What is unique to the W131 Groups curriculum in comparison to W131 Basic and other W131 courses?

The basic premise of these two versions of W131 are the same: meet the same learning goals while assuming as little common-ground as possible. That is, our starting position is that students have either struggled with writing in some capacity (for Basic, our measures for this has been test-scores and GPA, so we only have a vague idea of just what that struggle consists of) or have environmental context for college life than some of our other students might. Since Groups students are all first-generation college students, the idea is to focus even more on the kinds of context (background, conceptual tools) that might be assumed in their other Bloomington classrooms. The Groups Summer Experience Program really is a “how-to-college” intensive, so the 131-Groups Program reflects that project.

 

Relatedly, how does W131 Groups condense the curriculum of W131 Basic into a six-week summer course? What challenges does this present?

W131-Groups was initially pretty similar to the specifics of the streamlined W131 Basic curriculum. While it has kept its basic focus, the details of the course blueprint have evolved significantly over the last five years. The course’s development owes to the skill of the graduate coordinators who have internalized previous versions and iterated on them. Sarah Pedzinski, Ben Luczak, Carolyn Marino, and now Jesse Matlock have all put their specific specialties and pedagogies to good use for the program and the blueprint bears the marks of their collective wisdom. I would note two big challenges that face these pedagogues each summer: 1) making any adjustments to the closely-coupled six-week system means making adjustments elsewhere in the blueprint; and 2) since the course blueprint is standardized to facilitate Groups students working together across sections, it has to be hospitable to the robust pedagogies our instructors bring the course. The graduate coordinators’ attention to both of those issues has been something I’ve consistently admired.

 

How does the curriculum of W131 Groups reflect the student body? Are there certain readings or learning strategies that you employ in W131 Groups to account for students who are predominantly first-generation?

Great question. I think each iteration of the course has tried to deal with this in various ways, aware of the danger of overdetermining what a group of first-generation students might be. Of course they’re not a monolith, so a strength of the “problem-cause-solution” structure of the course’s assignments. This not only allows the course to meet students where they’re at when they arrive but welcomes their experience and their communities into the classroom. That’s not to say that being first-gen is socially irrelevant. Specific readings ask them to reflect on things like race and class that implicate all of us in but might also begin to provide some students with vocabulary and concepts to make sense of where they find themselves in a largely white college town, for example. Another virtue of our graduate coordinators has been their capacity to keep tabs on what students seem concerned with and integrating those concerns into future versions. So, recent iterations have also added some focus on tech and attention related issues that students often intuit without having the tools to fully express.