Blake Wilder

Teaching Artifact: The Writers Blog

The Writers Blog project that I have developed is an informal expressivist writing
project that is designed to help students to become aware of writing as a process, develop their
own voice, and learn to anticipate and respond to an audience.
On the first day of class, I give all the students a marble composition book to use as a
writers notebook. This compels the students to collect their work and responses to it in one
place; this highlights their growth over the course of the quarter and encourages them to focus on
their progress from week to week. Every week, students write a draft of a post in response to a
choice of prompts in their notebooks, which they bring to class and exchange to get feedback
from at least two fellow students. Using this feedback and their own reflections, students polish
their posts and publish them on their individual blogs. All the student blogs are linked through a
class blog. Outside of the classroom, students read all of the blogs, comment on some of them,
and vote for the Blog of the Week. In practice, this activity utilizes the pedagogical
possibilities of innovations in digital media to maximize the benefits of traditional composition
pedagogy. Specifically, it combines my understanding of Peter Elbows Writing without
Teachers with strategies drawn from Building Online Learning Communities: Effective
Strategies for the Virtual Classroom by Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt.
Except for the voting, I participate in all the steps of the Writers Blog composing my
own responses, receiving and offering initial feedback, polishing and publishing my posts, and
commenting on various other blogs. My participation as an equal to the students in this process is
intended as another way to downplay my teacherly authority and to encourage students to learn
from each other, reflecting the arrangement of the class in a circle. Both the initial feedback
exchange and the commenting give students the opportunity to hear feedback regarding how
their words are experienced by others; this feedback is sustained over an extended time and
includes feedback to writing that is still in rough draft form. The emphasis on feedback
recurring and at different points of the writing process is drawn directly from ideas that Elbow
sets out in Writing without Teachers. To create an awareness of the writing process, to focus
attention on the feedback, and to counteract the most significant challenge to using Elbows
model in the classroom (the inevitability of assessment), the grading for the Writers Blog is
quantitatively based on the steps of participation rather than evaluatively based on the quality of
the writing itself.
Palloffs and Pratts Building Online Learning Communities has been invaluable to my
thinking of how to use digital media options to access the benefits of Elbows ideas, which are
unfortunately based on a model that is impossible to attain within the university system. By
better understanding the realities of how interactions are experienced in online settings, I am able
to take deliberate steps (modeling informal commenting, creating a distinction in tone between
Carmen and the blog space, requiring a level of participation that prompts the habit of active
participation) to encourage students to see the class blog space as more imaginatively open than
the traditional classroom setting. This perspective is reflected in the fact that the class blog
allows students to interact with each other from physical spaces outside of the classroom.
Moreover, because it is a digital space, the class blog space hopefully evokes other modes of
social networking that students are already comfortable with, such as facebook or twitter. To
establish this connection and to reinforce the role of the blog in building student relationships,
students are asked to have profile picture so that comments are humanized with a face.

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Writers Blog:
The Writers Blog will be an ongoing and multi-step process designed to help you practice
organizing your writing, explore different ways to express a point-of-view, write with an
audience in mind, and practice revision.
Step 1: After reading the assigned essays from Crossing Cultures, you will select one of
the suggested prompts. There will be two to three options available depending on the
week. You will write a rough-draft response by hand in your journal notebook.
Step 2: You will bring your journal notebook with you to class on Tuesday (this will
happen every Tuesday). The class will exchange notebooks, and you will receive
feedback from two to three of your peers.
Step 3: Using the feedback from your peers, you will revise your original entry. You will
publish the polished version of at least 300 words on your individual blog by midnight
Thursday every week.
Step 4: You will read through all the published blogs, commenting on at least three and
voting for one as Blog of the Week. You will complete this step by midnight Sunday.
Step 5: First thing on Tuesday, we will discuss the winner of Blog of the Week in
class, focusing on why people voted for it and what was most successful. We will then
move on to step 2 for your next entry.
As you can see, The Writers Blog will an ongoing and overlapping process. It will be crucial
for you to stay organized and on top of each step. No single step is excessively challenging, but
they will become overwhelming if they pile up.
The following are selected prompts from Crossing Cultures: Readings for Composition. These
follow essays or poems that embody some form or idea that the prompt is asking the student to
recreate. Students always have multiple options and are also encouraged to use the prompts as a
jumping off point if they are inspired to diverge.

Develop your own philosophy of a teachers role beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. In
other words, what can teachers teach us beyond academics?

Most students experience some change when they go to college that distances them from
their family or alters their family role. Describe a change that you have gone through or that
you see yourself going through in the future.

Have you ever experienced an eventa dance, a party, a tripthat you looked forward to
and that turned out to be a disaster? Or have you ever dreaded an event, such as an interview
or a blind date, that turned out better than you expected? Tell it, trying to make the reader
feel the anticipation and the change through specific, descriptive details you cite, rather than
by direct statements.

Describe a situation where you had an insight into an experience that you felt others around
you might not share. Describe how you gained that experience, and how it affected your
feelings about, or your approach to, that situation.

Have you ever felt yourself in real danger? If so, try to describe the circumstances. Instead of
just an objective description of the events, try to heighten the effect by the careful use of

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emotionally effective words and phrases (You will find that overuse of emotional words
diminishes rather than enhances the effect).

Has there ever been a moment, event, or experience with a person that changed the way you
view things or yourself? What was the change? How did it change you? Try to describe the
experience so the reader can see you change instead directly stating that you did change.

Write a response in which you celebrate some aspect of your identity. Consider beginning
with the line This post is in celebration of Focus on one specific aspect (race, ethnicity,
gender, national identity, religion, class, state identity, college identity, hobby) of yourself
and reflect on how that part helps shape who you are.

Although not all of us are of mixed or battling heritages, most of us have felt split at some
point in our lives. For example, we may feel both allegiance to and conflict with the identities
prescribed by our family traditions, our religion, our social class, or our societys ideas about
appropriate gender roles. Describe a way you see yourself on the border of any of these
identities or others important to you.