With the advent of the COVID19 pandemic, incorporating digital tools into the undergraduate classroom became necessary. This challenge to educators across all levels provided an opportunity to develop resilience, creativity, and to experiment with new pedagogical tools in their virtual, hybrid, and in-person classrooms. This presentation will provide a case study of best practices in the first-year writing classroom, across modalities with a special emphasis on digital tools. It will discuss how to nurture resilience in first-year undergraduate students in the writing classroom and beyond. Where educators are now mentors, this session will tackle the idea of resilient and adaptable pedagogy in two parts 1) the need to foreground mentorship meetings in the writing classroom and 2) the importance of providing students independent approaches to writing, critical thinking, and communication. Finally, this presentation will discuss how teaching multimodal projects in lieu of traditional research papers can create empathy, resilience, and flexibility in first-year writing students.

This presentation will lay out examples of first-year writing multimodal projects alongside the scaffolding used to implement such collaborative and creative work. These projects which critically think about tangible solutions to climate crisis, provide a kind of transferrable knowledge beyond the first-year writing classroom. Ultimately, this presentation asks: how can digital tools and collaboration help us as teachers and scholars reimagine what worthwhile critical thinking looks like? What topics should be at the forefront of our pedagogy? How does teaching for social justice impact student resilience?

Authors:
Kate Albrecht, University of Miami, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Kate Albrecht is a University Doctoral Student at University of Miami, United States

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