The Question of Form
Sometimes the hardest advice to remember is our own. Partway through the Spring semester of 2013 I found myself struggling to start my capstone project. I had been discussing various iterations of the project with my mentor for several months and doing reading about motherhood, identity, and composition. I felt like I was ready to begin—so why couldn’t I get going? I wanted to focus on my content and told myself that I could pick an online platform for the project after I felt that I had a better idea of how my ideas were taking shape. Still, I couldn’t produce anything.
Despite my courses in rhetoric and composition (and even including this idea in previous projects) I had forgotten the important link between content and form. If this project were to be hosted by Wordpress, I would need to create content for a blog. If I created a static website then I would need to design different content. Additionally, different website design platforms allow for certain design choices that others do not, such as sidebars, embedded videos, and easily modified headers, etc. When I realized that picking a platform was more important than I had originally thought because the affordances of the platform I chose would determine the final shape of my project. Despite designing genre-savvy assignment sequences and writing and thinking about genre for over a year and a half, it was only when I took the relationship between form and content seriously and chose Wix as my platform that I began to make real progress.
A common lament in our capstone course was “but how am I supposed to deal with all of this text?” Besides designing new documents such as a syllabus and assignment sequence, I had papers that I wanted to revise, reflections to write, and a literature review to post. I was tempted to shorten these to make them more appropriate for a web audience. However, at the advice of Professor Tilden, I took to heart the injunction that this project is an academic exercise. At some point, I needed to stop worrying about minimizing text on my site and instead focus on how I could make it more reader friendly. Looking at examples of how other websites helped me format the text to be the most reader friendly For example, instead of posting pdfs of my revised papers, I went through these projects and broke down my arguments paragraph by paragraph. I chose the paragraphs that I felt best reflected the thinking that went into my capstone and rewrote them so that they could stand on their own. After adding a picture and a title to each paragraph, these became my “Foundational Texts” page. I also highlighted important phrases in each paragraph so that readers could easily discern the topic at hand. While there is still a large amount of text on the page, I feel that it is more web and reader friendly and provides important background information for my project.
A Text Heavy Website
I was recently filling out applications for several teaching positions and each application asked (in some form or another) about my comfort level with various technologies. As I checked boxes and wrote in answers, I was pleased to realize that, thanks to the capstone, I could confidently list several more skills than I could earlier this year.
When I began this project I spent a lot of time trying to do ‘traditional’ research. While this research provided some helpful materials for the syllabus, it demonstrated a lack of understanding about the nature of the capstone. While the capstone did require drawing on my research skills from the MA program, it took me a while to realize that I needed to approach this project differently—as evidenced by the number of abandoned pdfs littering my computer. While I certainly needed research about motherhood and composition, it also would have been helpful to do even more research about community colleges, website design, and potential platforms for the project. In fact, coming into this project I failed to anticipate how much time it would take to create website that is user friendly, looks good, and feels professional. Even though I am a confident technology user, and chose a simple platform like Wix, I sometimes felt like I was reinventing the wheel.
Designing my capstone forced me to think critically about the websites that I use every day.
Critical Technologies
As alluded to in the previous section, I reinvented the look and layout of my website multiple times. As I write this, I wish I had taken pictures of each version so that you could see the long and bumpy road it took to get to this point! Looking back, I’m glad that I had three vastly dissimilar site designs because it made me think more critically about web presence. As I did so, I realized that a well-designed site typically does two things well: 1) it clearly conveys its message and 2) helps the reader feel that he/she is in capable hands. In some ways, I believe design parallels good grammar usage in academic writing. Having ‘good’ grammar allows the author to clearly communicate his/her message and helps the reader focus on the content. ‘Correct’ grammar signals to the reader that the author takes his/her writing and the reader’s response seriously. Although design (and grammar) may seem secondary to the creation of the content, the grammar of design was a vital part of my capstone project.
The Grammar of Design
Creating content for the site also presented various challenges. One challenge was creating a new assignment sequence that was substantially different than the one I had created for the “Approaches” Course. My first assignment sequence was called “The Art of The Essay” and like the “Write a Review” sequence guided students through an exploration of a particular genre, expository essays, in this case. While I am still proud of the hair-pulling effort I put in to my first assignment sequence, I believe the “Write a Review” sequence improves on some the issues I struggled with previously.
One of the first things I notice reviewing my past sequence is that my learning goals for the “Write a Review” sequence are much more writing oriented. In “Art of the Essay” sequence, my goals included helping students “to apply critical analysis to current cultural objects and discourse” and to “critically analyze a work and draw meaningful conclusions.” While these are valid goals for a course, I never connected these objectives to the actual work that students would do. By failing to articulate how students were supposed to achieve the course objectives I almost guaranteed they wouldn’t be effective. In my current sequence, I created course goals that were attached to specific actions the students could take to achieve those goals. I also implemented daily writing goals to help reinforce that, despite the assigned readings, this course is dedicated primarily to student writing. I hope that using chapters from They Say/I Say as part of the assigned readings in the sequence will help students focus on writing as a subject.
