Appendix B: New Curriculum Structure
The writing program’s website states:
Courses developed under the Writing Across Technology curriculum are project-based inquiries, collaboratively explored between both instructors and students throughout the semester. They center multimodal composition and universal design and seek to make apparent that all writing is multimodal.
There are five writing moves that First-Year Writing courses ask students to make throughout the semester, both during in-class activities and through writing assignments. These moves are: collecting and curating, engaging and entering a conversation, contextualizing, theorizing, and circulating. Assignments in First-Year Writing courses using the WAT Curriculum are designed around one or more of these moves, and students practice all of them by the end of the course.
The revised course changed the structure of how courses are delivered in the program, moving from a 4-credit seminar model (enrollment 24) to a 3-credit seminar model (enrollment 16) with an attached 1-credit hybrid studio (enrollment 32).
Redesigned Course Structure
In addition, the revised course emphasizes active learning through studio pedagogy. As part of the curriculum overhaul, the program won a grant to construct an Active Learning Center where many of the program’s studio classes would be held. According to the First-Year Writing program’s website:
The studio approach affords ways of teaching beyond the lecture, seminar, or discussion. The classroom becomes a workspace. Our program emphasizes active and accessible learning, play, design, and digital literacies. The WAT curriculum encourages instructors in all classrooms to engage studio approaches to pedagogy, both in the Active Learning Center and outside of it.
Active Learning Center Floorplan
© Gabriel Morrison, 2021
