Title of the proposal
Best Practice: Against the Grain, Using Technology, Social Media and Creative Writing Pedagogy to retain and engage Hispanic Students in Freshman Composition.
Bio
Jillian Abbott Adjunct Lecturer, Queensborough Community College and York College, CUNY
Jillian Abbott is an adjunct lecturer in English at York College and Queensborough Community College, both colleges of CUNY. She was a Research Associate with the Research Foundation of CUNY from fall 2011 to fall 2015 and is currently working as a consultant to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism to create ground-breaking case studies of digital media startups. Jillian’s short stories, essays, features, profiles and lifestyle features have won awards and been published in the US, Australia, UK, Ireland and India.
General description of the initiative or project
In my Freshman Composition classes I draw on technology and the pedagogy of creative writing – storytelling, peer review, reader engagement, plotting, adaptation, scriptwriting etc. to engage and retain Hispanic Students and encourage them to find meaningful expression.
The ability to articulate identity is central to teaching freshman English in an urban Community College setting. However, with a high percentage of Hispanic and other non-native English speakers and migrants, expressing oneself in Academic English can be extremely challenging for this population. By using technology to facilitate peer review, reader responses, and to enable students to incorporate, images, videos and sounds into personal narratives, student engagement increases as does the quality of student work.
I would like to share my student digital narratives while discussing the pedagogy of teaching composition in this way, and exploring various methods of assessing the effectiveness of this pedagogy.
Jillian Abbott Bio
Jillian Abbott is an adjunct lecturer in English at York College and Queensborough Community College. She was a Research Associate with the Research Foundation of CUNY from fall 2011 to fall 2015 and is currently working as a consultant to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism to create ground-breaking case studies of digital media startups. Jillian’s short stories, essays, features, profiles and lifestyle features have won awards and been published in the US, Australia, UK, Ireland and India.