We're Back! Teaching Technologies of Writing
Posted by Kate Ozment
In 2019, I proposed a course called Technologies of Writing that was supposed to be my first book history-intensive course and the first in our department. We all know what happened in 2020, and I felt that given the significant challenges of reimagining my many classes with virtual instruction, it was not the time to also reimagine critical making. As of Fall 2022, we are back to teaching fully in person (I will not comment on the wisdom of this; only that it’s a thing), and I’m finally running this class. As a result, Sammelband is back, too.
In this short post, I’m going to introduce the class’s concept, the main materials, and how I’m running the day-to-day workshops. The structure of the course is we meet on Mondays for lecture and discussion on a technology. We meet Wednesdays for hands-on workshops. And Fridays, students have journals that ask them to reflect on the week’s work. Posts in the future will focus on the weekly units with emphasis on the workshops, and as previously, we will give detailed price breakdowns and focus on how to do more experiences with less money and resources. I also have students with access needs, and I’ll detail how we have worked together to accommodate them. The slate of planned workshops are as follows (I’ll add links to these as the posts come up):
Bookbinding
Media Archaeology
Illustration
Zines and Scrapbooking
Digitization and Digital Surrogates
eBooks and Digital Publishing
Make Me a Book
In each post, I’ll also link to the online resources and other instructors’ prompts that have inspired my own, which should create a mini bibliography on each topic.
The Class
Technologies of Writing is an upper-level general education course in the category of “Arts and Humanities Synthesis” and a course for English majors in the category where we do deep dives on specific topics. This means that I have a lot of instruction I have to incorporate as learning objectives to meet both sets of requirements. Specifically, students have to research, write, and do oral presentations, and the class must be interdisciplinary. I have 25 students from a range of majors, but as this is the first time we are running it, most are English majors. Here is a copy of the syllabus.
A few things to note on the syllabus. First, I’ve opted to use a single overview textbook, Joyce Kinkead’s A Writing Studies Primer. This might seem like an odd choice for a book history course, but this class is designed to be technology focused rather than historical, even while we explore the temporality of technologies. I don’t have the ability to re-create historical techniques very often, and the course leans into material rhetorics and the creative ways we can access historical skills or effects with modern tools.
Secondly, I use labor-based grading and a contract that is mutually decided with students on the first day of class. I’ve started with the system designed by Asao B. Inoue, but I updated it after reading Ellen C. Carillo’s reservations about whether or not this grading style is more equitable. I gave them the structure and my two ground rules — students can’t miss more than a month of class or a major project. My version tries to balance the good of this system with its challenges. Students invented the rest of the criteria in an exercise that took about 40 minutes. You’ll see that it’s still a work in progress. I asked students what an “Exceeds Expectations” might look like on their midterm, and they wanted to decide closer to the date. I also intend to have them review their early semester choices once we’re through the midterm to see if it needs to be updated. I’m aware that the “rigor police” may come for me on this, but I’m more interested in meeting students where they are they holding them to arbitrary standards. In addition to labor-based grading reflecting my values, I also feel that it sets the right tone for a class where I’m going to ask them to be messy, to try things, and to learn by failing.
Lastly, the class takes place in four different spaces. I have a classroom with tables for workshops as our standard space. I booked a session in our Special Collections, where we combed through the archives to find weird books to talk about book forms. Our college is an agriculture college, so a lot of the books are about horses, but of course our librarians came through. I have several weeks in the Maker Studio, a student-run space in the library that we opened in 2019 with grant funding that combines historical and contemporary making technologies. Lastly, I have a few classes booked in a computer lab so we can work on digital making and look at digitization and eBooks. All of this required a good amount of logistics and working with staff in three different aspects of the library, but I hope it will be worth the effort.
About the Author
Kate Ozment is assistant professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She has a book on Hroswitha Club forthcoming from Cambridge UP’s Elements series, and you can find her other work in Textual Cultures, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Contact her at: keozment (at) cpp (dot) edu.
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October 2022
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching in the Maker Studio Part Two: Safety Training and Open Making
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching Book Forms
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching Letterpress with the Bookbeetle Press
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September 2022
- Sep 24, 2022 Making a Scriptorium, or, Writing with Quills Part Two
- Sep 16, 2022 Teaching Cuneiform
- Sep 4, 2022 We're Back! Teaching Technologies of Writing
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June 2020
- Jun 1, 2020 Black Lives Matter
- May 2020
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April 2020
- Apr 1, 2020 Teaching Materiality with Virtual Instruction
- March 2020
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February 2020
- Feb 1, 2020 Making the Syllabus Zine
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January 2020
- Jan 1, 2020 Teaching Print History with Popular Culture
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December 2019
- Dec 1, 2019 Teaching with Enumerative Bibliography
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November 2019
- Nov 1, 2019 Finding Women in the Historical Record
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October 2019
- Oct 1, 2019 Teaching in the Maker Studio
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September 2019
- Sep 1, 2019 Graduate School: The MLS and the PhD
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August 2019
- Aug 1, 2019 Research Trips: Workflow with Primary Documents
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July 2019
- Jul 1, 2019 Research Trips: A Beginner's Guide
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June 2019
- Jun 1, 2019 Building a Letterpress Reference Library
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May 2019
- May 1, 2019 Teaching Manuscript: Writing with Quills
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April 2019
- Apr 1, 2019 Why It Matters: Teaching Women Bibliographers
- March 2019
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February 2019
- Feb 1, 2019 Roundup of Materials: Teaching Book History
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January 2019
- Jan 1, 2019 Building and Displaying a Teaching Collection
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December 2018
- Dec 1, 2018 Critical Making and Accessibility
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November 2018
- Nov 1, 2018 Teaching Bibliographic Format
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October 2018
- Oct 1, 2018 Teaching Book History Alongside Literary Theory
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September 2018
- Sep 1, 2018 Teaching with Letterpress
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August 2018
- Aug 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Circulation
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July 2018
- Jul 1, 2018 Setting Up a Print Shop
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May 2018
- May 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Commonplace Books
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April 2018
- Apr 1, 2018 Getting a Press
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March 2018
- Mar 1, 2018 Teaching Ephemera: Pamphlet Binding
- February 2018