This is my second post in a small series, exploring how I might incorporate blog/s/ing into a course I’ll be teaching for the first time this spring, “Writing for the Social Sciences.” (WFSS) I suppose I’m cutting it a bit short here, in terms of decision-making, but I’ve still got several weeks left to make some final choices.

In my last post I noted my WAC professional development as a CUNY Writing Fellow. That experience has taught me to begin my planning by considering: What are my goals for this course? What do I hope that students come away with from WFSS?

Initially, I want to be aware of contextual issues that will affect my goals. The Center for Worker Education (CWE) is a small liberal arts school within the City College of New York, CUNY. Students at CWE are adults working full-time, and I am told that many of them come to the program because they need a bachelor’s degree to move further on in their field. The average student age is forty. I also want to consider the fact that the degree offered is broadly oriented and interdisciplinary.

With those factors in mind, and given that this is my first time teaching the course, I have decided to use a textbook, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ways of Reading seems to be intended for First-Year Composition courses, but the excerpts they include come from challenging yet readable texts by scholars and writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Adrienne Rich, Edward Said and W.J.T. Mitchell. The readings are also organized in ‘sequences’, for instance, Autobiographical Explorations, Truth and Method, History and Ethnography, or Language, History and Identity, and frames such as these will nicely address a range of topics across social sciences. The sequences take students and professor through a series of writing assignments that can eventually connect into a larger project. For the final paper, I plan to have students select their writing from one sequence and build on it with additional readings and outside research.

So back to my original question, What do I want students to learn how to do? 1)To read challenging texts carefully and to engage with those texts. 2)To make connections: between texts, and between life and text. 3)To provide written summaries, analysis, and critique. 4)To become familiar with one or two discipline-specific styles of writing. In addition to these more outcome-based goals I have for students, I also want to make sure that what we do helps them engage further with the world, whether that is within themselves, family life, work life or some other arena. This may be where blogs come in. Blog/s/ing may partly be about connecting.

I have been wondering how adult students with full work and personal lives would feel about taking time with blogs. Are blogs interesting to people beyond a small technophilic world? I don’t think I want students just reading live journals. If we’re reading blogs, I’d want them to read something substantive, that relates to their professional field or to what we’re reading. I’m not sure that exists. I’ve done some searching for blogs relating to Social Services and Social Work professions and haven’t found much. It occurs to me now that I might look for Teacher Education blogs.

Why even use blogs in a course? Well, I do think it’s beneficial to be aware of the new forms of technology and writing that are out there. In a sense, I think it’s good to ‘keep up.’ But I want more than just keeping up with the Joneses… Of course, there are blogs on writing—I could always have students read and respond to more general writing-focused blogs. These questions I’m asking are about content. The content of the blogs matters to me. I don’t want to waste students’ time, and I guess I’m aware that my own entry into the blogosphere has taken place over a number of months. I am leaning toward having us engage with other blogs that are out there, rather than say, do a course blog, or have students write their own. I’m thinking of this as a baby step, I suppose. Anyone have any thoughts they’d like to share?

Recently I’ve been thinking about incorporating some form of blog/s/ing into a course I’ll be teaching for the first time this Spring. After spending two years as a CUNY Writing Fellow, taking a few creative non-fiction writing courses, and teaching sociology on and off for several years, I have the opportunity to teach “Writing in the Social Sciences.” I’m really excited to have the chance to combine these numerous interests of mine. And, fortuitously, I’m doing some writing in the social sciences of my own—that is—my dissertation on contemporary art and social change.

As a Communication Fellow I’ve had increasing exposure to weblogs. I had begun one of my own last May on the free site Blog-City, but it was just this semester that I really delved into the whole ‘scene’ as the Communication Institute started discussion of cac.ophony.org. I’m still learning, following links to see where they take me, getting used to the genre, the geeked-up versions of vernacular English, or the letter-to-my-mother versions of critical, cultural and political theory that seem to exist out here. My first impression so far is that a blog is a great space to think thoughts out loud. Blogging is making space for our more tentative, not yet fully formed ideas, to go public. This kind of writing (ideally?) could also make way for interventions, cooperative strategizing and shared theorizing. Of course this is the optimistic view of the information distribution system that is the internet, but experimenting with the possibilities does appeal to me.

Now that my brain has started to think in terms of how technologies across the curriculum can work with Writing Across the Curriculum, I have wondered how I might use blogging in my own teaching. That said, this entry marks the first in a series of posts I’ll be devoting to my thought processes, considerations, questions, concerns and planning for some role that blogging might hold in my Spring 2005 Writing in the Social Sciences course.