2006 Writing–Teaching Grant Recipients
Mary L. Gray, Communication and Culture
Gray will use her grant to “scale up” a writing component deployed this semester in a small class, where limited enrollment has allowed her to use writing as a tool to help students negotiate what is new terrain for many: addressing queer genders and sexualities as intellectual, academic topics of analysis. Gray will explore how to use writing to navigate these controversial topics in lower division, high enrollment classes.
Dionne Danns, Education
Danns will expand an existing autobiography assignment in H340 Education and American Culture, to enable students to reflect on lectures and readings, and to make sense of how their roles as students interact with larger educational and social phenomena to inform their roles as future teachers. Through the revised assignment, students will explore personal history and apply educational concepts such as tracking. Students will also interview and write a biography of someone of a different race, class, gender, ethnicity, or religion from themselves.
Justyna Beinek, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Beinek will integrate writing assignments into her new Polish film course, an introduction to cinema and cultural studies that addresses cinematic expression in the context of East European history, politics, and sociology. Students will react to films through response essays, analyze films at the aesthetic and semiotic level through fact sheets, synthesize impressions and information about films through reviews, and develop analytical essays that will discuss films in their historical and sociopolitical contexts.
Fabio Rojas, Sociology
Rojas will augment writing assignments for Sociology 340 Introduction to Social Theory, organized around readings from classical and contemporary social theorists such as Max Weber and Karl Marx. Currently students write two- to three-page essays in response to readings. They then expand their essays in response to further readings and comments from the instructor. Rojas intends to revise the class to solicit more feedback from students at all stages of the writing and revising process.
