On August 30, 2017, three students from my Queens College composition course published an article in the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Hybrid Pedagogy. Their article, “The Ultimate Life Experience: Preparing Students for the World Beyond the Classroom” argues that colleges ought to prepare students for a great future, and offers concrete suggestions for how teachers, administrators, and students can work together to make this happen.
This blog is the practical, step-by-step, how-to guide that describes how I structured our course around a final assignment that challenged students to co-author submissions to the journal. For more about the pedagogical decisions that went into this, see my article “Write Out Loud: Teaching Writing Through Digital Publishing” in Hybrid Pedagogy (forthcoming). You should feel free to reuse, remix, or borrow from anything you read in this post.
Introduction
One of the most important and challenging lessons to teach in college writing courses is that language is a source of power that makes things happen in the world. Once students recognize the profound implications of our work with language, many of the skills instructors value — argumentation, organization, revision, editing, proofreading – become much easier to teach. In addition, given that many of us work with students for merely one semester, when we want or need at least two, I am much more confident that students will leave my class and continue to work on their writing if I know that they have a deep understanding of how and why language matters in the world.
In fall 2016, I taught a basic writing course at Queens College on “The Purpose of Education.” Instead of writing a traditional final paper that would be read solely by students’ peers and their instructor, this project challenged students to use what they had learned over the course of a semester to collaboratively author submissions to a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal. After spending a semester immersed in debates about active learning, critical pedagogy, the role of technology in education, standardized testing, education funding, and segregated schooling, I guided students in their attempts to enter an ongoing scholarly conversation occurring among the Hybrid Pedagogy community. With this assignment, students further developed their reading, writing, and revising skills; practiced writing for a specific audience; and learned the power of their own voices and stories. Writing with the explicit intent of publication was an effort to help students understand how their words matter in the world beyond the classroom.
Read the full post on HASTAC.
