2 Curriculum Design Considerations

Because everyone’s priorities, objectives, student learning outcomes, schedules, and institutions are different, we’ve come up with some general ideas for how to design your community change curriculum.

1. What are topics that you would be interested in using for a community change-themed writing course? Some of these may cross over with the ones we have; others may be more specific to your own colleges, communities, or regions of the country/world.
2. What are your personal reasons/motivations for wanting to create this course? If you’re not excited about this, then your students won’t be. So what are some drivers for wanting to create a new or modified curriculum?
3. What are your pedagogical priorities? These priorities might pertain to (and in no particular order) writing instruction, critical thinking, critical reading, discussion, engagement, oral communication, mechanics/grammar, formatting and citing, revision, application, rhetoric & argumentation, analysis, project-based learning, service-based learning, etc. While we would like to focus on all of these things all of the time, time constraints often force us to pick and choose or prioritize what is most important for us to teach our students or for students to learn. These priorities can also inform the types of activities and assignments we create.
4. What are the student learning outcomes for your course? In some cases, like in Idaho, these general education learning outcomes come from the State. However, if your state doesn’t mandate particular outcomes, then use your institutional ones. If your institution doesn’t have those, then use standards commonly used in other states (while the wording might be slightly different, they often have similar expectations for first-year composition courses) and use the mix and match method. We included a chapter in this textbook with Idaho Written Communication outcomes that are fairly standard when compared to other state’s outcomes for composition. Similar to the priorities, ensuring that the activities and assignments you create incorporate SLOs is important so that your curriculum aligns with general education outcome mandates as well as provides data and artifacts for assessment purposes.
5. Think about your academic calendar/schedule. How many weeks does your course run? Is it a quarterly or semester-long system? How will you schedule work around campus breaks? Having a firm idea of your calendar can help with scope and sequence and making some of those hard decisions on what curriculum to maintain and what activities to shed.
6. How do your students learn best? Take an inventory of your past few semesters. Are your students coming in with strong or struggling writing skills? Are your students recent high school graduates, transfer students, adult learners, part-time students, commuters, etc.? Again, having some knowledge of incoming students’ skills and prior reading and writing experiences can be helpful here for pacing and scope of assignments. Your teaching methods and multiple learning styles should be contemplated. This is also a consideration for thinking about alternative learning pathways.
7. How will you make learning accessible and encourage belonging? Think about accessibility in terms of lived experiences (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), socioeconomic concerns like the financial cost of books and materials students may need to purchase (or pursue low-cost or no-cost options like OER), learning disabilities and accommodations, technology and Internet access, etc. Consider ways to ensure accessibilty and inclusivity with the readings, assignments, and activities you’re asking students to do.
8. How will your materials be accessed and presented? Are your classes in-person, online, remote synchronous, or hybrid? Will you use an LMS to house your materials or some other platform? Will you be using Google Workspace, Teams, or another collaborative system?
9. Will there be a collaborative element? How do you want to use group/team work? How much of an individual’s grade will depend on what the team has accomplished or how well they have worked?
10. What didn’t work? We all have experienced activities and assignments that have fallen flat despite our best efforts. Think about activities and assignments that haven’t worked and jot down some ideas on why they didn’t. Maybe you didn’t explain something well enough, or maybe students didn’t put forward their best effort due to time or misunderstanding the assignment. Do a brief but critical analysis on why you think something that should have worked didn’t. Is that activity or assignment salvageable? Can it be tweaked? Or will it be replaced with something new or something better?
11. What has worked? What activities and assignments or types of activities and assignments have worked well in the past? Do you want to continue to use those? How can those be tweaked so that they fit the community change theme if they don’t currently do that? How can you enhance a current activity or assignment so that it is even more engaging for students?
12. What is something new that you want to try? Maybe you found a good idea from a professional development workshop, CCCCs or TYCA session, reading an article, listening to an educational podcast, or accidentally stumbled upon while Google surfing. How can you fit that new teaching method, activity, or assignment into your new community change curriculum?
13. Syllabus time. What changes do you need to incorporate on your syllabus or first-day documents that explains the new theme? We have a sample of our syllabus statement/rationale in this chapter if you want an example.

Although this list is not a comprehensive one, the steps outlined here should get you off to a good start as you begin to design your Writing for Community Change curriculum.