Re-Writing Writing

Establishing Pedagogical and Evidentiary Paradigms for Digital-Forward Instructional Design in Postsecondary Writing Courses

This report summarizes the work of the Re-Writing Writing workshop. We invited a diverse range of digital learning experts (including academic technology leaders and instructional technologists, writing faculty, teaching and learning center directors, and writing department chairs) to bring their distributed knowledge of digital tools to a four-session virtual workshop. Working together we would collect and organize more than each of us knew individually. The workshop, held during the Fall 2020 term, challenged participants to address current barriers to digital instruction, especially in the online environment of instruction, which had become de rigueur during the Covid-19 pandemic. We were more than proven right, and rewarded. In addition to bringing more understanding to a theory of digital-forward design we wanted to build an example that would advance the discussion around, and ability to develop, a digital-forward course. Looking within the universe of courses developed through the work of the PLC, we elected a course that was both necessary to student success in postsecondary education and among the most challenging to shift from instructor-forward to digital-forward.