Composition Forum 47, Fall 2021
http://compositionforum.com/issue/47/

Ethos and Dwelling in the University: Using Online Writing Projects to Help Students Navigate Institutional Spaces and Classroom Experiences

Matthew Kelly and Tara Propper

Abstract: This article examines how online writing projects can provide students an opportunity to critically reflect upon their literal and conceptual position within university spaces. We begin by discussing the underlying connection between classical notions of ethos and spatial dwelling before considering how writing in online environments provides new opportunities for students to engage in a dynamic form of ethos-building. We then discuss two different online writing projects wherein students narrated the strategies they used to negotiate a variety of institutional environments and the learning experiences that happen therein. In doing so, these projects demonstrate how online writing assignments can reinforce students’ confidence in their ability to traverse a variety of educational scenarios which, in turn, can help them chart a path for achieving their own academic, professional, and personal goals.

Introduction

Many scholars have examined the unique advantages of incorporating digital and online writing projects into the composition classroom (Buck; Shipka; Gillam and Wooden). A recurring theme throughout this scholarship is the notion that many students enter into first-year writing courses with prior digital and/or online composing experiences (Vie). In other words, the prevalence of online communication platforms has created a situation where students often use a variety of digital composing strategies in their personal lives. Consequently, incorporating digital and online writing projects into the classroom can help students better comprehend the unique rhetorical dimensions of the composing practices they encounter in their day-to-day activities (Fraiburg and Chui). As Ryan Shepherd argues, using the classroom to validate students’ personal experiences with digital or online writing can help them “see their out-of-school writing as more important” in the sense that students are encouraged to view their out-of-classroom composing practices as participating in the same type of intellectual work undertaken by academic writing (Shepherd 104). Furthermore, locating commonalities between composing practices that occur within the classroom and those that happen beyond educational environments can help students understand the numerous contexts in which writing happens. This, in turn, will prepare them to navigate future writing scenarios (Yancey et al.; Wardle).

While these scholars have been instrumental in reaffirming the pedagogical benefits of assigning digital projects in composition courses, this research implicitly characterizes the writing classroom as an arena where students re-envision the significance of online composing practices that occur beyond the confines of traditional educational spaces. Taking this critical approach can potentially overlook students' ability to use online writing to analyze their experiences within classroom environments.{1} Rather than view the classroom as a space for students to reconsider the online composing practices used in non-educational contexts, this article will examine how online writing projects can provide an outlet for students to critically reflect upon their learning experiences within university spaces. Put differently, we would like to re-approach the interrelationship between online writing assignments and student learning activities within traditional classrooms by exploring the following questions:

1. In what ways can online writing projects actively reaffirm students' connection to university spaces and the academic cultures that reside therein?

2. How can students use online writing to reflect upon their experiences navigating institutional environments, policies, and infrastructure?

3. How can online writing projects invite students to draw connections between their navigation of educational spaces and the types of real-world scenarios they will most likely encounter as members of a given scholarly or professional community?

To answer these questions, we will build upon the theoretical frameworks put forth by Donald Gold, Merideth Garcia, and Anna V. Knutson in their article Going Public in an Age of Digital Anxiety. We will start by analyzing Gold et al.'s notion of power (which they define as the ability to craft a dynamic and influential virtual persona that builds upon past experiences and utterances) in order to emphasize the implied spatial dimensions of ethos-building in online environments. We will then explain how the connection between power, ethos building, and space manifested itself across two digitally-native projects that we designed for the first-year writing sequence at our university. The first of these assignments was an Internet Resource Guide, which were websites that allowed students to use their personal experiences navigating university infrastructure as a way to discuss the underlying values of their intended major. The second assignment was an online e-portfolio, which cataloged the intellectual strategies and composing practices students used to persist through different academic scenarios. In both of these sections, framing student writing through the notion of power and ethos-building underscores the ways in which online writing projects can provide opportunities for students to create their own “space” within academic culture.

The ultimate goal of this examination is to illustrate how online writing projects can help students re-envision the literal and conceptual spaces they inhabit in institutional environments. In explaining our rationale behind our assignments and exploring the unique writing practices these assignments elicited, we hope to provide enough resources to help instructors design digital projects that resonate with students' first-hand experiences navigating classroom or campus settings. To begin, we will briefly explain our local institutional context. Discussing our university's organizational structure and circumstances can further clarify our rationale for implementing online assignments in first-year writing courses.

Institutional Context

Our campus is a medium-sized, four-year public university that enrolls slightly more than 10,000 students. Our university also serves a diverse population; minority students account for thirty-three percent of undergraduate enrollment, and fifty-seven percent of undergraduates are first-generation college students. Additionally, forty-six percent of undergraduates fall beyond the eighteen-to-twenty-one age demographic. While our campus is located in a city, many students commute from smaller suburban and rural towns throughout the surrounding region.

