Writing Remix Ep.113: Note From Dan & Reflection Questions
Listen to 113. Spring 2025 Semester Reflection: Meaningful Teaching, Student Engagement, & Well-being
“The most important thing was making sure that we were taking care of ourselves [this semester]. And I think that mean[t] pulling back on the amount of assignments so that we all could have time with them, whether making, writing them, and me assessing them. That was a big change, and it made it a much more enjoyable semester for me and for my students. And I don't think doing less assignments isn't student centered. In fact, I believe that it was absolutely student centered so that they can focus on doing meaningful and purposeful work.”
-Dan Dissinger
At the start of the Spring 2025 semester, I challenged myself to create a class community centered around well-being both for myself and my students. After a few semesters where my students were talking about how mentally, emotionally, and spiritually unhealthy they felt at USC, and personally coming out of a very challenging period of my life, I promised myself to take a hard look at what wasn’t truly serving this goal. Centering my writing classrooms around well-being, around what bell hooks calls in All About Love a love ethic, is a huge challenge because it goes against traditional pedagogical hegemony. It means putting love at the center and not rigor, it means assigning work for quality and not quantity, it means making time in the classroom to hear and to listen to students when they aren’t feeling well, and it means promising to build trust with vulnerability, just to name a few challenges.
Trust building comes with sharing as the instructor. Trust building comes with being open to changing the course even if it's already “planned” because life will life for the students during the semester and I want to lead with a love ethic which means leading with empathy and humanization. And when life is lifing for me students rise to that occasion, because they know I believe taking time for personal and communal well-being isn’t a concession, it’s a core value.
This episode of the podcast is a trust building exercise, and it’s an episode I’ll share with my students in the future. I ask students to be vulnerable, which means I must participate in that vulnerability. I see this episode as an invitation to hear from other instructors from K-12 and Higher Ed. I want this episode to create a supportive community. Inviting people into my personal challenges and reflections means letting them see more than what might have worked and didn't work in the in the course in terms of books and assignments. I’m inviting you all into my challenges doing this work, the emotional, mental, and spiritual toll. It’s important to say I'm not trying to speak for everyone. These are my experiences and thoughts, yet I do believe sometimes being an educator at any level is very much misunderstood, attacked unnecessarily, and seen as this job with long “breaks.” I hope this episode serves as a starting point for a deeper discourse.
This is one of the more challenging times of the year for me, when there’s no more work, there are no more classes to teach, there are no more students to meet with, there are no more books to read for class, and there is no more grading. Even though grading is one of the more arduous tasks, having unstructured time, for me, is difficult to deal with and leads to bouts of depression and anxiety. This is a personal challenge that I face yet it’s a challenge I want to share because I know that I'm not the only one out there who feels this way. I'm hopefully opening a conversation where others can be seen and heard as well, because we all need to reclaim and rebuild our campus communities, during and after the semester, since returning to campus after COVID. Hallways that were once textured with open doors and chatting and laughing are silent, which makes the job even lonelier than it already can be.
“The [writing] course doesn’t have to break a student down as much as I felt like USC wanted me to do it. I can build way more [and] build up.”
-Dan Dissinger
The biggest standout moment from this semester was seeing how assigning less homework created deeper more meaningful writing assignments. This change also ran parallel to the emotional toll that grading all that work can take on my mind, body, and spirit. I always felt like I had to give so many assignments, and my students’ writing wasn’t improving. I needed time to breathe and so did they. I’d also been trying to take more control over the grading cycle, and since I have control over the homework assignments and due dates of the larger projects, I decided to use bell hooks’ love ethic again to revamp the workload for students and myself. This shift made teaching more enjoyable, learning more meaningful for the students, and it gave the assignments that I did assign more defined and deeper purpose.
At USC, the writing courses are the ones students are the most apprehensive going into. They don't trust instructors because of past traumas in other writing courses and things that they’ve heard through comments and stories from friends and online. This doesn’t have to be the narrative and writing classes don’t have to be abusive. Writing classes don’t have to break students down, they can be an opportunity to build the students up and to build community inside the classroom an across multiple writing classes to build larger learning communities for support. Writing is empowering. Writing is a pathway to liberation and reading is the collaborator for that empowering writing.
The best thing that I could have done this semester was putting two books on my syllabus, Exile and Pride by Eli Claire and All About Love by bell hooks. There's this misnomer that students don't want to read, though in my experience this semester and each semester that I've had a book on the syllabus for the last five years is students are hungry to read books. They are, and they tell me this over and over. They kept telling me that the books we read were books they wished they read as a first-year student. I know putting books on the syllabus means taking something off, and if the choice is between valuable and purposeful reading or assigning homework responses, I’ll choose reading every time. My students still did a lot of writing, and that writing was meaningful and purposeful writing. Plus, reading sparked so many amazing conversations in class, and for some students they were able to finally come to personal realizations that they never thought possible and were taking with them across the graduation stage, into their summer, and into next semester.
Looking forward to the Fall 2025 semester I know that those classes are going to be different than the classes from Spring 2025. Every writing class is different, every student experience is unique, so I’m challenging myself to being open to changing and shifting my courses as the semester unfolds. I’m challenging myself to be vulnerable, even more vulnerable, and start the trust building over again for these new students. I’m challenging myself to take the student suggestions from this semester and implement them for the Fall, because I’m in service to my students. As an instructor, I see the classroom as the space where I can engage in the changes I’d like to see in the world, I can make it a sacred space, and this happens in collaboration, in vulnerable creation, with my students.
I hope you enjoy this episode, and I would love to hear your stories about the end of Spring 2025. I'm going to be doing more solo episodes, and I hope that this encourages you to also take a look at how well-being can play a role in the pedagogy for your classroom going forward.
Please share this episode with someone that you feel needs to hear this. And let's create together as much as we possibly can. Email your thoughts and questions to writingremixpodcast@gmail.com and I will answer them on a future episode.
Episode 113 Reflective Questions
This week's Reflective Questions ask us to consider the challenges we try to face on our own at the end of the semester or in times of loneliness.
Write for 5 minutes about all the things that you love about who you are outside of school.
Look at that piece of writing and find one thing that truly calls out to you, write that on the top of another page, and write a letter of gratitude to that thing. Really dig deeply into the details, those how and whys, use your senses to describe, and get vulnerable.
Lastly, take that piece and use it to create a singular core value that traverses both break time and work so you are bringing that core you everywhere you are.
Share your writing with us at writingremixpodcast@gmail.com, or post your thoughts on Instagram and tag the podcast @WritingRemixPod. I’d love to read them on the next episode!