An American Creed Writing Marathon

From the first, I have been clear with my students that my goal for our Writing I class is to help them grow as humans, writers, and thinkers. While I know that Writing I is a very important class for my college students, I want the experience to be meaningful to their lives. First and foremost, I am engaged in the process of supporting the journeys of developing humans and writers and I have built my class and the activities and assignments with that central mission in mind. That has meant centering our work together around authentic writing experiences focused on our personal values. As a teacher I know this work is important and valuable because my students tell me so almost every day, but I also know it is important and valuable because as an authentic teacher who thinks and writes along with and beside her students I see and feel the impact on my own humanity and writing. I hope that I am showing my students through both word and deed that writing can help them learn and grow as well as do amazing things. No disposable assignments allowed!

For several years now, my Writing I classes have focused on an American Literacy and used the American Creed documentary as well as National Writing Project Writing Our Future materials to support our thinking and writing. All my first year writing classes have themes to support our work and I have found that American Creed provides a lot of range for authentic writing. However, shifting the focus of that work to focus on the personal values we hope to see reflected in our fellow citizens and the policies of our country has made our writing experience even more powerful.

This fall, our second of pandemic living/learning/teaching, I leaned heavily into the writing marathon. As I explained my plan in Jam Session or Writing Marathon, I know that writing marathon can be a powerful tool to build community and support writers. In addition, we are all broken in some way and I believe in the power of writing to help and heal. I also thought the combination of jam sessions with asynchronous online work would make our community safer and help students who missed class stay on track. The journey through our first unit was both better and worse than I hoped.

We began by Writing Our Way Into The Journey in class thinking, writing, and sharing our thoughts about writing and transitions and then online working through an orientation to the class and introducing ourselves via snaps sharing our personal values. By the second week I had learned the power of starting off each jam session with the simple check-in writing prompt: My name is _ and I am a writer from… I wanted my students to be reminded each class that they are writers, but those writing and sharing sessions quickly became more than a way to take attendance and remind students that they are writers. The simple ritual of writing about their lives was comforting for some students and serves as a form of exorcism for others and when they shared with the class I found it so helpful to understand my students physical and mental well-being. Sharing our check-ins also continues to help our community bonds. Our in class focus was on exploring our humanity and how that humanity is shaped by our communities. Then online we created snaps exploring our American values via American Creed, music, and the Declaration of Independence.

The goal for the first unit of my American Creed themed Writing I class is to write our own creeds using the This I Believe model. After spending our first two weeks together exploring our personal values and the American values we believe in, we shifted our focus during our in class writing sessions to the stories we want to tell about America and American values. Online students engaged in starting to draft their American Creeds then sharing those drafts and responding to their peers via an online workshop run using the inquiry process I adapted from Liz Prather’s Project-Based Writing model. During our fourth week, while students were engaged in writing and revising their American Creed essays, we focused our in class writing on what we hoped to make with our values and stories.

Two important tools that support my praxis are #HyperDocs and #Ungrading. As I note in my last blog post, HyperDocs Make Living, Learning, and Teaching Easier. In particular, my use of unit logbooks to support our work creates a space to collaborate, request and offer feedback, and showcase our work. Every time I visit our unit logbooks I love how this simple Google doc serves as both a collaborative studio space and group portfolio. The use of unit logbooks offers the opportunity to share thinking and writing, the work of our class community, across multiple sections and throughout the span of the unit — and beyond.

I have been on an #ungrading journey for some time now and my current iteration combines weekly self-assessments where students report and reflect on their work and support for the community that week with longer unit reflections after the final deliverable is posted to the logbook. As our fifth week together focused on wrapping up our workshop and revising American Creeds outside of class, we focused our writing in class on the unit reflections that would accompany posting week the final draft of the essay to the showcase column of our Creed Unit Logbook. I adapted our I am a writer from… prompt for the reflection by asking students to write about these topics before completing the I am a writer from sentence:

  • Quantity: How much time have you spent writing and thinking about writing? Think about how much you have written as a result?
  • Quality: How has writing within our community during Jam Sessions, sharing Snaps, and workshopping drafts inspired you as a writer?
  • Time and Space: Consider the pace of our journey together developing your ideas and crafting your essay. How does this make you feel as a writer?

So how did things go? I am not even certain how to reflect on this process using my usual tools but that may just be the fact that pandemic teaching/living has reduced my capacity. Using Christopher Leman’s three questions, this unit did generate a lot of writing and critical thinking and the lessons about writing, critical thinking, and personal values may influence my students long after they leave the class; and the students engaged in this work grew as humans, writers, and critical thinkers — which is the whole point of this class. Thinking about this unit using John Warner’s five qualities, this unit offered students authentic writing for themselves and shared with our class community (x2); there was some serious metacognition work concerning writing practice and I suspect learning about our country and fellow citizens; our work invoked multiple dimensions of writer’s practice from process to feedback to developing an understanding of audience; many students reported that this work excited and interested them as well as renewed their love of writing; and reflection was woven throughout the process of thinking and writing as well as at the end to wrap up the work.

Thinking about this unit, this work, this community through these lenses has helped me feel better about the outcomes. It is hard, despite leaning (perhaps overextending) into a generous attendance policy and elastic due dates, my students are still struggling with the exhaustion and stress of pandemic living/learning. This means that even as we are now well into our third unit there are still students who have submitted little or nothing for the American Creed unit. The exhaustion and stress combined with quarantines and normal health/life challenges often means that sometimes the students who most need to be in my classroom are missing in action for large chunks of time. I just need to remember that those conditions and challenges are not a reflection on this unit or my praxis. In fact, students tell me again and again that my classroom is their safe space, their happy space, and perhaps that is the only thing I need to remember when reflecting on the success of a class taught during the third school year of a pandemic.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Author: Deanna Mascle
#TeachingWriting and leading #NWP site @ Morehead State (KY): Passionate about #AuthenticWriting, #DeeperLearning, #PBL, #Ungrading, and #HyperDocs.

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