The university's first-year writing sequence consists of two classes, English 1301 and English 1302. These courses are designed to meet state-mandated learning outcomes, which include the ability to “develop ideas with appropriate support and attribution,” “analyze, interpret, and evaluate a variety of texts for the ethical and logical use of evidence,” and “demonstrate knowledge of individual and collaborative writing processes.” On our campus, English 1301 introduces students to foundational reading and writing strategies that can help them compose essays in other classes (such as the ability to effectively summarize academic texts and undertake expository forms of critical analysis). This class also familiarizes students with resources (such as our library's databases) that can help them conduct independent research. English 1302 prepares students for highly specialized research and this class culminates in a literature review that examines a specific topic in students' intended disciplines.

The major projects and evaluation criteria for English 1301 and 1302 are standardized throughout all sections. However, these classes are taught individually by both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty in the English program, and instructors can design smaller assignments or class activities as they see fit. All first-year writing classes have an enrollment limit of twenty-two students. On average, we offer twenty-five sections of English 1301 and twenty-one sections of English 1302 each academic year (with most 1301 sections held in the fall and most 1302 sections held in the spring).

As English faculty members who are also part of the department's Composition Committee, we were tasked with revising the readings and assignments in the first-year writing sequence to better account for student needs. From discussing instructors' experiences teaching English 1301/1302 and conducting department-wide assessments of student writing, we discovered that students often had difficulty selecting topics for assignments because they were unsure of what constitutes scholarly or professional reading/writing practices in their chosen field-of-study. This, in turn, made it challenging for students to find connections between their daily class activities and long-term goals, meaning that classroom experiences appeared inapplicable to students' self-identified educational aims. In short, we observed that many new students found themselves dislocated from university spaces and unsure of how to navigate new learning scenarios. Consequently, we wanted to redesign English 1301 to help first-year writers better orient themselves within the university and the academic communities that reside therein.{2} The purpose of this revised curriculum was to invite students to reflect upon their own goals for enrolling in college and speculate where their prospective disciplinary identities might reside within this larger university sphere.

For the 2017-18 academic year, we restructured 1301 so that each student would create a public-facing website, which we titled an “Internet Resource Guide” (hereinafter IRG). These websites introduced students' respective majors to other first-year undergraduates. More specifically, students narrated the responsibilities and conventions of their intended field-of-study while also discussing how readers might utilize scholarly resources for their own professional goals. Our intention for having students speak to an audience other than an individual instructor through these public websites was to encourage them to reflect upon the academic environments they speak from. Put differently, entering students have mainly composed essays within an insular power hierarchy (i.e., writing to an instructor in a course that is required by high schools or colleges). Such a power hierarchy can create a situation where students' only writing goals are to validate their proficiency within a given subject to an authority figure. Conversely, writing in publicly accessible online environments challenges the assumed hierarchy between authors and audiences. As Deborah Brandt notes, the increasing prevalence of digital writing practices in contemporary socio-economic systems has created a scenario where “[a]udiences are made up not merely (or mostly) of receptive readers but also responsive writers; increasingly people write to catalyze or anticipate other people’s writing and people read with the aim of writing back” (Brandt 162). This means that online writing assignments can create situations where student composing practices are able to elicit action, be it written or otherwise, on the part of their audience. In regards to the IRG, anticipating the perspectives and possible reactions from readers who may be unfamiliar with a given discipline could encourage student-writers to reflect upon their own position within similar educational environments as a means to empathize with and encourage responses from their audience.

Our hope was that having students write to an audience which includes fellow undergraduates (who may have little-to-no familiarity with college-level academic culture) would motivate student-writers to draw from their own experiences within educational spaces as a means of informing and fostering re-actions on the part of their readership. In narrating personal experiences within the university, students would have an opportunity to articulate why they initially chose to enter a specific academic space and, by extension, feel more empowered in their goals for inhabiting said environments (Murphy et al.). Before discussing the writing elicited by our assignments, we will briefly review how scholars have discussed the relationship between empowerment, the inhabitation of space, and online writing.{3} Understanding the interconnection between these concepts will further highlight the critical work that students were undertaking in their websites.

Power, Ethos, and Dwelling

Gold et al. link the concept of “power” in online writing spaces to students' personal assessment of their own ethos. They note how writing in online, publicly visible environments can create anxieties around one's expertise insofar as the decision to make writerly interventions within digital spaces is “often dependent on the student’s perception of their ethos—their self-perceived rhetorical power—in a particular context and at a particular moment” (Gold et al., np). A perceived lack of expertise may cause students to question their ability to make meaningful contributions to discussions that occur within virtual public arenas. While anxieties surrounding expertise is a valid concern for students, Gold et al. argue that a writer's “rhetorical power” should be viewed along a continuum of experiences as opposed to evaluating one's ethos based on a single, isolated utterance. Put differently, online writing environments permit a more flexible and complex expression of ethos because these spaces allow for on-going conversations wherein one's virtual persona is not limited to singular and self-contained composing practices. As Gold et al. explain, “individual writing assignments tend to figure ethos as applying to a discrete rhetorical act; for students writing online, however, ethos formation is an ever-ongoing work in progress, and interventions are seen not as discrete, but interlinked” (np). Consequently, ethos (and the rhetorical power that accompanies it) should be viewed as an iterative process through which students approximate their own position within larger conversations by reflecting upon their on-going exchanges with ideas and individuals.

