Going Digital: Reinventing Duke's Writing Curriculum

The Thompson Writing Program’s new Language, Arts and Media Program (LAMP), encourages students to weave digital communications and non-traditional media into their writing and research. Funded through a $5 million grant from the Bacca Foundation, LAMP helps students in Writing 101 understand how knowledge circulates in the digital age and how they can compose across different media to communicate their ideas to a range of audiences.

The program’s director, Jennifer Ahern-Dodson, spoke with Duke Today about the initiative and her vision for Duke’s writing curriculum.

Q: How will the LAMP initiative transform the first-year writing curriculum?

A: What we do here at the Thompson Writing Program is teach critical thinking through writing by, among other things, evaluating sources and articulating a position in academic essays. It’s important to recognize, however, that authorship and sources are changing. Soon you may be asked not to find five peer-reviewed sources but five credible sources, which could include online and open sources like Google and Wikipedia. How can you talk about Ferguson without talking about Twitter? You really can’t. The range of sources is changing, and we want Writing 101 students to be able to assess credibility and relevance whether that source is a peer-reviewed essay, a website, a video, a tweet, an interview, or an archival document.

We know that students love Google. Rather than seeing Google Scholar or Wikipedia as off limits in academic research, let’s help students critically evaluate open sources like that. We also want students to be able to compose coherent arguments across media, across disciplines, using both traditional and open-source content, so they can communicate with different audiences. Those compositions may be Wikipedia entries, Twitter essays, or blog posts, but they also may be op-eds, oral presentations, Ignite talks or research panel discussions.  What students actually compose may be different in each Writing 101 class, but all students will consider how knowledge is shared in different mediums, and the relationship between the medium and the message they are trying to communicate. LAMP essentially allows us to amplify the work we already are doing with students in Writing 101.

Q: LAMP’s primary focus is on “teaching 21st century literacies and digital citizenship.” What exactly do those two terms mean?

A: In terms of literacy, I would say we’re at another “Gutenberg moment” now: authorship is more fluid, and the way we consume and share information is changing. For example, Wikipedia is now the sixth most visited site on the Internet, and a recent Pew Research Internet Project reports that 94 percent of students are “very likely” to use Google.  We’re not living in just a print world anymore. We share knowledge on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. We represent ourselves through image and sound. We would be irresponsible to not help writers think about how to compose thoughtfully across media if we want them to engage meaningfully with broader publics. Students should be able to evaluate and to produce what they consume, and that is really what we mean by “21st century literacy.”

Digital citizenship isn’t all that different from what we understand regular citizenship to be. How can you be thoughtful, informed and engaged in your interactions with people in your communities, both online and in person? As digital citizens, we have to think about how we’re part of a community. We want students to understand the challenges of sharing their research and ideas publicly, but the responsibility to do so as well.

Q: You have five LAMP lecturing fellows, each with a doctorate in a humanities discipline. How are they incorporating all these concepts of digital citizenship and 21st century literacy in their Writing 101 courses?

A: Josh Davis’ class called “Digital History” is a great example of this. He has students researching local history, particularly stories that are not visible in widely used online resources. For example, until a couple years ago, the 1957 Royal Ice Cream Parlor sit-in in Durham -- one of the first in the country -- was not on Wikipedia. There are books written about Durham civil rights movements, but all these stories were invisible on the site. So his students are now in the archives conducting traditional scholarly research while translating that information into Wikipedia entries. They’re finding that publishing on Wikipedia is very different [from writing] a term paper. Josh is positioning his students not to just study history but also to think about which histories get to be represented in the online community.  Students are contributing Wikipedia entries that increase public access to local histories.

Q: What are your long-term goals for both the fellows and the LAMP Program as a whole?

A: Our goal is [for LAMP] to be a teaching incubator. We are trying to spark conversations about teaching critical thinking in the digital age across the university, not just within our own Writing 101 curriculum, and to collaborate with the other Duke programs who are engaged in this work as well. The LAMP Fellows are currently moving through the program and learning from their courses and each other. Within one year, we will revisit our Writing 101 goals to discuss how to best incorporate the fellows’ “promising practices” in digital citizenship and literacy instruction across our first-year writing curriculum. Because they are post-doctoral teaching fellows who are only with us for five years at the most, we hope our fellows will take what they learn through LAMP to their own disciplines and help spread the effect of this work to other institutions.

For more information on LAMP, visit the program’s website. Click here for more information on the Thompson Writing Program.