Writing 160 Multimodal Composition
These courses emphasize an individualized approach to writing in a small seminar setting with frequent student-teacher conferences. They are designed to give you practice communicating in a variety of social situations and media; you will have opportunities to explore your own interests and ambitions as a writer. These courses will prepare you to adjust to new communication challenges you’ll encounter in your college courses, work, and life. In Writing 160 courses, you’ll address key features of college writing, including developing major compositions through multiple stages (planning, drafting, and revising); analyzing and composing a range of texts in more than one medium (papers, podcasts, videos, etc.); conducting research and integrating it into your compositions; and learning to use your own languages (multilingualism, varieties of English, and dialects) as valuable resources in your compositions. You will improve your ability to read critically and compose in a variety of media. At the end of the term, you will submit a portfolio of your compositions, prefaced by a reflection on your development as a writer.
Writing 160.001 - Trails and Tales: Walking's Intersections with Writing and Argument
In an era of constant connectivity, what can we gain as writers by getting out of our brains, mostly away from tech, and into our bodies? Rebecca Solnit says, “Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” I would also add that walking can be powerful in forms like tourism, protest,displacement, and pilgrimage. There’s a long tradition of writers walking as research, walking as invention, walking as a rich subject of its own, and writing pieces that explore and encourage, even facilitate walking. We’ll explore other writers’ connections between walking and writing and make some for ourselves in this course.
Our active engagement with walking and writing will task us with writing a variety of types of projects beyond the terrain of the “traditional academic essay,” from zines and podcasts to ArcGIS StoryMaps, to field guides, to virtual races, etc. Assignments will require getting out into the world and walking (immersive and embodied research!), observing, analyzing, even creating visual or performance art pieces.
Writing 160.002 - Multilingual Writing
The US has had a fraught history with multilingualism, even as “multiculturalism” has been held as a defining American value. College and university programs for multilingual students, as well as for students studying languages other than English, have fluctuated in funding as a result of political and historical shifts in public opinion towards multilingualism and immigration. Multilingualism in education has been viewed as an asset promoting diversity, globalization, and even soft diplomacy, but practical support for multilingual college writing is not always apparent; for example, college writing programs often focus on assimilating student writing to meet Standard Academic English ideologies. However, multilingual skills such as code-switching and translation can be resources that students draw upon to convey their ideas in English writing more completely, particularly as multimodality continues to rise in importance in college writing. As college writing, like US society as a whole, becomes increasingly global and digital, this course will explore how multilingual skills can be harnessed as a resource to meet modern students’ college writing needs.
This course will explore the causes and effects of multilingual education policies (or opposition to them) in the US, the benefits of multilingualism in college writing and scholarship, and how English writing in general, as well as multimodal writing specifically can be enhanced by multilingualism. Current research in Critical Language Awareness and linguistic justice will be highlighted. This course is designed to meet first-year writing goals while encouraging students to develop a rhetorical perspective on multilingualism related to academic writing.
Writing 160.003 - Communication & Conservation
“Save the whales!” “Hug a tree!” “Go wild for wildlife!” Conservation slogans like these are easy to get behind. They stoke emotions or show charismatic creatures in peril or finding refuge. Storytelling and appeals to emotion, ideology, and imagination are often key to building momentum and support for conservation projects—but these same strategies can flatten or obscure the real-world complexities and challenges that must be addressed to accomplish meaningful conservation work.
In this class, we will explore the multimodal communication that surrounds conservation of wildlife and the natural world. We will consider how storytelling—through a variety of media, from folktales to documentaries—shapes perspectives about wildlife. We will analyze and practice the rhetorical, communicative strategies used in different kinds of media to share information about and influence perceptions of wildlife and conservation initiatives. We will also explore the challenges of conservation, incorporating a variety of perspectives and analyzing the impacts of poverty, indigenous and local involvement, ecotourism, and cooperation and conflict between human needs and the natural world.
Writing 160.004 - Food for Thought
Claire Saffitz is on a quest to recreate all of our favorite desserts from scratch. Sean Evans has mastered the art of interviewing while eating the spiciest wings on Hot Ones. The Bear takes a surreal dive into Chicagoland kitchens. Food-related content is all over our social media feeds, often being about more than cuisine. Does a loved one’s memory live on through a recipe? How do our families, friends, cultures, and languages celebrate nourishment?
This section of Writing 160 will grant you opportunities to write and make digital works surrounding food—preparing it, eating it, and gathering around it. We’ll focus on multimodal composition, meaning we’ll study and express ourselves through a variety of different art forms. You can expect to watch YouTube videos about New York City bodegas, read poems about barbecue and essays about sustainability, or discuss comedy sketches where the customer is never right. We’ll break bread, crafting creative reviews, podcasts, restaurant concepts, and arguments that will prepare us for the rest of college and outside of it.
Writing 160.005 - Identity & Autoethnography
This course is about speaking for yourself. Instead of traditional ethnography, where often an observer records cultural traditions and values from an outside point of view, autoethnography is all about hearing a voice from the inside. What happens when a person becomes the speaker, the artist, and tells their own story? What traditional molds and boundaries must the artist break with in order to insert their own narrative? Does the artist invent new ways of using language and storytelling to create a sense of self? And how might their art challenge the story of the world we were previously told? This course will explore questions like these by looking at how artists create identities across mediums, telling stories grounded in or inspired by personal and generational experience. This course takes an antiracist approach by examining the possibility of identity creation outside of dominant narratives, as well as by positioning our understanding within the systems of power artists are creating into.
This first-year writing course will guide you through writing as a process, including conferences with me to discuss your ideas and peer review and writing labs to better know the community you are writing with. In this way, you will find methods to locate your personal voice and push it to its ultimate potential, not only gaining you the skill necessary to communicate with academic audiences, but the tools to apply the urgency and power of your voice across social situations. This course welcomes you to enter with your full and complex identity, because somewhere along the way you will begin to view yourself as a writer and artist in your own right, applying your personal leanings and the subcultures you are a part of to the art you will analyze, the multimodal autoethnographies you will get to produce, and your reflective final portfolio, an autoethnography of your identity creation as a scholar and artist in Writing 160.