Gold et al. demonstrate how online writing environments help us re-envision ethos as a dynamic process that emerges across a spectrum of utterances and interactions. However, other scholars have similarly re-defined ethos as an on-going process rather than a static object-of-examination. In The Ethos of Rhetoric, Michael Hyde discusses the implied spatial dimensions of ethos in classical rhetoric. According to Hyde, ethea, from which Aristotle's ethos is derived, referred to a dwelling space (Hyde xvi). Ethea later came to connote the habits and behaviors one developed within this dwelling space. This pre-Aristotelian context allows us to re-frame ethos as not simply an individual's display of character (as it is typically construed), but, instead, as a public presentation mediated by and contingent upon one's spatial relationality. As Aric Putnam argues in his analysis of Hyde's work, “the term ethos provides a vocabulary for the treatment of the rhetorical effect of collective identity formation,” which pushes back against Aristotle's more individualized conception of ethical development (Putnam 36). In other words, one's virtues, habits, and authority are contingent upon their inhabitation within and movement through collectively-shared spaces. Ethos, then, can be viewed as an extension of the strategies an individual uses to traverse literal and conceptual spaces while also negotiating the collective values or communities that reside within these spaces.

To connect these ideas back to student writing, we can say that a student-writer's “self-perceived rhetorical power” is tethered to the “dwelling practices” used to navigate her/his surroundings and engage with the communal values circulating within these environments. This means that a student-writer's recognition of their own ethos can be connected to the ways in which she/he feels (or does not feel) confident inhabiting a literal or conceptual space. As Gold et al. argue, online writing environments can encourage students to see their “self-perceived rhetorical power” across a continuum of experiences. Online writing environments can function as virtual territories where students critically reflect upon the “dwelling practices” they deploy across different spaces (meaning, the strategies used to navigate collectively-shared environments) while also considering how these spaces impact their daily activities. That is to say, online writing environments can operate as a dynamic archive that catalogs how students have moved (and will continue to move) from one space to another, and undertaking this type of critical self-archiving can help students feel confident in their ability to successfully move through subsequent spaces which have yet to be encountered. In order to explore how the relationship between power, ethos, and dwelling shapes actual student writing practices, we will now discuss the IRG project that we designed for our English 1301 curriculum.

Narrating the Navigation of Space

We implemented our revised curriculum across all English 1301 sections for the 2017-2018 academic year.{4} We sequenced assignments so that three major projects would build upon one another throughout the semester. The first major assignment was a summary, which tasked students with locating and summarizing three journal articles in their intended field-of-study. The goal of this project was to introduce students to academic resources, such as scholarly databases, while fostering foundational writing strategies (e.g., proper incorporation of outside quotes, avoiding generalizations when defining key terms, etc.). The second assignment was a rhetorical analysis, in which students examined the sources they summarized and identified recurring patterns in how a professional/academic community communicates discipline-specific information. The goal of this project was to highlight how different disciplines prioritize varying methods of gathering and conveying information. In finding patterns among research in their prospective majors, students could begin envisioning the writing scenarios they would need to navigate in future academic or professional settings.

The final project was the IRG.{5} Each student located and summarized five sources in their prospective major (such as journal articles or discipline-specific databases) before explaining how novices might benefit from engaging with these sources or describing how these sources illustrate the responsibilities that professionals must manage in real-world scenarios. Students also arranged these sources into different navigation tabs on their websites and explained their rationale for grouping sources together. Despite the online format, the IRG built upon earlier projects; students were encouraged to revise their earlier summaries and include these sources on their websites, meaning students would only need to locate two new sources. Additionally, the patterns identified in the rhetorical analysis could help students further clarify professional responsibilities and conventions.

These websites were more than just formal collections of scholarly resources, though. Each website was required to have a Mission Statement, which briefly introduced the student-writer and provided an overview of the information housed on their website. Additionally, this section asked students to narrate any uncertainties they initially had about their major, then explain how navigating these uncertainties could be representative of the difficulties others might face when starting their degree. In designing the criteria for this section, we wanted to create a situation where students could reflect upon their experiences in university environments in order to derive a sense of confidence in their ability to successfully negotiate college-level expectations or tribulations. This, in turn, would provide students an opportunity to demonstrate their familiarity with obstacles or logistics surrounding their majors despite the fact that many student-writers had yet to complete their first year in college. Put differently, communicating their status as someone who knows how to successfully navigate uncertainty within college environments would require students to create a type of academic ethos insofar as they were cultivating an online persona that exhibited a degree of scholarly/professional expertise via their ability to translate complex materials and learning experiences to a novice audience (McIntyre). In order to demonstrate how students began crafting a dynamic academic ethos, we would like to examine several Mission Statements.{6}

In their Mission Statement, Student A narrated how they decided to major in civil engineering:

I wanted to be an electrical engineer and work for the defense industry, but after my first semester I realized that I would absolutely hate spending hours on end in the lab testing circuits. I decided to speak to some of the professors on campus in different fields of engineering, I asked for advice on what their daily work schedules look like. [...] I sought out information from friends [and] family. [...] I found that my uncles and I shared many of the same interests as me when it came to math and science, and both were very successful engineers at their firms, so I decided to look into civil engineering as a possible major, and I was instantly hooked by the direct impact that I could have on the community.

