9 Sample Syllabus 1: Genre Translation for Social Action
Our first Sample Syllabus is an excellent choice if you are thinking of designing a course where you want students connecting with particular audiences in order to take action on a social issue that the class has been engaging collectively. In the syllabus materials developed by Megan Butler (Lit and Culture PhD, 2024), you’ll see that she centered her course around the theme of education, but there are many other topics that could be central to such a course. Popular topics for UW writing courses include: issues around place and mobility (supporting the unhoused community, addressing food insecurity, navigating transportation systems, relationships between urban environments and the plants, people, and animals that move within them); issues related to historical and ongoing injustice (Japanese incarceration during WWII, redlining in Seattle neighborhoods, Indigenous sovereignty and reparations, growing wealth inequality); issues of language, identity and communication (linguistic justice, linguistic racism, navigating language policies and identities) and more. We encourage you to identify topics that offer you and your students a wide range of possible lines of inquiry and with complex and multifaceted audiences and spaces for engagement.
Megan’s particular design for the course centers on what she calls a “center of gravity” text. In her case, it is a piece of long-form journalism from the New York Times that she and her students engage carefully over the quarter. You might similarly choose a journalistic essay or an academic article or book chapter — there are several options in the back of Writer/Thinker/Maker that you might consider using. Whatever topic or “center of gravity” essay you choose, be mindful that you will have a range of students and student interests in your course, including students who may not be familiar with topics focused on a U.S. context, or who may have strongly dissenting perspectives depending on the topic chosen.
In PWR we talk often about creating contexts for students’ writing. Each assignment sequence is an opportunity for you to design a meaningful space for students to work through their thinking and share that thinking with audiences that matter to them. Megan approaches this by first designing a space where students engage around a problem collectively, and in their first assignment sequence, work to identify an audience to whom they see this problem as mattering or to whom they want to communicate about this problem. Through this work, students invest in the issue and figure out why it matters to them, their community, or to various audiences. They then enact a “genre translation” — shifting the genre of “long-form journalistic essay” in their center of gravity reading to a different genre that would enable them to connect with a meaningful audience. The emphasis here is both on students’ identifying a genre and an audience, and then learning to create that genre with an eye toward that audience.
In the second assignment sequence, then, students take what they’ve learned by composing toward an audience of their choosing and creating a genre translation and put their work toward composing a grant request to a funding agency. Here, Megan specifies an audience for her students to write toward and engages them in a series of exercises as they navigate yet another genre translation, bringing what they’ve learned and researched toward identifying potential solutions or next steps or courses of action they would like to see implemented.
You’re welcome to take up any of Megan’s activities and exercises below and there are many ways you can adapt or iterate this syllabus, particularly the final sequence. If you would prefer not to focus on grant-writing, you can identify a different audience for students to compose toward (e.g., a local Seattle or UW-focused entity or person with the ability to implement action) or you could ask students to compose a particular genre (manifesto; open letter; video or podcast) that is supported by your assignment sequence activities.
