Do you write assignments for your students based on how you think writing should go? A thesis statement! An outline! An annotated bibliography! A rough draft! A final paper! For some, this structure is useful, but for many, it is nothing like their actual writing process. This workshop is designed to support faculty as they reflect on their own approach to writing and use those insights to guide new experiments with student writing assignments. It will be interactive and discussion-based. We will begin with a free write about what we do as writers, and then use our reflections to talk about, draft, and/or redraft an assignment inspired by these insights. Faculty will leave the workshop with this draft, which they may decide to develop and implement.

Faculty from any discipline, who assign any writing assignments, are welcome to join.

Accessibility: ASL interpretation and live CART transcription will be provided.

Karen Miller is Professor of History at LaGuardia Community College and teaches in the Master’s in Liberal Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current work examines the US in the Philippines between 1902 and 1965. She is interested in programs first sponsored by the American colonial state, and then taken up by the Philippine Republic, that moved Christian Filipinos into non-Christian areas.

Dr. Miller’s book, Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit [nyupress.org] (2014) argues that white northern leaders increasingly embraced egalitarian ideas about racial difference at the same time that they helped implement and maintain social and political practices that promoted racial inequality. As African Americans made clearer and more strident claims about their right to full equality, white liberal leaders used the discourse of northern racial liberalism to both respond to and manage those demands. Dr. Miller is also author of an abridged version of that book, Northern Racial Liberalism: How American City Leaders Built Segregated Neighborhoods while Disavowing Racism, from the Taking Freedom Series at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (2021). Her most recent work on the Philippines can be found in the American Quarterly in 2019, “ 'Thin, Wistful, and White’: James Fugate and Colonial Bureaucratic Masculinity in the Philippines, 1900–1938.”

Modeling Your Assignments after Your Own Writing Practices