Student A’s discussion of how personal uncertainty regarding their major galvanized in-person meetings to learn about—and later identify with—a discipline reveals the inter-animating relationship between ethos building and dwelling practices. In communicating the responsibilities of civil engineering to new majors, Student A first recognized their own dwelling practices in institutional spaces and considered whether these practices sync up with their personal values. Put bluntly, the demoralizing prospect of “spending hours on end in the lab” spurred Student A to literally navigate the halls of the university and speak with professors. Furthermore, Student A ventured beyond the confines of the university and talked to family members in order to understand how personal interests in math and science are applicable to real-world settings. These conversations allowed this student to return to their position in the academy with a stronger sense of a disciplinary value—an emphasis in community engagement—that could help them map out the learning experiences and professional scenarios they find most rewarding. Hence, Student A used the potentially anxiety-inducing experience of navigating institutional spaces (i.e., the process of changing one’s major) as an outlet for investigating and confidently communicating the values underlying civil engineering.

Student A's strategy of discussing professional values via classroom scenarios was a recurring trend among these websites.{7} Student B, a marine biology major, similarly framed their discipline by narrating personal apprehensions about certain college-level courses:

You may decide on marine biology while thinking, “at least I’ll never have to take another Chemistry or English class”, but that is not true at all. I thought the same thing, but quickly realize [sic] that while they are both required classes for this major, they are also useful classes when looking at marine biology. Chemistry is need [sic] because in order to understand the biological aspect of marine life, we need to first understand all the elements and minerals they come in contact with, and how these might affect the various types of marine life. Taking college level English classes is a must due to the fact that [...] you will need to communicate your finding [sic] with someone else.

As with the previous student-writer, Student B contextualized their major by describing classes they were not enthusiastic about. However, Student B veered away from a conversation about their literal navigation of educational settings and, instead, speculated the professional scenarios that marine biologists encounter. In doing so, Student B traced a pathway between the embodied experience of dwelling within university spaces (i.e., the types of classes aspiring marine biologists must take), the lessons learned from inhabiting said spaces, and the applicability of these lessons vis-a-vis real-world responsibilities. In doing so, Student B imagined the intellectual work associated with their major and considered how such work manifests itself across different environments. To echo Nedra Reynolds, Student B’s connection between the classroom and professional scenarios provides an “understanding of how geographies are embodied [and] how bodies imprint a place with identifiable or palpable characteristics” (Reynolds 145). In this sense, Student B’s treatment of their discipline is explicitly spatialized because they articulated disciplinary conventions based on the literal spaces and conceptual circumstances that marine biologists occupy. This means that Student B's ability to present themselves as someone familiar with marine biology was inseparable from their capacity to articulate the larger significance of moving through different educational or professional arenas.

It is interesting to note that Student B framed their conversation of disciplinary responsibilities by directly addressing the audience as “you.” This subtle-yet-important stylistic decision exhibits an authoritative ethos in the sense that Student B used their own misconceptions surrounding their major as a foundation for providing guidance to a novice audience.{8} Offering advice on how “you” should approach the value of certain classes echoes the advice that Student B garnered for themselves after reflecting upon their own inhabitation within the university. In passing along this advice, Student B was encouraging intellectual action on the part of their readership insofar as they urged their audience to re-envision the larger applicability of chemistry and English classes.

Granted, speaking to an audience via the second person is a move that first-year writers often make. As David Bartholomae notes, using the second person may indicate students approximating what they believe to be an authoritative academic persona; by insisting on what “you” should do, students are projecting themselves into a position of authority based on their assumptions regarding the audience/author relationship within academic culture (Bartholomae). While the use of the second person may reveal assumptions regarding academic authority, the online nature of these projects allowed student-writers to embed hyperlinks to other websites and explain how their audience might take advantage of these resources. In explaining how to utilize other websites, the use of “you” operated less like a vague stand-in for a generalized audience and, instead, more like an invitation for others to participate in the same navigation of space exhibited by student-writers. For example, Student C, a nursing major, included hyperlinks to websites that explained different subfields within nursing.{9} They then described how their audience might use these resources:

More information about the different pathways can be found from Source 1 [...] [w]hich is a website by Registerednursing.org. The website goes over the different nursing positions, careers, and specialties available such as a midwife or hospice nurse. You can click on a certain nursing position and it will bring you to another link where you can learn more about how to become that specialty. Gauging the different options and seeing what you’re interested in can give you more motivation and a better vision for the future.

As mentioned earlier, online writing environments allow for a dynamic process of ethos-building because they archive the dwelling strategies used to move through different spaces. Student C's narration of how to properly engage with a professional resource reinforced their ethos as someone who can confidently navigate a virtual space (i.e., a website that may seem complex for those who are unfamiliar with nursing). However, Student C also insisted that their audience to participate in the same type of spatial navigation and, by extension, ethos-building; Student C argued that navigating a virtual space (a professional website) can help readers refine their aims for navigating a literal educational space (deciding to major in nursing). In coupling the traversal of a virtual space with the traversal towards long-term professional goals, Student C created a situation where their audience was encouraged to undergo a spatialized form of ethos-building.

