Project 4: Public-Facing Syllabus draft due 5/6

In Spring 2024, English 240 began to be designed by and for students themselves; as such, it is continuously evolving according to the needs, desires, and interests of each new group of students. You can view this evolution on our in-progress public syllabus webpage. Thus, the final major project of this course is to continue this important work by revising and improving upon what’s been started by previous classes. 

 

That is, we will work together as a class to transform what you’ve learned this semester into a public-facing syllabus for future English 240 students. Public-facing syllabi are a form of political education that seek to engage communities inside and outside of academia. Our class syllabus highlights important contributions to the Writing Studies field that move beyond peer-reviewed articles, monographs, or edited collections. Instead, the public-facing syllabus prioritizes freely available materials in a variety of formats in alignment with a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. As a result, the syllabus is intentionally accessible and appropriate for use by a diverse audience and provides a comprehensive introduction to a theme (or themes) in the field of Writing Studies. Our syllabus is housed on a WordPress site hosted by Lafayette College. 

 

A syllabus is both personal and professional. That is, syllabi often reflect the creators’ feelings, attitudes, and beliefs about the subject matter, teaching, learning, and learners. A public syllabus serves as a permanent record and a learning tool. It collects information about a topic in one place for use by a wide variety of learners from a wide variety of backgrounds. As such, it should help readers/ users/ viewers become effective learners for the topic at hand. To accomplish this goal, our syllabus must explain 

  • the conceptual structure used to organize the course (why it is organized the way it is); 
  • our philosophy about the course content, teaching, and learning; 
  • relevance and importance of the course to an undergraduate student audience; 
  • time estimates or suggestions for engaging with the content of the syllabus; as well as 
  • hints or suggestions for how to make use of the materials in the syllabus (what the materials contain, why they are important, and what perspectives they address/ include). 

Right now, our public syllabus does not do all of these things because it is still in-progress. 

 

We have been using the following public syllabi as guides for our own: 

 

For this assignment, we will complete the following:

  1. Self-select into three teams: 1) course description, assessment, and homepage content creation; 2) unit page redesign for uniformity, utility, and accessibility; and 3) unit materials & assignments revisions. Once we’ve determined the members of these groups, we can break down these larger tasks into smaller steps and goals. 
  2. Compile materials for each team and make intentional decisions about text and audiovisual content, genre, order, placement, inclusion, rationale, summaries, explanations, etc. through the lens of power. This will involve considering the rhetorical situation of our public syllabus and the goals we have for the site’s uniformity, utility, accessibility, and content. We may need to perform research on similar sites to make these decisions.
  3. (Re)Design an accessible public syllabus that can house multimodal and freely available educational materials along with the pertinent information about those materials for users/ learners. Universal Design for Learning (UDL), programs like Canva and Adobe, and tools housed in WordPress will be imperative to creating a usable and aesthetically pleasing public syllabus. 
  4. Contemporaneously fill out individual labor logs. The work that you do on a project is not always visible. Sometimes when you do multimodal composing, it takes HOURS to learn how to edit something, or to add music, or to source images, or your computer crashes, or other weird stuff happens. In order to not discourage you from trying to work with an unfamiliar or tricky technology—from taking a risk—this labor log will help you to keep track of the time that you’re spending, and will also externalize your process to me. You can make your own copy of it here, update it as you go, and share the copy with me when you turn in your final portfolio. 
  5. A peer review/ “writing” workshop (that you complete for one other person in the class who’s working on a different team). If someone doesn’t complete your peer review, you will not be penalized for this.
  6. A final draft public syllabus that can potentially be used for future iterations of English 240 and added to by future students in this course. This public syllabus will live here. 
  7. A writer’s memo (submit your labor log, too) that explains your process for and experience of this project. This could include how you chose the sources you contributed to the syllabus and/or what you learned through researching and thinking about this assignment. As in previous writer’s memos, you should describe the choices that you made in language, subject matter, and modality and tell us why these choices will appeal to an undergraduate student audience. And do not forget to submit your labor log!
  8. All components of the portfolio are submitted in a well-organized portfolio as a single document (see the guidelines below). In your portfolio, it should be clear what and how you contributed to the public syllabus—through your memo as well as the organization of your portfolio.