Empowered Admissions: helping students and colleagues navigate the world of admissions essays (Mo Kim)
When high school seniors hear about writing for college admissions, many of them think solely about the personal statement—but there’s so much more to it than that! This workshop will help demystify this genre of writing in order to empower students and educators; together, we’ll not only explore personal statements, supplemental essays, additional information, activity/award lists, and more, we’ll also introduce and practice brainstorming, drafting, and revision strategies you can immediately use and adapt for your students and school context (informed both by the guidance of admissions officers and the experiences I have supporting students at SEO Scholars, a college-access program serving low-income/first-generation students across the Bay). We'll play with sentence structure, introduce a new way of outlining, and practice ways to convey complex ideas with personality and power!
"Puppeteering for Creative Writing, Kinetic Learning, and Community Engagement" (Jeffrey Neil Anderson)
In 2018, I taught Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio as the centerpiece of an interdisciplinary course in Beijing on reading, critical writing, and speech and debate for English Language Development. I used an actual Pinocchio puppet to demonstrate different ideas, but mainly to keep students engaged kinetically with learning. As my marionette collection has grown, so has my use of marionettes as a pedagogical tool. They seem to be the perfect antidote to an increasingly virtual, disembodied world. Manipulating marionettes or simply becoming swept up in the magic of a marionette performance requires one or more puppeteers and an audience, so employing them in teaching is inherently collaborative.
"Fostering Collaboration through Co-authored Social Justice Papers" (Angela Birts)
This session will focus on the integration of collaboration and social justice in the classroom through a small-group, co-authored paper project. Participants will explore how collaborative writing on social and environmental justice topics not only enhances students' understanding of power, privilege, and equity but also nurtures a deeper sense of community and shared responsibility. By engaging in research-based group work, students will learn how various contexts—both historical and contemporary—shape their perceptions of justice, equity, and inclusion. This session will highlight the key elements of the project: selecting a social justice issue, conducting collaborative research, co-authoring a cohesive paper, and delivering an engaging presentation. Attendees will gain insights into the effectiveness of collaboration as a pedagogical tool for fostering critical thinking, community engagement, and inclusivity.
"Collaboration and digital literacy" (Anne F. Walker, Chelsea Criez, Alayna Mills )
This 60-minute workshop shares teaching strategies focused primarily on how Stretch faculty support students in exploring digital literacy through collaboration, and touches lightly on faculty collaboration in developing expertise to help students.
Because many of the students who choose the yearlong 6-unit Stretch English 1A classes at San José State University (SJSU) are less “comfortable” with and “confident” in reading and writing, Stretch faculty share a scaffolded curriculum that establishes community, draws from and builds on students’ prior knowledge, and invites students to contribute to serious academic discourse. Instructors also participate in professional development; this year’s theme is multimodality.
Some projects from AY24-25 include rhetorical analysis of the "I'm Just Ken" music video from Barbie, an infographic project using Adobe Express to create visual counterstories—data-driven infographics that challenge societal stereotypes, real-time shared opinion blogging, and group web page development to examine climate change using both course readings and contemporary media. These multimodal projects combine English composition with community building and demonstrate how collaborative digital tools can encourage rigorous academic work and incite social awareness.
Far from existing in a vacuum, the Stretch digital literacy focus interacts with the Summer 2024 English Department’s week-long Digital Literacy summer Symposium for first-year writing program faculty. It created a minimum goal for “every participant to walk away with at least one digital literacy assignment to teach in their classes in Fall 2024 and enough facility with Adobe Express to get students started.”