These websites demonstrate how online writing projects can help students establish their own academic ethos by re-envisioning their experiences inhabiting university spaces. Put differently, these websites were not isolated platforms where students narrated individual reasons for entering college. Instead, these websites allowed students to draw upon their personal dwelling practices within educational environments as a way to contextualize the larger importance of college-level learning experiences and professional resources for their readership. Hence, designing websites provided students an opportunity to reflect upon their institutional dwelling practices in order to locate themselves within a literal and conceptual community while simultaneously encouraging an audience to rethink their own position within physical or virtual spaces.

Using E-Portfolios to Create a Space in the University

At the end of the 2017-2018 academic year, we assessed student writing and discussed instructors’ experiences from our revised curriculum. Instructor feedback among the on-campus courses was generally positive. In our English 1301 sections offered for dual-credit at local high schools, however, instructors expressed more of an interest in highlighting the writing skills that would be used in college-level courses as opposed to emphasizing disciplinary conventions, seeing as dual-credit students may not have decided upon a major. To account for the fact that English 1301 would be taken by students at varying points in their education, we designed an alternative digital project (an e-portfolio) for the 2018-2019 academic year and gave instructors the ability to select whichever end-of-semester project would best resonate with the needs of their students.{10}

While the IRG asked student-writers to create websites that resonated with the perspectives of incoming undergraduates, the e-portfolio catalogued the writing skills and learning experiences student-writers had garnered throughout the semester. Students archived major assignments and highlighted moments they felt were particularly rewarding, productive, or even difficult. They then explained the applicability of these learning experiences to other educational or professional scenarios in their Mission Statement, which was housed on their e-portfolio's homepage. Furthermore, students were given the option to collect outside texts that captured their relationship to learning and education (a central theme of newly standardized class readings), then put these texts into conversations with their assignments.

With the e-portfolio, we wanted to emphasize students’ individual relationship to learning by prompting them to consider how their initial perceptions of class readings and composing strategies evolved throughout the semester. Rather than using personal experiences within institutional environments as a means of contextualizing disciplinary conventions (as was the case with the IRG), the e-portfolio would be a space where students could put multiple experiences and ideas into conversation with one another (Hall et al.). In doing so, students could establish their own intellectual space within the academy, meaning, an arena where students would mediate the overlap or fissures between the numerous learning experiences and texts they encountered while working towards their educational interests/goals. Thus, the e-portfolios functioned as on-going critical archives of students' inhabitation of the university, featuring both writing practices and resources that were central to their academic development.

The digital format of this assignment complimented our goal of treating students' e-portfolios as critical archives; the online nature of these projects would allow students to forge intertextual connections via embedding or hyperlinking to outside sources they found useful when drafting and reflecting upon their previous assignments. While print-based portfolios can undertake similar forms of archiving, the immediacy and flexibility of online platforms allowed students to collect a diverse array of texts beyond static print media. If there were videos, songs, podcasts, or other multimodal texts that helped students explore key themes within major assignments, they would have the opportunity to integrate these texts directly into their e-portfolios and discuss them alongside their class projects.{11}

For example, Student D analyzed trends among journalism scholarship in their rhetorical analysis and discussed how journalists often resort to innovative uses of technology (such as social media) when researching stories. In her e-portfolio, however, Student D wrote “After completing the three Learning Units for this semester, I feel worried about my major which is journalism” because their classes were not preparing them for the type of research practices examined in the rhetorical analysis assignment. Instead, Student D felt as though their classes privileged standardized, formulaic approaches to writing. In response to these concerns, Student D embedded two videos that critiqued teaching methods which stymie individualized creativity:

These next two videos pertain mainly about education and how the education system really works. Both videos describe how students are being taught the exact same thing no matter how different from each other they may be. I believe that each student learns and thinks differently, and schools should help each student learn in more customized environments.

One video was by spoken-word artist Prince Ea, entitled I Sued the School System, in which he prosecutes a case against “modern day schooling” and its emphasis on uniformity. The other video was a TED Talk entitled Do Schools Kill Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson, a British author and education advisor. In the TED Talk, Robinson claims that students are “educated out of creativity” via an over-reliance on standardized learning. Student D drew a direct connection between their reflection on past assignments, the themes of these videos, and anxieties about the applicability of their learning experiences within the university.

By embedding videos that were critical of what they perceived to be traditional academic conventions, Student D was not simply narrating the strategies used to navigate institutional spaces. Instead, the e-portfolio operated as a virtual arena for working through questions or concerns regarding academic dwelling. Such a virtual arena provided a temporary dislocation and distance from the physical space of the university, which allowed Student D to re-approach their own position within and against academic culture. Put differently, Student D used their e-portfolio to curate a space populated with texts (both self-produced and extra-institutional), which, in turn, allowed them to question the type of academic identity that is (or is not) encouraged by their institutional learning experiences. In doing so, Student D actively demonstrated a form of ethos-building by further engaging with feelings of uncertainty, speculation, or even anxiety. That is, students may initially think of rhetorical power as having confidence in knowing the “right answer” at a specific, isolated moment (as noted by Gold et al.), but ethos can be characterized by uncertainty seeing as this shows a dynamic reflection and on-going acknowledgment of one's relationship to their surroundings.

