Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

With all of this as the reasoning behind why I constructed
the writing course as I did that year at the University of
Delaware, it was really only worth the writing that the students
did for the class, both inside and outside of the classroom.
Writing begins through freewriting at the beginning of most
class days for a period of five or more minutes. These
freewritings were framed by a prompt related to, in general, the
theme of that unit and, in particular, the issues and questions
to be discussed that day in class. These freewritings asked
students to articulate their thoughts upon some question or
concern. Furthermore, those prompts were fashioned so that they
asked students to perceive those experiences and perspectives in
ways they may not have otherwise, thus positioning them as
critical observers of those very same experiences and
perspectives.
Outside of the classrooms, reading responses attempted to
continue this same agenda of not only the personal articulation
of perspectives of reality and “truth” based upon their own
experiences and knowledge but also the questioning of those
perspectives based upon a dialogue with some reading or some
film. The four essays - the three exploratory papers and the
research paper - that were assigned throughout the semester
attempted to exist as means for students to enter into the whole
conversation of not simply some particular unit but the course
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