Course Development Tool

 

This tool is intended for use by instructors who have an idea of what they would like their course inquiry to be and a rough idea of what their assignments may entail, but would like to further explore how this inquiry might work in the Writing Across Technology curriculum. It provides one structure for developing a course through the new curriculum - instructors may find that brainstorming their course through other means and in different directions first before going through this tool may work best for their teaching practices. The terms used in this form are not meant to be prescriptive, but, rather, the learning objectives, scaffolding process, and course moves we have developed describe practices we all engage in while composing across media and genres. In part, then, our goal is to make these practices visible.

Courses developed under the Writing Across Technology curriculum are project-based inquiries, collaboratively explored between both instructors and students throughout the semester. They center multimodal composition and universal design, and seek to make apparent that all writing is multimodal.

Click the headings below to learn more about our learning objectives and course moves.

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Learning Objectives

The Writing Across Technology curriculum includes five major learning objectives  that students will develop throughout the course. In essence, these objectives are the things students should be able to do by the end of the course, and will affect the way students engage with composition broadly and long-term. There are many ways to achieve these outcomes, and individual FYW courses are structured differently and reach these goals in various ways.

The five major learning objectives are:

  • Practice composing and writing as creative acts of inquiry and discovery through written, aural, visual, video, gestural, and spatial texts
  • Consider projects and problems from multiple ways of knowing
  • Develop new methods for all forms (including digital) of textual analysis, synthesis, and representation
  • Formulate strategies for the conceptual, investigative, practical, and reflective work of writing

  • Contribute to others’ knowledge and understanding through your research and compositions
  • Practice ethical scholarship and develop a strong identity as a responsible maker of meaning

  • Discover, analyze, and engage with others’ ideas in productive ways through complex texts
  • Approach and use texts as ways to analyze, interpret, and reconsider ideas
  • Extend your ideas to new ground in the context of others’ work

  • Identify and analyze conventions of disciplines
  • Interrogate genre expectations, including how knowledge is created and how evidence is used to forward work in academic disciplines
  • Evaluate the functional components of format, organization, document design, and citation

  • Recognize that technologies are not neutral tools for making meaning
  • Assess the context and mode of technology you are using to compose
  • Respond to situations with productive choices to deliver meaningful texts
  • Employ the principles of universal design to make your work accessible and legible to the widest possible audience

Course Moves

We’ve structured our curriculum in terms of five “moves,” by which we mean five actions or practices of writing.

What's the difference between learning objectives and course moves?

Learning objectives will fundamentally change the way students approach composition throughout and after the course. Course moves, instead, are rhetorical actions and practices that we engage with strategically depending on the work of each assignment.  You can learn more about each of these moves here. When we write, these moves are not altogether distinct, nor are they the only actions we take while writing. Instead we see these moves as interwoven, overlapping, and mutually constitutive. The order presented below is not meant to be prescriptive, as experienced writers rely on different methods, processes, and ways of thinking.

Assignments focus on one course move in order to facilitate metacognition about writers' practices, as well as to provide more directed assessment and evaluation for instructors.

This infographic shows the five course moves in hexagonal shapes: Collecting and Curating, Engaging and Entering a Conversation, Contextualizing, Theorizing, and Circulating.

  • Collecting & Curating refer to the practices of strategic observation or active “noticing,” and a move toward making something meaningful from the collection.
  • Engaging and Entering a Conversation is when writers look for ways into a conversation, consider ways to put the text to use (rather than reading for information that would be re-presented), and formulate how they might make a contribution.
  • Writers are Contextualizing when they situate a text among others that are in the conversation, but also when they consider a text in terms of its history, values, assumptions, and its ways of presenting or ordering the world.
  • Theorizing involves accounting for the reasons for a phenomenon, changing the terms of an argument, investigating what others have bracketed out of sight. It constitutes a contribution to the conversation, method, and the new knowledge the student produces in the course.
  • Circulating is when our students' work finds audiences not previously accounted for as their texts are distributed and their knowledge networked. Students’ digital literacies are a significant focus when working through how texts circulate and the consequences of those circulations.

How to Use the Course Development Tool

This tool is intended to help instructors ensure their course inquiry achieves curricular goals of the Writing Across Technology initiative. On each page, you will need to complete each section fully in order to advance to the next page. You may save your progress at any time by clicking the "Save and Continue Later" link at the bottom of each page (the whole page does not need to be completed to do this; the tool will remember which fields you filled in already). This field as well as the fields above describing the curriculum will remain at the top of the page as you progress. If you'd like to review any of these, you may simply scroll up as you work.

The tool will first ask you about the relationship between your course inquiry and the WAT learning objectives. Afterward, it will ask you to brainstorm a major project for the course, including its course move, writing goals, and research component. This is a project that will occur in the last third of the course. The tool will then ask you to think about the semester-long scaffolding of your assignments and the timeline in which they will occur. You'll need to upload a timeline map of your assignments. Next, the course will ask you to outline your first assignment in detail, and finally, there will be a number of available boxes for you to outline other assignments in the course. Your course must use all of the five course moves, whether in its scaffolding assignments or in the major assignments.

A graphic depicting the process for designing a course, beginning with connecting the course inquiry to writing, then developing a major project, and finally developing the course assignment sequence. All steps are connected by course moves and by writing and digital literacy thresholds.

When you finish and submit the form, you will automatically receive a full copy of your responses to your email. Your responses will also be saved to the website. If you have questions, please contact firstyearwriting@uconn.edu.

This tool was developed by Alex Gatten, Gabriel Morrison, Lisa Blansett, David Des Armier, and Brenda Brueggemann.

Course Development Tool

Sample WAT Course Design

A timeline of a reality TV course beginning with: A low-stakes buzzfeed listicle, a high-stakes multimedia essay on a community conversation, a low-stakes annotated bibliography, a high-stakes website on a historical or social context, a major spin-off video that is theorizing, and a high-stakes reflective blog.