While Student D's uncertainty led them to be skeptical about the real-world applicability of academic conventions, Student E (a pharmacy major) used their uncertainty surrounding academic expectations to reconsider how their navigation of university spaces might resonate with long-term professional goals. In their Mission Statement, Student E framed their major assignments by discussing how they managed personal anxieties as an entering college student with on-going health complications:

In the second learning unit, I had discussed the different coping tools students employ to handle the stress that comes from being a first-year college student - specifically, a first-year college student with health issues. I wrote about being faced with multiple surgeries mid-semester and how I was afraid to return to class because of some irrational fear that I would be turned away on the grounds of incompetence even though health issues are not something a person can control. In the end, I concluded that the fear was “not nearly as intimidating as I originally thought”.

Student E identified a self-perpetuating cycle whereby anxieties about the ability to persevere in the face of difficulties could actively cause first-year students to leave college altogether. In reflecting upon a previous assignment, this student was able to discuss a method for positioning themselves within academic spaces (namely, negotiating anxieties surrounding failure in such a way that helped them see how fear was “not nearly as intimidating” as they initially believed).

Student E continued to explain how their revised relationship to fear might prepare them for future professional scenarios. In their rhetorical analysis, Student E discussed pharmacy research which explored the role of empathy in pharmacist-patient interactions. In their e-portfolio, they drew connections between empathy-focused scholarship and their earlier conversation about managing fear:

In the third learning unit, I wrote about a study in which pharmacy students were required to live as patients with chronic health issues for a certain length of time. These students kept journals detailing life “on the other side of the counter” to experience how difficult it can be to adhere to medication administration times and regular blood pressure, blood sugar, and other kinds of tests some patients must perform on themselves multiple times a day. This allows me to look at my illness as a tool rather than a burden. The fear I experience as a disabled student is cultivating the empathy necessary to make me great in my field of study.

Student E acknowledged how personal experiences with anxiety could allow them to empathize with patients who may have similar feelings when interacting with pharmacists. In this sense, Student E was able to critically reflect upon a particular dwelling practice that helped them cope with the expectations of college (i.e., working through personal anxieties or fear) in addition to narrating how this same dwelling practice can help them excel in their intended field-of-study.

To echo an earlier sentiment, online writing spaces can encourage students to establish an academic ethos across a continuum of experiences as opposed to gauging ethos based on isolated, singular utterances. Both Student D and E traced their academic ethos as it evolved throughout different utterances vis-a-vis locating connections between their previous assignments and discussing on-going reflections that were spurred by composing these projects. Student D used the structural features afforded by online platforms to embed outside videos as a means of contextualizing their skepticism towards the professional applicability of academic conventions (a skepticism that itself was forged through further exploring the work they undertook in earlier projects). In doing so, Student D used their e-portfolio to carve out a space for identifying and vocalizing their own educational goals. Meanwhile, Student E used the implicit distance provided by digital arenas to examine their uncertainties and anxieties surrounding academic culture before speculating how their methods for negotiating academic spaces could help them navigate professional scenarios. In each case, the student-writer was able to cultivate their rhetorical power within and against the norms of academic culture by cataloguing a dialogic relationship between their writing and the surrounding circumstances that influence said writing.

Conclusion

The IRG and e-portfolio allowed students to forge a dynamic academic ethos as they critically narrated their navigation of literal and conceptual academic spaces. This, in turn, helped students re-envision their dwelling within the university. “Dwelling” within this context is not simply one’s capacity to immediately inhabit institutional environments. Instead, dwelling implies an ability to derive a persistent approach to learning via adapting to new educational scenarios. Thus, these projects underscored what Nedra Reynolds refers to as the “where of writing,” which she defines as “not just the places where writing occurs, but the sense of place and space that readers and writers bring with them to the intellectual work of writing” (Reynolds 176). That is, in assigning these projects, we attempted to tether students’ academic and professional goals, which can be opaque during the first year of college, to the physical environs and conceptual arenas anchoring their everyday experiences at the university. In doing so, the virtual sphere operated as a staging ground for students to make meaning between different texts and contexts. Additionally, the public-facing nature of these assignments provided students an opportunity to make such work meaningful to the personal, professional, and academic communities to which they belong. Hence, online writing environments served as a space of negotiation wherein students reaffirmed the larger significance of the work they undertook within the classroom.

