Great question. The engagement project series is a quarter-long, 3 project series that builds student self-efficacy, ethical agency, and community engagement while working towards traditional first year writing (FYW) learning goals.
Interested? Check out the engagement project series project prompts, or the related sample syllabus and lesson plan. Or, read below for a little bit about how I got to this FYW curriculum.
A Reflection on the Engagement Projects and the Sample Lesson Plan
Students are the priority when I plan, write, and research. Students are the drive for me to build every activity and class around culturally sustaining pedagogy. For me, that means centering students’ communities and experiences, creating opportunities for us to collaboratively and critically examine systems of power, and building student agency. The artifacts I’ve included on the website, two projects and a lesson plan, have evolved from my experiences with students to help me do these things.
Centering students’ experiences is critical. Students each have unique experiences, communities, and ethical commitments. To center students’ unique and complex identities, and to show students their writing is a contribution, I developed an English 101 curriculum that helped them do a few things. First, they name their communities and ethics, then they find real issues facing them and their communities, and finally they intervene in these issues with public-facing writing projects. I’ve attached two out of three projects that are part of this curriculum, and though they all put student experiences first, the proposal project demonstrates this best. It was inspired by an English 101 curriculum from years ago.
The proposal project asks students to position themselves within their communities through writing and then start making change. First, this means bringing to the surface what gets called a pillar in this curriculum. These are usually unique. For example, one of my students chose “presence” as part of an effort to live more intentionally. Next, students find a problem that their community is dealing with. The same student faced off against social media content contributing to disordered eating in women and girls. Students then develop a way to address their issue and their audience effectively and publicly. Another student used this opportunity to confront their senators in a series of letters, still another developed a housing accessibility petition that went to University Residences. However, this student chose to speak specifically to other young women who have struggled with disordered eating. She decided she would make a digital cookbook for eating disorder recovery that featured native, forage-able plants. This student was able to use the proposal project to make their experience a prominent part of the way they were contributing to their community, and to make space for being present by gathering and cooking in a healthy, thoughtful way. They were nervous about sharing writing before, but after this, they posted the content online and used it, and my recommendation, as part of an application for a foreign language exchange program that allowed them to deepen their experience with presence. Centering student experiences like this and empowering them to participate in their communities is what the proposal project is all about, but it sets up something bigger, too.
Students, like me, need the support of a community to collaboratively and critically examine systems of power. That’s why the proposal project naturally leads into what I call the engagement project, which is an original project that was inspired by Ingalls and Morse’s 2009 curriculum for change-making. This project is where students put their proposal into action to make change in their communities and build praxis. Students have taught me that there is a huge difference between talking about change and making it happen. The engagement project helps us, as a team, examine the systems that begin to take shape, often as obstacles or threats, when we’re done writing about something and we start writing into it. Using real-life, relatable writing situations that speak to power and bias helps cultivate a classroom community that can use discussion and writing to critically reflect on how power functions, how it should, what might be done about it, and what tools we’ll need.
The engagement project has evolved to really support students as they discover and navigate the systems with which their communities are entangled. One student, who has a disability, began the semester wanting to write about something ‘easy.’ We started to get into the scaffolded activities that lead students towards their communities, ethics, and the possibility of effecting change, like our discussion of Eduardo Galeano’s work and its implication for our writing practice. He shifted and started to focus specifically and systemically on healthcare insurance companies’ role in his community and chose to embody courage, his pillar, in his work. He had numerous challenging experiences with the healthcare system, but this project enabled him to set specific goals and deadlines for himself to conduct in-person research in care offices. His engagement project was a medical literacy pamphlet that compiled and explained resources and some best practices for WWU students that weren’t visible in our healthcare interfaces. It enabled students, especially students with disabilities, to take full advantage of and advocate for what was available to them and it made navigating insurance less intimidating. I’ve had other students use this project to take on issues like city-sponsored gentrification and corporate censorship through marketing firms, direct action, and other clever avenues. What I want to make clear is that this project helps students feel out the systems of power in their communities and how they might fit into, or disrupt, them.
These projects represent some big goals for students. My third artifact, a lesson plan built around the IFEAA writing move, is an example of how these big goals get scaffolded through daily work that builds student agency and self-efficacy. This writing move comes from a previous version of the 101 curriculum, but I modified it to fit my goal for that day. My goal was to help students understand that writing is a meaning making practice, and to help them understand themselves as able to use the writing moves they have to create something new and meaningful.
In this lesson, we used IFEAA to actively and collaboratively do something, and that’s part of what builds agency. At the end of the proposal project, students get into groups based on what genres their engagement projects are in and then identify the skills they’ll need to make their projects. These skills become our next few lessons. For this lesson, students said they needed some video editing help. So, I taught the IFEAA framework that helps students find and put information to work, critically and responsibly, and then had students work together to develop the video-editing, skill-building resources they would need for that genre of project. Those resources ended up on Canvas for students to consult, and IFEAA was useful for others to apply to the problems they faced in their own projects. Along the way, too, I focused on students’ own exigencies, like what to do when our fridge stinks, so that students could start to see themselves as capable of confronting and overcoming challenges. In my course, through lessons like using IFEAA to build their own set of resources, students learn their writing is more than academic, it’s an evolving practice that makes them active participants in their world.
Students and the ways they grow through writing have inspired the three artifacts I’ve included. The proposal project enables students to center their unique experiences in their work and really see themselves as a part of and a participant in their communities. The engagement project provides students a scaffolded way to critically examine and navigate the systems of power with which they’re entangled. The IFEAA lesson plan shows how my curriculum is designed to help students build agency and self-efficacy through writing and student-centered collaboration. Writing does look different in different places and it is a meaning making practice, these are our core principles in English 101. However, as my artifacts demonstrate, my 101 courses go beyond defining writing. They ground students in their unique experiences, develop students’ critical attention to systems of power, and build students’ sense of agency so that students don’t just write, they write themselves into active and ethical participants in their communities.
As a developing scholar and educator, my research centers on first-year writing and my approach is constantly evolving. The unique curriculum I’ve described, which comes out of my commitment to culturally sustaining pedagogy, has been a central part of my study on students’ ethical hexeis and their generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) use. This research has flipped on its head a previous inference that students aren’t motivated to enact their ethical commitments in the classroom. It has also helped me develop critical GenAI literacy interventions that uphold students’ community ethics. Separately, I’ve learned that this community-and-ethics-driven curriculum can be overwhelming at times, which has meant that I’ve built much more humor and celebration into each quarter. For example, the warm-up in my attached lesson plan enables students to play with a serious and relevant concept through ridiculousness and parody. I’ve also included a compliment workshop, partially developed by a fellow GTA, into peer review for each of the projects to help students celebrate their successes. What’s important here is that because culturally sustaining pedagogy and first year writing are so big for me, I’m dedicated to building agency, identity, and critical literacy, but I’m also committed to growing with and learning from students.