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Course Context
My project emerges out of the experience of teaching writing in New York City after 9/11. Following the attack on the World Trade Center, students in the three writing classes I was teaching that fall wrote powerful personal accounts of that day. They revised those writings through a series of peer critiquing sessions and donated their accounts to the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, an important repository of historical documents. The "I" that emerged from many of those papers was noticeably stronger--more expressive and authoritative--than the "I" that appears in many student papers that I had previously read. While the proximity of the attack and the impact of the experience brought an urgency to these first-person accounts, the responses of peers--students from all over the world who were now linked by their experiences of the attack--fueled the first-person voices in these papers. Students wrote not only for themselves, but for each other. In the winter of 2002, I began looking for ways to help students continue to respond to 9/11. I also began to reconsider the place of first-person writing in my classes. I wanted to find ways to help students cultivate the expressiveness and authority so apparent in the 9/11 papers. The Discussion Board became an important tool in this effort. The following fall, I began gathering "data"--student writing on the Discussion Board that served as prewriting and the resulting essays. I am now examining that data paying particular attention to the amount and the characteristics of exchanges on the Discussion Board in relation to characteristics of the essays that followed. While I had not originally intended to analyze Discussion Board prompts in relation to student writing, I am finding that analysis to be a necessary part of my study. more...
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