This is a syllabus is for a first-year writing course I created called Literacy, Culture, and Identity, which was inspired by scholarship in critical race and feminist pedagogies and originally intended to be taught as English 101 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). John Jay’s English 101 class is essentially supposed to be about how to write a research paper and includes a number of required assignments, which limit the number of outside readings teachers can bring in. However, instructors are free to select the course theme; for my class, I chose literacy and its relationship to identity (particularly race, gender, and culture). My updated syllabus aims to pay greater attention to student engagement and active learning, writing and reading across multiple forms of media, centering texts by authors of color (especially LGBTQ women of color), and student choice. You can download the full syllabus and, at the end, read a longer reflection about the choices I made in designing it.
Syllabus for Literacy, Culture and Identity first-year writing course
