Instructor: Micciche
M 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM
This class focuses on the development and evolution of writing practices across the human lifespan. Our study will highlight writing development in classrooms and national and transnational communities as that development interacts with age and shifting identity markers, cultural experiences, ever-changing writing tools, and life events (e.g., parenting, bodily changes, illness, disability, caretaking). We’ll explore qualitative, longitudinal, and archival methods for studying writers across the lifespan and consider how to design writing pedagogies that honor idiosyncratic pathways toward writing development. Readings will draw from the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of lifespan writing research (e.g., Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research by Dippre, Phillips, Poch) as well as works by Charles Bazerman, Deborah Brandt, Asao Inoue, Paul Prior, Jessica Restaino, Lucille Schultz, Marilyn Sternglass, and Kate Vieira, among others. We’ll also wander through online archives of writers across the lifespan and read nonfiction that documents writing over time (possibilities include works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Nancy Mairs, Reginald Shepherd, Eudora Welty, and/or Richard Wright). A guiding presumption of this class is that writing is not a stable practice but instead takes shape (and gets re-shaped) over time, in context, and in concert with embodied experiences.