As a WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) Specialist at the College of Staten Island, I wanted to create a place where WGS faculty could find clear and easy ways to bring writing instruction into their classrooms. Not only does writing help foster critical thinking, as we all know, but writing also improves critical reading skills. According to John Bean, author of Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking and Active Learning in the Classroom, quizzes tend to promote surface learning rather than deep learning as students attempt to find the right answers rather than to seek engagement with ideas. In addition, lectures on readings can inadvertently foster ineffective reading as students are no longer responsible for processing the content on their own. Incorporating writing in the classroom can be one way to avoid these two widely used pedagogical modes; through writing, students become co-creators of knowledge rather than passive recipients.

After discussing my ideas with the Director of the WGS program at CSI, Dr. Matt Brim, I realized that I needed to make the site a place where a professor or instructor could both grab a quick activity for a day’s lesson, or invest more time thinking through a major paper assignment. In particular, I wanted to make adjuncts feel more supported in their pedagogical endeavors and to provide a trove of WGS assignments that use writing. After perusing the tabs above, you might decide to:

• substitute in-class writing prompts for a formal exam, with an emphasis on short answers and paragraph-length constructions.
• experiment with a variety of fun writing-based activities, which will add variety to your curriculum.
• use some of the prompts I’ve provided here as medium or high-stakes writing-based assignments.
• find ways to make grading writing assignments easier and more consistent, particularly for large classes.

In addition, I want to encourage professors and instructors to use writing to further their feminist pedagog(ies). The politicized nature of WGS courses needs careful attention, and writing can help your students process and reflect on their own views as they incorporate new feminist paradigms, and  encourage them to view their own personal experiences as legitimate ways of knowing. Writing can foster a collaborative classroom ethic; within this context, students become co-producers of knowledge, and writing can help invert the power structure in the classroom where the professor is the bestower of information and the student is the passive recipient. Writing in the classroom can foster small group discussions and underscore the value of affective learning.

Above all, have fun incorporating writing!