Assignment Design: Education Memoir

Drawing on scholarship from writing studies that articulate a meaningful assignment as one that encourages students to write about their own lives, this assignment is designed for students to draft a memoir specific to their experiences with education. As an assignment for a First-Year Writing course that largely includes students new to college, this offers students a chance to reflect on their educational journey thus far while also reflecting on their processes of writing about it.

course
WRD 540 Teaching Writing

instructor
Dr. Erin Workman

term
Winter 2024

course summary
WRD 540 surveys current perspectives, theories, and methods for teaching writing that are grounded in the disciplines of Rhetoric, Composition, Literacy, and Writing Studies and informed by equity-minded, antiracist and anti-ableist pedagogical practices.

assignment
scholarship informed assignment design

prompt

For this project, you will review your hypothes.is annotations, reading responses, writing activities, and notes from class to identify an area or topic of interest in composition studies scholarship connected to teaching writing and develop a resource handout or annotated bibliography that elucidates this area of inquiry for yourself and your colleagues. Drawing from these, you will create a writing assignment with scaffolded reading and writing activities.

Education Memoir

"I resonated with the idea of students writing a memoir and finding ways to apply the course concepts to their own lives because that’s what would make it meaningful to them (and perhaps support transfer)."

"My goal is for students to perceive their writing not as products made for me as their instructor, but embodied “works in progress” that are extensions of who they are as people, learners, and writers."

Reflection

I developed this assignment design at the same time I was working through my independent study and synthesizing ideas from writing studies and education studies. I was reading bell hooks and thinking of education as a practice of liberation at the same time I was learning about the theories of teaching writing. With this knowledge informing my experience at that time, I designed this assignment to encourage students to tell stories about their own education. I wanted to offer an assignment that allows students to practice their rhetorical skills while valuing their own experiences and reflections about school and learning. As this assignment was designed for students who are relatively early in their college careers, I hope that it invites students to realize that their education is part of their own story.

This emphasis on story is also not something simple to overlook. Whether in cultural rhetorics or culturally-responsive pedagogies, stories have a meaningful place in teaching writing and I wanted to highlight all the multimodal ways these stories can be written.