“Question everything,” my W140 professor, Deborah Oesch-Minor, told us. This is one of the things that has left the greatest impression on me throughout this semester. I expected this class to be much more straightforward than it actually was, but I am so much happier with the end result than I would have been if it were as simple as I expected. This class made me question my expectations for writing and learning through the pieces we read and assignments we did. I read academic writing and practiced asking a set of questions for every piece I read and write to better understand them, wrote several pieces which explored different genres, and developed a new understanding of my processes through metacognitive reflection. I have revised this WIX site and my immersion experience narrative for the final e-portfolio. 

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This class made me question my expectations for writing and learning through the pieces we read and assignments we did.

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In this class, I have strengthened my skills of rhetorical analysis. For example, when we analyzed Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone,” we discussed her purpose (challenging people to move beyond traditional ideas of academic studies into a more diverse and unique understanding), the audience whom she was addressing (academic professors, mainly), and genre in which she wrote (using “transculturation” to speak with people not used to nontraditional thinking). We focused on reading rhetorically and intentionally by asking meaningful, targeted questions about this rhetorical triangle to engage with everything that a work had to off . To that end, we also practiced skimming and re-reading works, annotating along the way to extract key points (Figure 1), and recording crucial parts of the source material and our thoughts on them in a double-entry journal (Figure 2). Typing out another’s words helped them integrate into my brain and memory and recording my response and thoughts helped me make connections with other pieces, connecting different elements of the sources we studied. This was learning transfer in action, as we saw concepts becoming relevant in other areas and authors.

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​Through approaching the work we read on its terms and breaking down its various elements, I was better able both to understand it and to learn from it how to better my own writing. For example, I became more aware of how many ways there are just to start a piece of writing. Up until now, I have been used to starting much of my writing with general statements, but we steered away from that and looked at many different examples of how introductions are handled by professionals (with articles like "When the Hospital Fires the Bullet", etc.). To see this in action, here is the opening statement I was working in my feature-style narrative: “In today’s culture, when people think of missionaries, a variety of things may come to mind.” Thanks to the introductory strategies we learned in class, I changed this overly broad opening sentence to introduce a character and a quote, an approach which employs a more suitable choice for my purpose of helping to immerse the audience in the world of FOCUS missions: “‘I am so loved. This is what I’ve been longing for.’ This is what Allie Fitzsimmons hopes to help other people say.”

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​“Who is your audience, what is your purpose, and what are you using to achieve that purpose?”

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Over the course of this class, I worked on several different types of writing for many audiences and varying purposes, which broadened the idea of academic writing that I previously was used to encountering. For each one, I was asked, “Who is your audience, what is your purpose, and what are you using to achieve that purpose?” Seeing these questions applied to the works of professional writers earlier helped me to transfer the questions to my own work and formulate my own answers. Particularly in the feature-style narrative article, I tried to write with a specific audience and purpose in mind, which shaped the way I wrote in my narrative to be less broad and to better complement what people interested in religion and missions probably already know. Additionally, I experienced writing for different genre expectations in working on the essays, narrative, argument, and my WIX project which holds all these assignments. The essays I did in response to Carol Dweck and Mary Louise Pratt were less structured, allowing me to share my thoughts on the ideas presented. The narrative was meant to incorporate some synthesis of multiple sources to create a unified idea throughout a story. The argument was more focused and highly researched, drawing even more upon other people’s opinions and investigations to try to reach a persuasive conclusion. My WIX-based project was meant to be able to reach more people and incorporate multimodal strategies to be more interactive and engaging.  In this case, I learned what tends to appeal to an online audience and shaped my pages to reflect that, with images and pull-out quotes that grab readers’ attention, hyperlinks to other resources, etc. This experience has already transferred: in another class, I did a presentation on how technology is shaping the way that the world writes and communicates, inspired in large part by what I’ve learned on this platform (Figure 3). With these tools, I am better able to control my own processes, creating highly individualized pieces and making the website and works of writing my own. The process of writing for so many genres helped me develop questions to ask which clarified my purpose in each one.

 

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Being aware of the way I like to do things helps me be more effective in expressing ideas and making projects my own by identifying opportunities for growth.

 

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As part of developing our metacognition throughout the semester, we were asked to question and reflect on our processes as we researched and wrote. I found that I tend to follow the steps shown in Figure 4 in my writing process. Being aware of the way I like to do things helps me be more effective in expressing ideas and making projects my own by identifying opportunities for growth. Another of the most helpful activities we did was holding peer workshops on our arguments in class, where we read each other's work and commented on it. I both contributed and received feedback on my drafts from classmates, which helped encourage me that I was on the right track on some areas and helped me see where I could spend more time to reshape and revise the overall work. It allowed me to more accurately analyze my work and see whether I was meeting the goals I had laid out for it. Additionally, this allowed me to employ Carol Dweck’s idea of a “growth mindset,” or what I described in my response to her presentation as “look[ing] at [an obstacle] as an opportunity to grow and learn.” The National Research Council agrees that this sort of “‘metacognitive’ approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.” In fact, by reflecting on the course and its goals right now, I am employing this approach.

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The way this semester has unfolded has made me question my expectations for this class as well as for my other classes. Is the classroom just a place to follow instructions to get a satisfactory grade, or it is a place of growth where I am challenged to truly learn? W140 has proved to be the latter, and I am grateful for it.

 

 

Works Cited

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Chick, Nancy. “Metacognition.” Center for Teaching. Vanderbilt University. www.cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.  

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Dweck, Carol. “The Power of Believing That You Can Improve.” TED: Ideas Worth

Spreading, Nov. 2014,

www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en#t-354758.

 

How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice. "Chapter 2 Key Findings."

National Research Council. 1999. How People Learn: Bridging Research and

Practice. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.  doi: 10.17226/9457.

 

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991, pp. 33–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25595469.

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