Sophia Minnillo | PhD Student in Linguistics | University of California, Davis

As an applied linguist with a background in both literary and composition studies and language pedagogy, I draw from this diverse training in my approach to teaching college composition. My pedagogy is grounded in three essential facets of my understanding of writing: (1) that it conveys the human experience, (2) that it is iterative, and (3) that it reflects authors’ engagements in conversations that are contextually-bound. This understanding, and my prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion in my pedagogy, translate into my practices for guiding students toward discovering and applying more effective writing and text consumption practices in the composition classroom.

Writing as conveying the human experience

Writing, a uniquely human practice, allows us to express our thoughts and ideas with more time, reflexivity, and permanency than is often characteristic of speech. Similar to a photograph (Barthes, 1980), a text may be considered as a trace of the author in a certain place and moment in time. This trace embodies the author, while taking on a life of its own, for a potentially indefinite duration after the text is created. Given these unique affordances of writing, this human practice provides an ideal venue for us to index our identities and share our experiences, both real and imagined.

I guide students toward this understanding of writing as conveying the human experience through analysis of Gloria Andalzúa’s (1987) Borderlands / La Frontera and Amy Tan’s (1990) “Mother Tongue.” While reading these texts, my students reflect on how Andalzúa and Tan exposé, negotiate, and problematize aspects of their multiple identities and the identities that others ascribe to them through their writing. Students also develop rhetorical conceptual knowledge by discussing how the compositional, linguistic, and aesthetic features of the texts reflect deliberate choices made by the authors and produce certain sensations in the reader. 

After unpacking how the authors present both their moments of pride and moments of struggle with language diversity and discrimination, my students brainstorm about how their own linguistic backgrounds, experiences, and identities are intertwined and reflected in their writing. This brainstorming informs their researcher positionality statements, which they compose at the beginning of the term as the first element of their term-long research project. In drafting the positionality statement, students come to realize that any act of composing, including writing an empirical research paper, is shaped by the researcher’s experiences, identity, and community of practice membership (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Writing as iteration

Another integral facet of writing is its iterative nature. It begins with the generation of ideas and the planning of elements to include and a structure to follow. The author then puts ink to the page, updating their ideas and plans as the piece unfolds. These steps are repeated while the author revises their work based on continued reflection and feedback from others. Thus, writing is an iterative practice similar to circumambulation; revisiting stages of the composing process, like points on a circular route, leads the author to greater self-awareness and their composition towards its target version.

My students build their understanding of writing as iteration through class discussion of Lamott’s (2005) “Shitty First Drafts” and Straub’s (1999) “Responding–Really Responding–to Other Students’ Writing.” They then practice this approach by drafting sections of their research project on a weekly basis. During class, students share their work on Google Docs and provide peer feedback, which I scaffold so that they focus primarily on higher-order concerns (Hu, 2005). I also reward students for consulting an on-campus writing tutor. Students subsequently revise their drafts in anticipation of our conference. Incorporating what we discussed in the conference, my students revise a second time before submitting their final course portfolio. Students practice metacognition by reflecting on their experiences across drafts and discussing how viewing writing as iteration will impact their composing process moving forward.

Writing as participating in a conversation

Another objective of my composition courses is for students to develop an understanding of writing as contributing to a conversation with a certain audience within a certain socio-historical context. To be successful in college composition and beyond, I believe that students need to recognize how texts vary depending on the discipline, genre, and author’s purposes for writing, among other factors. I introduce students to this variation in conventions through class discussion of Dirk’s (2010) “Navigating Genres” and Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff’s (2003) “Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities.” Students then apply their knowledge of discourse communities to critically analyze the primary and secondary sources that they incorporate into the literature review of their research project. 

They first receive assistance with selecting sources through a workshop hosted by a subject librarian. Following this workshop, we dissect sources by considering with which other texts and scholars the sources are in conversation and how each source fills a gap in the field of inquiry. Drawing on their reflections from the positionality statement assignment, my students contemplate how the subjectivities of each researcher’s socio-historical and disciplinary context can result in differing interpretations of the same phenomena. This understanding leads students to comprehend the importance of presenting a range of sources from different sides of the conversation in literature reviews. With a more complex conceptualization of source use and the dialogical nature of scholarship, students leave my class prepared to take on increasingly sophisticated research projects in their major courses.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Informed by translingual and critical language perspectives (Horner et al., 2011), I recognize that students do not have equivalent access to the standard/academic language varieties and socio-cultural norms of behavior that are privileged in university spaces. With this in mind, I use a labor-based grading contract to limit reproducing the inequities inherent in college classrooms. Additionally, I make explicit that our class community recognizes and values the full linguistic repertoires of all students. I refer to the conventions of standard U.S. academic English as an additional code that adds to the rich repertoires that students already possess. Prioritizing student voices, I allow students to dictate how much sentence-level feedback they would like to receive in my response; however, higher-order concerns still constitute the vast majority of my feedback. These response and assessment policies signal to students that the content of their compositions and their labor in the class are more important than their (unequally distributed) access to hegemonic language codes.

In framing writing as expression of human experiences, as an iterative process, and as a conversation, I assist students in developing text creation abilities that transfer to subsequent classes and inform their academic, professional, and personal composition practices. I valorize students’ diverse funds of knowledge and help students to meet their self-identified objectives for composition across the curriculum and across contexts.

UWP1: Introduction to Academic Literacies

"I gained the college way of writing and reading. The activities were nice and got the students involved. The teacher was amazing and extremely supportive."

"good course. very organized and the instructor provides plenty of resources and is passionate about students' work. learned a lot about metacognition and rhetorical strategies."

"Instructor showed her respects and understandings to her students. Grading standards are very clear. Lectures are well-organized and slides on canvas pages are well sorted so that students know what they exactly need to do or plan for this week. Relevant sources are listed in each week module."

"I gained a lot of knowledge about writing from this class. It helped me understand how to write a good research paper which can help me for the future."