Reflection

Teaching the Literacy Narrative

There’s a lot going on at the beginning of the term, and we appreciate WR instructors carving out a little time to assign the Writing Program’s common literacy narrative assignment, which is a key part of all students’ cumulative portfolios. One goal of the assignment is to get students thinking flexibly about literacy and language […]

Teaching Writing for Critical Language Awareness

The resources on this page, inspired by a critical language awareness (CLA) framework, teach students to examine language as a social practice and to reflect on the ideologies and power dynamics embedded within language use. Thank you to the Writing Program’s Curriculum Committee, who worked intensively on these resources in 2022-2024. 

Reflective Writing Activities

All WR courses should offer students regular and varied opportunities for reflection, including personal, metacognitive, and social/systemic reflections that instructors assign as in-class activities and/or for homework throughout the term. Each semester, WR students will choose three of these reflections for inclusion in their cumulative portfolios. Below you will find ideas and examples that can […]

Creating and Updating WR Portfolios

These videos will help students create WR portfolios using Digication. Be sure to check out the FAQs that follow, too! Video 1 Video 2 Video 3 FAQs What is Digication and why are we using it? Boston University licenses digital portfolio software through Digication (http://bu.digication.com). Digication is free (and ad-free) for BU students, it protects […]

Composing a Multimodal Reflection

Prior to this activity, students need to have some form of written reflections, perhaps looking back at prior writing instruction, looking ahead and setting personal goals for themselves for this course, or otherwise considering their strengths and needs as writers. For this activity, they practice the act of remediation by translating their reflections into the […]

Cumulative Portfolios in the Writing Program

Since Fall 2023, all WR students create a portfolio in their first WR course and continue to add to it throughout subsequent WR courses. This cumulative portfolio assignment will create a shared experience for WR students, offering them a space to reflect on their growth and their developing identities as college writers and communicators over […]

Metacognition

Each Flipped Learning Module (FLM) is a set of short videos and online activities that can be used (in whole or in part) to free up class time from content delivery for greater student interaction. At the end of the module, students are asked to fill out a brief survey, in which we adopt the […]