Active and Accessible: University Writing Practices for the 21st Century View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Brenda Brueggemann,  Lisa Blansett  

We have designed a flexible writing and composing methodology that actively engages students in, and enables access to, making contributions to knowledge in a college writing course. The core of our methodology is active and accessible writing processes and practices. We aim to develop and make visible best practices in the “teaching of writing." Most important in our active and accessible approach is making students active participants in the work of creating accessible new knowledge. In this approach, we introduce students to design-based, iterative practices of writing that are active and accessible with five primary course moves. These moves identify five different cognitive and material activities deployed in the process of writing: collecting & curating, engaging, contextualizing, theorizing, and circulating. Together, these five course moves invite experiential learning and emphasize transferable, 21st-century skills that lead to contextually sensitive projects composed through different technologies and aimed at diverse audiences across disciplines and contexts. We’ve rendered the course moves as verbs, as in “we are contextualizing a practice in its history,” marking the idea of “in process” in their tenses. But the words also serve as nouns--gerunds--as in “theorizing is a complex practice in which the creator posits a new way of understanding.” And finally, the moves are also adjectival, “we are developing ethical curating practices.” This workshop explores this new critical thinking, soft skills, and technology based approach to college writing courses. Participants will actively engage and "try out" the five course moves.