This appendix contains sample coursework and assessment processes from courses I have taught at Pace since I was hired in 2018. I create diverse opportunities for experiential learning and low- and high-stakes thinking, writing, and revising in all my courses. In accordance with my creative, scholarly, teaching, and service philosophies, my assignments encourage embodied rhetoric, genre experimentation, multimodality, relationality, advocacy writing, and the development of meaningful writing projects. I have included project guidelines and student work (included with permission) from multiple courses: ENG 120: Critical Writing, LIT 205: Intro to Literature, Culture, and Media, ENG 206: Introduction to Writing Studies, and LIT 275: Disability Studies in Literature and Culture, LIT 315A: Postmodern Literature, and WS 297V: Feminist Disability Justice.
In this in-class exercise from ENG 120: Critical Writing, students played a modified version of the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Dialect: A Game about Language and How It Dies to experience the creation and dissolution of a discourse community. Against the collaboratively chosen backdrop of an apocalyptic narrative — in this case, an isolated space colony on Mars — students took turns collaboratively inventing, developing, using, and discarding language as members of a discourse community. As preparation for their high-stakes writing assignment, I had each group document their discourse as dictionary entries in a shared Google Doc.
Sample student responses to low-stakes writespace assignments for LIT 205. This student's use of experimental, playful techniques mimicked the course material, such as the use of hypertext and inclusion of screenshots, points to a learning environment that is safe and conducive to risktaking. (LIT 205 Writespace Prompts are attached here as well.)
Sample student submission for Project 1 Draft 2 in LIT 205, combining a traditional essay in academic style with the same strategies of deformance under analysis. (LIT 205 Project Guidelines are attached here as well.)
Sample student submission for Project 2 Draft 2 in ENG 206, which enacts its argument by emulating the graphic novel format of the assigned theoretical reading the student engages most. (For ENG 206 Project Guidelines, refer to the Teaching: Sample Syllabi appendix.)
LIT 275 Project Guidelines, instructing students in developing a collaborative access guide to Pleasantville campus, including documentation and photographs.
Rough draft of the LIT 275 Collaborative Access Guide, organized by team and site of study.
Final Project and Rationale from LIT 315A, using asemic writing to analyze asemic and diagrammatic writing. (For LIT 315A Project Guidelines, refer to the Teaching: Sample Syllabi appendix.)
Creative Project and Rationale from WS 297V makes use of multisensory, multimodal composition by creating a hanging mobile to represent "bedlife" as a site of knowledge-making, agency, and community, using handcraft to create a visual metaphor for many of the concepts, theoretical frameworks, and experiences discussed in the course. (For WS 297V Project Guidelines, refer to the Teaching: Courses Developed appendix.)
I have also included anti-oppressive assessment materials from a single class — LIT 205: Introduction to Literature, Culture, and Media — and the course packet I designed for ENG 201: Writing in the Disciplines to showcase my attempts to prioritize writing-to-learn activities (as opposed to writing that demonstrates mastery) within an anti-oppressive assessment framework. Based on experience, student mid-semester feedback, and constructive course evaluation comments, I create writing assessments that center difference and are written using nonhostile language out of sensitivity to the common student experience of assessment as a punitive, shaming tool. This helps students reconceive of composition as scaffolded, recursive, reflective, and contingent, often a process of trial, error, recalibration, and revision. Antioppressive assessment practices encourage students to embrace uncertainty, take risks, and "fail up" by openly acknowledging that most students equate risk with the possibility of failure and failure with punitive impacts that extend beyond the classroom: for example, GPA determines student eligibility for financial aid, honors college membership, certain programs of study, and athletics. My assessment practices aim to relieve the invisible pressures placed on students by circumstances outside of their university life, like anxiety and other mental health challenges, medication problems due to U.S. supply shortages, illness or undiagnosed symptoms, and time poverty due to full-time employment, caregiving responsibilities, and/or health challenges.
Sample labor-based grading contract used in this course, including a rationale for labor-based grading and explanations of non-letter grade scoring.
Sample Google Jamboard produced during this course that illustrates my routine use of anonymous, non-shaming, and non-punitive ways of assessing student understanding.
Project guidelines for LIT 205, including all instructions for low- and high-stakes writing.
Sample general feedback sheet for student writespaces (low-stakes writing) produced in this course; I called them writespaces to emphasize that writing is an act of cognitive, metacognitive, and spatial exploration. I compose general feedback sheets based on patterns I notice across student submissions and provide these notes for students to use for peer review and to individually plan their high-stakes assignments. (Sample student writespaces attached as well).
The use of Discord for my online classes allows me to score work in a "friendly" manner, with at least one emoji reaction; I use ✅ and ❓ to indicate if I think a one-on-one chat would be beneficial and often supplement them with "reader response" reactions commonly used on social media, like ❤️, ✊, 🔥, 🫡, 💯, ❗, and ‼️. As with social media, low-stakes emoji reactions and meme sharing increase user engagement on our Discord server, and students are comfortable with using both to engage with course material and their peers' contributions.
LIT 205 Writespace Notes, consisting of general feedback responding to patterns across all student submissions that I updated and posted at the end of each writespace thread. Writespace Notes also serve as a reference point for my assessment of high-stakes projects, which I provided dialogically in feedback coffee chats (a more approachable name for conferences) and in synchronous and asynchronous direct messages.
The course packet I designed for mixed-modality and asynchronous ENG 201 courses, containing modules of informational resources compiled, designed, and organized for ease of reference and self-paced work, with no-stakes and low-stakes assignments at the end of each module.