Over the past two years, while adapting my WRA 101 and 195H to an explicitly anti-racist curriculum, I surfaced a few challenges:
1. Keeping the culturally supportive, asset-based and learner-centered approach that I use in Preparation for College Writing, but not repeating activities and assignments. PCW students often follow me into 101, and I want the program to feel comfortably familiar, but not repetitive;
2. Offering a course that will value the backgrounds of international and domestic students equally, and be equally fruitful for both cohorts;
3. Introducing concepts of Power, Privilege and Identity (my current working title for the course) but keeping the course focused on writing from the student’s experience – not on top-down assigned content. Maintaining a course that is, as our program advertises, “rhetorical, inductive and inquiry-based”;
4. Exploring intersections of Language and Power, especially in the Cultural Literacies and Disciplinary Literacies assignments – again, within an experiential framework.
I have kept the traditional five-assignment arc of Learning Narrative, Cultural Literacies, Disciplinary Literacies, Remix and Semester Learning Reflection, incorporating much of the useful “shell” from Dr. Bump Halbritter and his team. I’ll share the assignments individually here, and some of the activities that provide their foundation.
How about you? Have you introduced to your writing class a major assignment, or just a class activity, with an anti-racist theme? What were the successes and challenges you encountered? If you have not yet done so, what benefits and challenges do you anticipate?