7 How Not to Teach a Writing Course
Piers Gelly
This catalog, and the exhibition it records for posterity, began with a first-year writing course I taught at the University of Virginia. In the fall of 2023, 36 students across two sections of my course “Writing About Labor” performed the preliminary research and writing for what would become Collective Bargaining for the Common Good; eight students (who are credited as Student Curators in the Contributors section of this catalog) then signed on for several months of ambitious post-semester work, which included further archival research, original reporting, and of course the curating, writing, and design of the show, in collaboration with our community partners.
So the exhibition began with a writing course; but the writing course began in the summer of 2023, with a conversation at Atlas Coffee in Fry’s Spring. On a humid Charlottesville morning, I met up with Ms. Mary Pettis, who had just retired after nearly 40 years of driving the 7 bus with Charlottesville Area Transit, the city bus service.
Pettis told me in no uncertain terms that she had enjoyed her job. “I loved it,” she said. “When you get on the bus with me, you’re going to have some fun. You’re going to enjoy it. If you’re having a bad day, I’m going to mess with you until you’re laughing.”
Nevertheless, she wasn’t sorry to have left. The problem wasn’t the job itself, but the essentially flat wages she’d had over the past few years, which hadn’t nearly kept pace with Charlottesville’s high cost of living. Over the previous two years, Pettis had played a key role in pressuring Charlottesville’s City Council to pass an ordinance permitting bus drivers to unionize, appearing at Council meetings (see 1:39:20) to let the Councillors know that she’d had to move out of Charlottesville, despite working three jobs, because the cost of living had gotten so high. “A union would speak for us,” she had told the Council, “and give us a voice.” The ordinance had passed by unanimous vote in 2022, but the process of actually getting to a first contract was a long one—by the summer of 2023, Local 1220 of the Amalgamated Transit Union was still over six months away from ratifying their first contract.
To understand why a Democratic-majority1 City Council in a proudly progressive city required a primer on the worthiness of labor unions as a tool for social, economic, and racial justice, you have to go back to the 1940s, when Charlottesville was anything but progressive: indeed, as this exhibition lays out in detail, Charlottesville holds the dubious distinction of bring ground zero for Virginia’s statewide ban on public-section collective bargaining.
In addition to setting back the cause of organized labor in Virginia by decades, that ban had the strange but not uncommon effect of creating a vast knowledge gap. To this day, even with the ban partially overturned, people will still tell you that they’d love to join a union, but it’s illegal in Virginia—only for them to discover, with a scandalized affect, that their right to organize has been concealed from them where it hasn’t been actively removed. Suffice to say, it’s difficult to build any kind of political coalition on such uncertain terrain. But there’s another scandal that runs even deeper, which has to do with the 75 years between the start of the ban and its partial repeal: forgetting the ban has meant forgetting the people and groups that struggled mightily against it, fighting for fair pay and a seat at the table. Learning to read the history of labor in Virginia is like parsing a tattered document with perhaps as many words obscured or missing as those that are legible.
For a writing teacher—which is, after all, what I am—this made the story of collective bargaining in Virginia a singularly rich topic for a writing course. When I design and teach writing courses, I am interested in cultivating what Henry Giroux calls “civic literacy,” by which he means students’ learned ability to “narrate their private troubles as public issues.” The goal of a first-year writing course is for students to obtain the skills they’ll need to write at the college level, but I have always felt that you can’t separate learning how to write from learning why. To that end, I’ve developed several courses around community partnerships that place students in “direct contact with the world,” to borrow a phrase from Josef Albers.
This was one such course. My hope in this brief essay is to share how it came about, why I think it worked well, and how interested instructors and their students might think about replicating the process—though “replicating the process” is a goal that I’d caution against, or at least consider with some healthy skepticism. Depending on your local labor landscape, the stories and stakes may be markedly different, and if there is one piece of advice I’d offer universally, it is that partnerships are like people: no two are alike. Hence the slightly misleading title of this essay: how we did it is, by necessity, not how you will.
• • •
UVA’s first-year writing course, ENWR 1510, is both a requirement and a rite of passage: 97.5% of the student body takes this course, across more than 150 course sections each year. This course has some learning outcomes that are typical of college-level composition course, and others that are fairly unique to the UVA Writing & Rhetoric program’s vision of first-year writing. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll note that whereas many schools take a rhetorical approach to teaching writing—focusing on argument—UVA’s model is inquiry-based, focused more on asking questions, and using language as an investigative tool.
I have found that writing courses are an excellent place to investigate the relation between language and politics. My courses are not politics courses, but I believe that political crises often manifest as crises of language, which make writing courses an ideal place to engage meaningfully with political discourse.
For instance, what’s at stake when we describe somebody as a “terrorist” versus a “militant”? This isn’t just a linguistic choice. More often, it’s a judgment about the worthiness of somebody’s cause, and the ethical status of the tactics they’re using to pursue it. (For this reason, the AP Style Guide advises that the word “terrorist” be avoided except in quotation or paraphrase “except when taking about significant historical events widely acknowledged as terrorist actions.”)