Despite the affordances of these assignments, there are two changes we would implement when teaching these projects again. First, while the e-portfolios encouraged the incorporation of multimodal texts, most IRG projects did not include any audio/video resources when contextualizing students' intended majors. Our assumption is that the English 1301 assignment sequence might have influenced student impressions of what constitutes academic versus non-academic texts; writing about formal text-based documents in earlier projects may have led students to view text-based resources as having more critical merit compared to videos, podcasts, or social media posts they encounter beyond the classroom. Encouraging students to include multimodal texts they find personally compelling could potentially reinforce the connection between their in-class and out-of-class experiences. Furthermore, including multimodal texts can encourage students to consider the unique digitally-mediated reading experience they want to create for their audience. As Cheryl Ball and Ryan Moeller argue, “designers and readers enter into a space of negotiated meaning-making when converging upon new media texts...[and] that negotiated space offers a new-media space for learning critical literacies by means other than research papers” (Ball and Moeller, np). New media platforms allow writers to construct non-linear reading experiences by forging connections between multimodal texts. Hence, omitting multimodal texts in the IRG runs the risk of overlooking how digital projects can cultivate new types of critical literacies via the ability to put different media in conversation with one another while crafting a digital reading experience for others.

The second change would be to devise ways for encouraging students to continue curating their e-portfolios after the semester has concluded. We revisited student websites while writing this article and, unfortunately, none of the student-writers we discussed had added anything new to their e-portfolios since completing their projects. A key feature of e-portfolios is to demonstrate how students can sustain their education while persisting through different learning situations (Yancey). Leaving e-portfolios stagnate after students' first semester or first year of college undermines a key learning outcome associated with these projects. While we cannot demand that students continue working on their websites after they complete our classes, it might be useful to consider how writing instructors might motivate students to build upon their digital projects as they advance through subsequent courses. For example, our department now hosts an annual E-Open House, which is a digital showcase of student work produced across our English classes. Moving forward, we hope to reach out to English 1301 students to see if they would be willing to contribute their IRGs and e-portfolios to the showcase. In offering this invitation, we may ask students to update their websites to account for the classes they have taken since completing English 1301 and explain how any ideas from their original projects have evolved in response to taking more classes within their major. Granted, not every instructor may be in a position to use departmental initiatives as a means of establishing on-going correspondence with students. However, it is important to remind student-writers that their digital projects have long-term critical value; creating opportunities to showcase student work after they have completed their first-year writing classes can be one strategy for prompting students to update online assignments.

Acknowledging these changes is not meant to identify fundamental shortcomings in the design of these projects. Rather, understanding how these projects might evolve moving forward is an extension of the very themes we have discussed throughout this examination; just as we asked students to use online platforms to rethink their movement through university spaces, updating the design and implementation of online projects can offer instructors a moment to reflect upon the physical and conceptual spaces that first-year writing courses inhabit within our respective institutions. That is to say, considering the limitations of online writing assignments can help us better examine our own “dwelling practices” in the university (by which, we mean the pedagogical rationale we use when tasking students with producing and circulating writing beyond the confines of a single, traditional classroom environment).

To return to our opening argument, we are interested in how online writing projects can enhance students' connection to university spaces and the learning experiences which occur therein. With the push towards online and hybrid teaching models in the face of COVID-19 policies, though, students' connection to university environments may be more ambiguous and obtuse than ever; as universities become necessarily virtual due to safe social distancing practices, it can be increasingly difficult for students to locate themselves within an educational space that looks radically different from traditional learning environments. Hence, it is instructors' responsibility to call students' attention to the fact that they are inhabiting and moving through new intellectual territories even if their college-level learning experiences may not share the same material elements of physical classrooms. However, this is not to say that online and hybrid forms of instruction are devoid of material dimensions. Quite the opposite, as online and hybrid teaching models contain undeniable material elements in the form of literal technology access when coordinating synchronous interactions (such as video conferences) and the sober acknowledgment that inhabiting shared physical spaces in a post-COVID-19 era brings with it new responsibilities (and risks) in terms of protecting one's health. Ultimately, we hope this examination can provide a theoretical framework—one which identifies the interrelationship between online writing environments and university locations—that can help instructors design projects which encourage students to re-examine the strategies they use to make a space for themselves in educational institutions.

Notes

1. To clarify, we are not implying that students' personal experiences with online writing are inapplicable to classroom activities, nor are we claiming that the scholars we have discussed over-simplify the relationship between digital writing and traditional classrooms. Instead, we are identifying a recurring theme in composition scholarship that, when further analyzed, can reinforce the pedagogical benefits of incorporating digital projects into first-year writing courses. (Return to text.)

2. We focused our attention on English 1301 because this class is normally taken during students' first semester, a time in which they may be acclimating to college and deciding on a major. (Return to text.)

3. When revising the 1301 curriculum and composing this article, we worked with the English department's Writing Program Director to formally request IRB approval from our university's Office of Research and Scholarship (ORS). The ORS stated that we did not need IRB approval for discussing anonymous student work in scholarly settings due to the fact that our redesigned 1301 curriculum fell under the category of normal departmental assessment. However, in order to ensure full compliance with ethical standards surrounding the use of student work, we secured permissions from the student-writers who are quoted in this examination. All student work reproduced in this article has received permission to be discussed by the original authors. In some instances, we have shortened student writing excerpts for the sake of brevity. However, we retained grammatical and mechanical errors within these excerpts in order to preserve the integrity of the author's voice and original intentions. (Return to text.)