I also think the assessment portion of this project is an improvement over my previous sequence. First, I chose to create a general rubric for students to view in hopes that they could see what I cared about when I (hypothetically) grade their papers. I think making my own grading objectives and expectations as transparent as I can to students is a good way to eliminate at least one level of student concern, freeing them to focus more on the composition process. In addition, I think the reflection portion of the “Write a Review” sequence is much stronger than in the “Art of the Essay.” In the “Art of the Essay” I required students to write a final cover letter, asking them to address any issues of “style, tone, audience, and structure” they cared to in a letter to me. The “Write a Review” reflection is specifically labeled as a reflective piece and gives students specific questions to guide them through the reflective process. I hope that by asking students questions like “what do you wish you could change about your review?” and “what do you think I would say about your review?” that students will be able to consider their process and audience.
Assignment Sequences: Then and Now
This website currently inhabits what rhetoricians Ryan Weber and Nathaniel Rivers term a “proto-public space.” While this website ostensibly provides a teaching portfolio for prospective employers to look through, the current settings prevent this portfolio from being found by search engines and thus from fully integrating into an online space. Additionally, it includes many items that might not be particularly interesting to employers but function to fulfill the guidelines of the capstone project (for example, the literature review). Once the capstone is complete I will make it searchable and may tailor the project more closely for the public audience.
Because this project exists to fulfill the MA program requirements and also serves as a forward-looking, career oriented portfolio, I attempted to create a tone that would be appropriate for either audience, without losing academic rigor or general clarity. While some sections, such as “What is a Capstone?” or “Capstone Top 10,” are more casual than most academic writing, I believe they still demonstrate critical thought and engagement. Other portions of the capstone like the “Literature Review” are more formal but were composed with multiple audiences in mind. I hope that whether formal or informal my voice comes through my writing and creates a unifying feel across the project.
Who am I Writing for?
One of the most difficult parts of my capstone was articulating the connection between motherhood and composition. My first thought was that both motherhood and composition classroom are contested spaces. As I learned in “Approaches to Teaching” writing and the “Rhetorical Turn,” there are a number of composition theorists with widely differing views on how to construct the best composition classroom. My research into motherhood and women’s writing confirmed my suspicion that motherhood is also an incredibly contested space. However, conflict alone does not justify bringing together composition and motherhood.
The critical link between motherhood and composition lies in the construction of identity. Women writing about their experiences with motherhood find a space to articulate the how and why of their choice to parent. Similarly, the composition classroom functions as a space where students explore their identities, whether as writers, students, or members of a larger community. Mothers, students, and student mothers use writing as a tool to shape their identities, create new (online) identities, and resist the perceptions of others by reasserting their own ideologies and identities. By creating a syllabus where students reflect on how mothers (and all women) employ rhetoric for specific, identity related purposes, I hope that students will be able to better reflect on their own rhetorical presence and think critically about how they use writing for a variety of purposes in their lives.
Motherhood, Composition, and Identity
Although I had previously written an assignment sequence, this capstone project was the first opportunity I had to design a syllabus. I began by designing the learning goals and objectives for my course—what did I want students to be able to do when they left my classroom after four months? After creating assignments that aligned with my learning goals, I thought that apart from creating a schedule of readings, I was finished with my syllabus. Feedback from classmates and professors, however, showed that my learning goals were not evident in the daily schedule. It appeared that my writing classroom looked a lot like a literature classroom. Returning to the chart I had made, I created a daily writing goal to help students focus their learning each class session. I share this experience in particular because one of my goals in the classroom is to be more transparent with students about my goals for certain assignments as well as for the course. I believe that adding writing goals helps me make student writing, not reading or even research, a priority in my course.
Creating a syllabus was an interesting experience because it allowed me to reflect on what was important to me in the classroom. As I considered even mundane things like which policies I should list first on my syllabus I became hyper-aware of my priorities. Although it wasn’t particularly hard to decide to put a statement about plagiarism before the inclement weather policy, I did make the decision to separate those two policies onto different pages so that students don’t have the chance to assume that plagiarism has the same level of importance as a snow. I also strove to use the rhetorical space of the syllabus not only to convey policies and expectations but also to share with students how much I valued their writing. Having looked at multiple community college syllabi for the “Syllabus Analysis” portion of the project, I could see that the better syllabi helped students understand that their writing really would be the central focus of the course.
A New Experience: Designing a Syllabus
Finally, I want to briefly note that one of the most critical factors in determining the success of my project was the capstone course. My initial mental model for the capstone was based on the thesis—I thought of this project as a solitary task. Almost immediately, however, I realized that the classroom community could be a great asset in helping me create a better project. Listening to other students’ advice from everything on technology to structuring a syllabus structure inspired me to create a better project.
Making our projects public to one another helped me anticipate my other audiences and made the creation process less solitary. I know that this model or publicizing our work has encouraged me to think about how I can make writing (and reading—here’s looking at you, Sheridan Blau) more interactive and public in my future classroom. Additionally, aspects of the course like reaching out to alumni and meeting with alumni panels helped increase my ‘real world’ understanding of the job market I was entering. Seeing other successful graduates helped me understand the steps I can take towards a career that I care deeply about.
Composing Together
