Course Title: Writing as Inquiry
Author: Daehyun Won, Michigan State University
Date Published: 2025
Course Level: Lower-Level Undergraduate
Course Description: In this course, you’ll begin on a journey to discover and build your past, present, and future identities by inquiring and (re)shaping the datasets of your own life. In doing so, you’ll learn how to articulate and narrate these insights and information with your own intention for preparing you to communicate effectively, ethically, and creatively as a civic-minded and critical participant in your-engaged communities and beyond.
WRA 101 with DH is more than a so-called “college writing” class. This is an opportunity for you to navigate yourself to YOURSELF through discovering and collecting qualitative (and occasionally as well) data/information/events you’ve experienced in your life, synthesizing the gathered qualitative self-data, interpret it meaningfully and persuasively, and eventually, create contents based on it to deliver to your intentional audience. Ultimately, this process is also to learn about YOURSELF as the most valuable asset in the data-saturated world. By the end of the semester, I expect that you will have accomplished the understanding that your life is not a simple-monotone-and-boring one but an adventurous one, worth narrating, reading, investigating, and representing.
It might sound complicated or overwhelming, right? But no worries! You already have a lot of integrated data in your life, to deep dive into and write about. In addition, our action-oriented, workshop-based, anxiety-free, non-textbook, and labor-oriented class structure is designed to help you not only use your pre-existing knowledge but also facilitate new learning through writing. Are you ready to discover, communicate, reflect, review, and refine yourself?
Learning Outcomes:
- to understand the value of self as a source of meaningful content creation and delivery.
- (broadly) to conduct the intellectual process – inquiry, discovery, and communication – to develop one’s academic (creative and critical) thinking process and communication skills.
- (specifically) to conduct self-collection, analysis, and synthesis of self-data through autonomous decisions.
- to provide chances to practice digital technology-driven academic writing, professional communication, and AI technology-based practices for students’ productivity in their college and professional life in the digital age.
- most of all, to offer a safe and supportive place to play-to-learn and learn through actions without writing anxiety to present yourself in class.
- to also offer a secure space to promote effective collaboration and communication.
- to conduct self-evaluation and reflection for improving metacognitive awareness.
- to provide out-of-campus activities as much as possible to help students’ real-world literacy skills.
Teaching Philosophy: Although the course covers a variety of rhetorical concepts such as fostering students’ agency and identity building, narrative inquiry, big data, qualitative data research methods, creative and critical thinking skills, multimodal-digital composition, GenAI and AI literacy, etc., the motivation of the course design is based on my long-term belief – the first-year writing (FYW) course serves as a foundational anchor to help students smoothly transition from high school to college, careers, and beyond. In that sense, FYW is not simply about learning how to write in college, but also about freely exploring interdisciplinary knowledge, discovering their voices and sense of agency, identifying the potential of future paths, developing communication, collaboration, and digital literacies skills – all of which are only possible when students are not overwhelmed by the severe cognitive overload and the anxiety from unfamiliar college life. Assisting students in understanding their intrinsic values through inquiring into qualitative self-data is another key to self-direction, to the next level of self-growth.
Therefore, I intentionally designed this bibimbap-style (Korean mixed rice bowl) FYW course to inspire my students to become futuristic, critical, and public thinkers who appreciate their worth and raise their voices. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to collect, analyze, and remix their own qualitative self-data, including life experiences, cultural memories drawn from various events and artifacts, and unique dreams and inspirations, into narrative-mixed content creations, particularly for their autonomy-building and true self-discovery in the face of the algorithmic world. At the same time, their academic knowledge of research methods and digital literacy skills will be naturally improved through the application of a play-and-learn teaching philosophy, incorporating in-class activities and workshops for qualitative self-dataset-driven inquiry, discovery, and communication in action.