4. For this examination, we reviewed student writing from the thirteen sections of English 1301 that we taught individually (equaling a total of 279 students) over the course of five semesters. During the 2017-2018 academic year, eight sections (equaling a total of 152 students) implemented the Internet Resource Guide. During the 2018-2019 academic year and fall 2020 semester, five sections (equaling a total of 127 students) implemented the e-portfolio. (Return to text.)

5. Students were taught how to use WordPress for creating their websites. However, students had the option to use other web-publishing services (such as Wix or Weebly) if they had prior experience with these platforms. (Return to text.)

6. For the sake of clarification, we will refer to student authors with the anonymous titles Student A, Student B, etc. (Return to text.)

7. Out of the 152 IRG projects we reviewed for this examination, 74 mentioned real-world classroom scenarios or university environments (such as classes they have taken or moments where they interacted directly with their instructors) when contextualizing professional resources or explaining responsibilities. (Return to text.)

8. Out of the 152 IRG projects we reviewed for this examination, 113 used “you” to directly address the audience while explaining professional resources or real-world responsibilities. (Return to text.)

9. Student A, B, and C all included hyperlinks to discipline-specific websites and explained how their audience could use these resources for their own academic or professional development. While we are focusing on Student C, Students A and B both used “you” when discussing hyperlinked resources. (Return to text.)

10. To streamline the e-portfolio assignment for instructors, we standardized course readings around the theme of higher education while retaining the same major assignments from the previous academic year. The new standardized readings included articles by Richard Rodriguez, Rebecca Cox, and John Pekins. English 1301 instructors had the option to use our standardized readings or allow students to select their own readings (similar to how students located their own scholarly/professional resources for the IRG). (Return to text.)

11. Out of the 127 e-portfolios we reviewed for this examination, 24 included multimodal or multimedia texts. These texts included TED Talks, diagrams/figures used by real-world professionals, images of real-world professional scenarios, and even pictures of student-authors in academic settings around campus. (Return to text.)

Works Cited

Ball, Cheryl and Ryan Moeller. Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media. The Fibreculture Journal, vol. 10, 2007, np.

Bartholomae, David. Inventing the University. Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 5, no. 1, 1986, pp. 4-23.

Brandt, Deborah. The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Buck, Amber. Examining Digital Literacy Practices on Social Network Sites. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 47, no. 1, 2012, pp. 9-38.

Cox, Rebecca. The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Fraiberg, Steven and Xiaowei Cui. Weaving Relationship Webs: Tracing How IMing Practices Mediate the Trajectories of Chinese International Students. Computers and Composition, vol. 39, pp. 83-103.

Gilam, Ken and Shannon Wooden. Re-Embodying Online Composition: Ecologies of Writing in Unreal Time and Space. Computers and Composition, vol. 30, no. 1, 2013, pp. 24-36.

Gold, David, Merideth Garcia and Anna V. Knutson. Going Public in an Age of Digital Anxiety: How Students Negotiate the Topoi of Online Writing Environments. Composition Forum, vol. 41, 2019. https://compositionforum.com/issue/41/going-public.php.

Hall, R. Mark, Mikael Romo, and Elizabeth Wardle. Teaching and Learning Threshold Concepts in a Writing Major: Liminality, Dispositions, and Program Design. Composition Forum, vol. 38, 2018. https://compositionforum.com/issue/38/threshold.php.

Hyde, Michael, editor. The Ethos of Rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

McIntyre, Megan. Productive Uncertainty and Postpedagogical Practice in First-Year Writing. Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, vol. 2, no. 2, 2020.

Murphy, Mary, Maithreyi Gopalan, Evelyn R. Carter, Katherine T. U. Emerson, Bette L. Bottoms, and Gregory M. Walton. A Customized Belonging Intervention Improves Retention of Socially Disadvantaged Students at a Broad-Access University. Science Advances, vol. 6, no. 29, 2020.

Pekins, John. A Community College Professor Reflects on First-Year Composition. What is “College-Level” Writing?, edited by Patrick Sullivan and Howard Tinberg, National Council of Teachers of English, 2006, pp. 231-242.

Putnam, Aric. The Insistent Call: Rhetorical Moments in Black Anticolonialism, 1929-1937. University of Massachusetts, 2012.

Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.

Rodriguez, Richard. The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning 'Basics.' College English, vol. 40, no. 3, 1978, pp. 239-254.

Shepherd, Ryan. Digital Writing, Multimodality, and Learning Transfer: Crafting Connections between Composition and Online Composing. Computers and Composition, vol. 48, 2018, pp. 103-114.

Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

Vie, Stephanie. Digital Divide 2.0: 'Generation M' and Online Social Media Networking Sites in the Composition Classroom. Computers and Composition, vol. 25, 2008, pp. 9-23.

Wardle, Elizabeth. Understanding ‘Transfer’ From FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study. WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 31, no. 1-2, 2007, pp. 65-85.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Portfolios, Circulation, Ecology, and the Development of Literacy. Technological Ecologies and Sustainability. Edited by Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe, Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press, 2009, pp. 1-14.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Liane Robertson and Kara Taczak. Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. Utah State University Press, 2014.