember to upload your course materials on our website.

Last month, ECE English held its second virtual workshop of the year—this time, on visual rhetoric in the composition classroom. Though we opened our discussion through the lens of teaching infographics, we had a great time talking about the elements of visual design from a number of approaches. Certainly, there are countless ways to challenge your students to think about the importance of visual design in the media they encounter daily and the projects they assemble.

We spoke briefly about the main elements of visual design outlined in the ENGL 1007 curriculum, which include balance, alignment, emphasis, proportion, movement, pattern, contrast, and unity. Here’s a brief video highlighting what each of those elements look like in action.

In my own classes, I often use examples like book covers or movie posters to talk about the relevant elements of visual rhetoric I want my students to wrestle with. (These elements might change depending on the project they’re working on!) It’s always fun to bring in pop culture and pick apart the very deliberate choices that make certain advertisements, posters, illustrations, and packaging so effective.

For example, if I knew my students were familiar with the film, I might show them the poster for Everything Everywhere All At Once and prompt a conversation about what it’s accomplishing in its design and storytelling choices. It’s massively cluttered, yet orderly and symmetrical; what does that suggest about the film’s themes? What motifs are repeated throughout? What images are enlarged (made important), and why? How is the text formatted, and why? What kinds of colors are used? What draws your eye first?

Similarly, I could show them a book cover and have the same conversation. The example I used in March’s workshop was the cover of Katherine J. Chen’s novel Joan. The text and fleur-de-lis are perfectly balanced across four even quadrants, and the font is consistent. Even the color palette follows the same rules: it is inverted across quadrants, but remains the same. This cover also prompts questions about when designers break the rules: what might an asymmetrical design be trying to accomplish? What about unsettling color choices?

This is a great way to generate conversation at the beginning of a visual unit, and it can also be fun to ask your students to bring in everyday examples, as well. Instead of searching for posters or advertisements, have them perform a visual rhetorical analysis on one of their class textbooks, or a poster they saw hanging up in the hall outside of your classroom. As I engage my students in the elements of visual design, I’m also always asking them to consider the rhetorical situation in general, too: what is this text’s overall purpose, and who is the intended audience? How do you know? Is it effective and accessible?

Visual design might not be the first thing we think about when planning a composition class, and we’re certainly not expected to be experts here, but it’s important (and fun, too). I’m reminded of my copy of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which begins with a note on the type: “This book was set on the Linotype in Janson […] This type is an excellent example of the influential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon developed his own comparable designs from them.” Writing and designing have always gone hand-in-hand, and conversation can be sparked from something as simple as a font in a book. As your students work on their various multimodal projects and you begin thinking about what assignments you’d like to incorporate next year, consider sharing any interesting and exciting conversations you might have with us! You can find a round-up of the workshop’s resources here, on our event page.