To bring this back to my “Writing About Labor” course, consider the term “business-friendly state,” which is favored by both Democratic and Republican politicians in Virginia, and used in reference to Virginia’s low wages and “right-to-work” law. However, one could just as easily describe Virginia as an “anti-labor” state or, more pointedly, “poverty-wage” state; in 2019, the anti-poverty organization Oxfam America went with the blunt assessment that Virginia was the “worst state to work in America.” Once again, when we decide which word to use, we’re exercising some clear moral and political judgments via our judgments about language.
This is a good example of what I meant earlier, when I wrote about placing my students in “direct contact with the world.” Once you become aware of the judgment you’re making when you choose a word, you start to think very carefully before you choose.
• • •
Just to be clear, my students don’t have to agree with me to get a good grade, and plenty of them don’t, in ways both large and small. The design of my “Writing About Labor” course was such that they had plenty of opportunities to encounter real-world evidence and make what sense of it they could. In this section, I’ll describe three areas in which those encounters occurred, as indications of how we explored both the how and the why of college-level writing.
Community-engaged pedagogy
In my vision of community-engaged pedagogy, students are invited to think of writing as a place where knowledge is produced in dialogue with, and in service of, community partners.2
The part of this project that is hardest to copy-paste into a new context—and the biggest “How not to” of this essay—are the partnerships at the core of this exhibit. But when it comes to such partnerships, I can vouch for the fact that labor unions can be very effective mediating institutions for mutually beneficial collaborations, given that labor unions are definitionally equipped to set the terms of partnerships, and identify individual collaborators, that serve the broader strategic priorities of their membership.3
I am a member of UVA’s campus workers’ union, United Campus Workers of Virginia (CWA Local 2265), and it was through UCW-VA that I found myself in conversation and community with members of three other labor unions in the Charlottesville area—the unions that eventually became the main characters in Collective Bargaining for the Common Good. In this case, the understanding with our community partners was that our collaboration would result in an accessible, public-facing exhibit that would provide visibility to the unions’ past and present efforts; the exhibit, crucially, would be developed via regular consultations with our partners, for which our partners received honoraria in recognition of their time and effort.
But with these terms in place, it wasn’t as simple as turning my students loose on our partners. Before we had those conversations, we spent the first half of the semester thinking about what it means to do this work ethically and respectfully.
The first major assignment of “Writing About Labor” was a formally standard academic essay, but with a catch: my students had to interview one another about their labor histories and write a thoughtful, inquisitive essay… and then they had to read what their peers had written about them, and write about that.
For one thing, this was an opportunity to show in practice what it means to authorize forms of knowledge that my students might be surprised to find us discussing in a college classroom. Suddenly, for instance, the student who’d worked at Chipotle through high school was the envy of everybody else, because he had so much to say about that experience, giving a detailed account of the workplace conditions that have led workers at various Chipotle restaurants to seek union recognition.
But more importantly, this exercise is an opportunity to see how it feels for your words to be used by an outsider, however well-meaning, to tell a story over which you have no control. In preparation for our interviews with community partners, my students wrote about what it was like to be written about, which led them to a thoughtful, nuanced point of departure for the community-engaged portion of the course.
Many students found the experience rewarding. Caroline wrote, “I initially didn’t realize what purpose Baha would use my words for […] but he used them in a resourceful way.” Her partner Baha, the student who’d worked at Chipotle, returned the compliment: “Caroline’s portrayal of my perspective is as good as it gets; if I were to portray myself I wouldn’t have been able to do it any better.” Striking a similar note, Yucheng wrote, “I get the feeling of being a celebrity and immensely enjoy it.”
But even more useful were the moments when students didn’t recognize themselves. Reflecting on the strangeness of how our words take on lives of their own, Ava wrote, “Some of the quotes really didn’t sound like something I would ever say,” and Talia observed, “There were times where I found myself thinking ‘that’s not quite accurate’ or ‘there’s more to it than that.’ That’s the challenge though—if I want to be accurately represented then I have to be crystal clear.” Even Yucheng, who felt like a “celebrity,” found the experience a little troubling. When he told his partner a story about being chronically stressed out in high school, he didn’t think much of it in the moment. But when he read his partner’s essay about that part of his life, a feeling of sadness “automatically rose from my mind,” not because his partner had done anything wrong, but because it changed his perspective to see the story from her point of view.
In ways large and small, then, my students understood the responsibility that comes from being trusted with somebody else’s story, with its hazards as well as its rewards.
Archival research
Another goal of my “Writing About Labor” course was for my students to find and annotate documents that might expand the record of UVA’s and Charlottesville’s labor history, and to gather those findings together as a service to groups currently mobilizing around these issues.
The students learned a lot from this, because most had never visited UVA’s Special Collections Library, and none had browsed an archival newspaper database.
This is an article that my student Hank found, about a protest from April of 2002, where the Graduate Labor Union (GLU) seems to have covered some percentage of UVA’s Lawn with bedsheets painted with one letter for every grade issued by a graduate teaching assistant, as a visibility exercise during the GLU’s calls for graduate student workers to receive healthcare.
