Hi Everyone,

I am excited to continue our conversation this spring:)

Some of the key principles of teaching writing that I want to organize my online and technology enhanced courses around are:

1. Equityminded Acceleration through highly supported courses: Providing enough resources so that students who are not as prepared can succeed in my class. Right now I have a whole series of handouts (on thesis statements, topic sentences, paragraph structure, using the words/ideas of others to develop your own purpose etc.) that I have digitized and put in a “Resources” module, yet I would like to move towards embedding these basic skills just-in-time resources in the way that the writers of the Online Education Initiative Embedding Basic Skills Handbook suggest.

2. Culturally Relevant: Courses that are responsive to our HSI student needs and immediately relevant to their lived realities. Many Latinx students have been schooled in a deficit mindset in which their home culture, language, their way of thinking, is seen as an obstacle for their academic success: In order to shift students out of that mindset, I design courses with themes that directly speak to the ontological and epistemological work we need to do: the reading and essay prompts ask students to zero in on their fear, apprehension, sense of self-efficacy as a major thread or inquiry question guiding our class.  When students read about educational inequality they begin to understand that maybe the alienation they are feeling from the academic tasks we are asking them to perform are not alien because they are “not smart enough/not college material,” maybe they are alienating because my K-12 schooling did not provide the academic literacy skills I need to succeed in college. In the video below I will share three equity-based instructional practices I am using in my current Course Syllabus English 100 Spring 2019 The video below begins with a brief review of resources I’ve found towards enacting this principle.

3. Active learning: technology-enhanced active-learning group activities are typical in my integrated reading and writing instructional cycle. The work that we do for each essay is modeled after courses developed by Katie Hern and other folks though the California Acceleration Project.

My instructional cycle includes, pre-reading activities, post-reading activities (reading responses and group work), pre-writing activities in groups, essay writing on their own and revision work through peer reviews.  Students spend a good amount of time working in groups using chromebooks and our active learning stations.  In the video below I am sharing with you a day in my current ENG 100 course, a zero textbook course in which student writing is the major “text” in the class.

If you want to know more, here is a link to the California Acceleration Project and here is a link to a Sample Accelerated Course

https://youtu.be/AUEEkuD_RrQ