Finding documents like this was personally exciting for the students, but crucially, they also contributed to a usable resource of uncollected documents regarding local labor history. This archive didn’t necessarily have to serve any particular use, but I’m pleased to say that one of our partners with the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) made use of this article from 1974 in preparing testimony for Charlottesville’s City Council in January, 2024, as ATU was participating in fairly antagonistic contract negotiations:
My student Kassandra found this while digging through the Daily Progress, Charlottesville’s local paper. The article describes how Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) got started. Kevin Adams, the director of UVA’s University Transit Services (UTS) at the time, advised that the city “conceive of a bus ‘service’ instead of a bus ‘system,’” by which he meant that the bus ought to “have utility for the immobile and poor, as well as middle and upper income individuals.”
Service versus system is quite a nice example of a politico-linguistic distinction with real-world stakes; if you’re trying to argue at City Council for a well-funded bus service in which drivers and mechanics are paid a living wage, it’s not a bad piece of supporting evidence.
This an example what I mean by working with stakeholders in the community to produce something of tangible use. And as a pedagogical tool, these community partnerships are very useful as well. When we start doing this work, I don’t have to convince my students that our close study of words matters, because they can feel it. When we’re talking about sentences as something that produce meaning, or error as something that interrupts meaning, they take those conversations to heart, because they really want to get it right.
Recursive writing practices
The final element of course design that I’d like to highlight is one that I borrowed from Bethany Mickel, an Instructional Design Librarian at UVA. As part of a grant that I received from the UVA Library, Bethany assisted me in developing this course and the associated exhibit and catalog, which is a proud contribution to the project of Open Educational Resources.
At any rate, Bethany pointed me to a capability of Canvas, UVA’s Learning Management System, that allows students to upload video responses directly to an assignment. She’d tried this out with a similar research project, and shared with me a model assignment she’d taught, so I gratefully adapted her work.
The results were great. Throughout the semester, I had five benchmark assignments for students’ research on collective bargaining, and with each phase of their research, I asked them to upload what we called an “archive journal,” telling me in their own words what they found. I enjoyed these video journals because I could see the students developing confidence and fluency with the research process in real time. These journals were graded on a specification-based model: as long as the students met the specifications outlined in the assignment prompt, they got credit.
And then, at the end of the semester, I had my students watch their own personal videos. They had to rewatch all the archive journals they’d submitted, and write an academic essay about that. (See the next section of this book for some adaptable assignment prompts.)
These final essays were some of my favorite pieces of student writing I’ve ever received, so I’ll close by sharing a few brief excerpts.
Many students reflected on how surprising it was that Google and ChatGPT actually didn’t have all the answers, because our library’s digital databases and physical archives included documents not indexed by either search engine: my student Nora wrote lyrically about the novel experience of navigating the “maze-like passageways of old records, manuscripts, and original sources.”
Others shared their thoughts and feelings about drawing connections between the past and present. After rewatching her archive journal videos, my student Tia wrote, “I used to think archived papers were merely old and grossly written handbooks that people used as diaries in the past, but they are more than just yellowed pages; they are like the university’s attic, storing the skeletons of its history. I felt like a spy as I came across old documents and odd objects.”
My student Lily shared an intriguing spatial metaphor in reflecting on her learning process, and on the community-engagement portion of the course. “At the beginning of the journey,” Lily wrote, “I would imagine this history as a queue: different unions in different periods come onto the stage, and perform their own stories as they leave. Now, I see it more like a stack: the coming-up unions build on top of the previous unions’ stories, and together push us high to the place we stand right now.”
The students also made interesting observations about their affect, and even their clothing.
Luca, pictured here, offered some very interesting assessments of his body language, the background of his shots, and his hoodie—in his view, the casual nature of this shot, including his hood-up costume and the mise-en-scene, suggested to him that he’d become very comfortable engaging with this subject matter, whereas his earlier videos contained (according to him) an off-putting stiffness and formality.
All this is to say that the recursive writing process seems to have helped my students articulate their own sense of the course’s stakes, as well as its value. My student Katelyn admitted in her essay that “The first time we went to special collections I was a little skeptical and frankly a little bit annoyed that we weren’t just meeting in our regular classroom.” The format of initial reflection, and then reflection on reflection, seems to have invited her and other students to bring an unusual candor to their writing, particularly when it came to some of the unfamiliar, challenging tasks I asked them to complete. If students can see their own growth over time, they have the space to develop a fairly nuanced narrative of their own learning process, and a stronger sense of their own values—whether or not they align with mine in the end.
As I indicated at the start of this essay, much of this project was specific to the context in which I designed and taught the course—your path through this book, and through the lesson designs I’ve sketched here, will necessarily look somewhat different than the path my students and I took. Not every lesson will be directly applicable.
Nevertheless, I believe that the spirit of the project is capable of translation to other contexts, and would recommend it to you on that basis. Mary Pettis put it very well during our conversation at Atlas Coffee, back when my course was first taking shape, so I’ll give her the last word. “The only way you can wake up a person,” she told me, “is for them to see for themselves.”