When Dr. Cindy Baer piloted Stretch English at San José State University in 2014, she had three primary questions in mind:
1) Is it effective in helping us to create more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable writing instruction at SJSU?
2) What resources do we have in the new ecology of multimodal learning cohorts and operating in an English-dominant context?
3) What are the resources we need and the next steps to build the initial promise of Stretch, sustaining and extending campus-wide the adaptive practices it has discovered to us and enabled?
Her aim was to agenticize students through Directed Self-Placement (DSP) and replace remediation with informed student choice. This meant doing away with protocols that tracked students into different writing courses based on their performance on a timed writing exam. It also meant eradicating the system in which only students who placed at a certain score could enroll in classes that met their A2 graduation requirements. In this, DSP challenged the long cycle of discrimination against the majority of students who comprise our population at SJSU: multilingual and first-generational students, underrepresented minorities, and Pell Grant recipients. The question then became how best to support students once they’d chosen their classes.
Because many of the students who placed themselves into Stretch English expressed being less “comfortable” with and “confident” in reading and writing, Dr. Baer scaffolded a shared curriculum that would establish community, draw from and build on students’ prior knowledge, and invite students to contribute to serious academic discourse. She also designed a series of professional development workshops to support Stretch faculty in cultivating an asset-based, culturally sustaining pedagogy.
It’s been a few years since Dr. Baer’s retirement, but her legacy continues at SJSU. Dr. Faith Kirk served as Stretch Coordinator from 2021-23, and Dr. Amanda Smith has been coordinating since then. During the 2023-24 academic year, we had seven FYW instructors teaching Stretch English and participating in bi-semester professional development. We’ve discovered that teaching, like writing, is a social process. So, we work in collaboration, relying on each other for feedback, advice, and affirmation. During meetings, we dialogue about what is and isn’t working and about which assignments and activities have proven most constructive in creating community and establishing inclusive multimodal and multilingual frameworks for learning.
We recognize the complex and rich lives our students lead and the value their experiences bring to our writing program and campus community. We also see their infinite potential as storytellers, academics, and change-makers. Our goal is to both support and challenge them in learning and in creating new knowledge, together. It is in this spirit of collaboration that this webpage has come to fruition. It is to be used as a resource for current and prospective Stretch faculty and as a platform on which to showcase the achievements of our instructors and students.
One of the major changes we made during the 2023-24 academic year was to update the original Stretch curriculum to reflect some of the broader changes within the FYW program. While it was important for us to continue with a shared sequencing of assignments, we wanted the work to represent real problems for our students to solve and not just new genres for them to navigate. We finalized some of the changes for which Drs. Baer and Kirk had also advocated, including the elimination of timed, in-class writing. Our hope is that this revised curriculum not only accepts but embraces writing as multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal and that it challenges ideas about correctness that seek only to marginalize difference and otherness. The original curriculum was divided into three units, a schema the long-time Stretch instructor Kristin Fitzpatrick said she'd always envisioned as 'containers'. This is how we have re-scaffolded the contents of each container .
Container One
The first part of Stretch, container one, is an introspective inquiry geared towards self-discovery. It will see students taking stock of their unique funds of knowledge and the experiences and observations that have informed their worldviews.
Launch Activity:
Purpose: To introduce students to the idea that writing is not about following a prescribed formula but about identifying the best strategies for conveying a message to a specific audience.
Students will compose/create something that reveals something about who they are or what they care about to a close audience - a family member, friend, FYW instructor, or even themself. This could be an email to a cousin explaining why they feel the way they do about a current issue (e.g. the campus protest movement). It could also be something like the creation of and reflection on an identity wheel. Whatever it is, it should be the foundation on which the other major assignments in this container are built.
Personal “Essay”:
Purpose: To challenge students to believe in and use their stories, experiences, and observations as important voices in an extant (academic?) discourse/conversation.
Students will compose/create a personal “essay” that makes a clear point about themselves or something they care about to an audience of their peers. In traditional essay form, we would expect students to use sensory language to create setting (then narration) as they come to know and share something about themselves (now narration). But this essay needn’t be limited to traditional essay form. For example, it might be a photo voice essay to be shared in class, potentially with a written reflective component.
“Essay” for a Public Forum:
Purpose: To invite students to use their stories, experiences, and observations to join a larger conversation about something they care about, to show how interest/investment can inform research, and to motivate students to make strategic choices about their writing to appeal to a public audience.
Students will compose/create an “essay” to share with a broader audience. By this point, they should have something to say based on their understanding of themselves, their values, and how they see the world. How they reach this public audience will depend on the message they want to convey. For instance, if they want to convince the public to back or not to back the campus protest movement, they’d have to consider the medium and form that would best help them achieve that purpose. Would it be through a blog? Or would a TikTok be more effective? This “essay” should have students making thoughtful choices about purpose, audience, and context. An added reflective component about these choices would be helpful in getting them to articulate and reinforce the importance of considering the rhetorical situations in which they’re writing when making decisions about writing.
Container Two
Container two is an extrospective inquiry through which students will take stock of and build on their stories, experiences, and observations to converse and engage with the people and places outside of themselves. In doing so, they will think not only about who they are in the world but how they are and want to be positioned in the world in relation to others.
Launch Activity:
Purpose: To reach out to a member of the community in which they’re embedded to gain a better understanding of a group or issue within that community.
Students will initiate a conversation with someone from their community they’d like to interview for their profile essay. Though this part of the inquiry needn’t be ‘targeted’, students should be aware that the person they are asking to interview will serve as ‘the face of’ a larger group or issue (e.g. first-gen or student-athlete at SJSU or people who work in Silicon Valley).
Interview:
Purpose: To connect with someone within their community, to gain new knowledge/insights about a group or issue within their community, and to learn something about themselves in relation to their subject.
Students will interview a subject for their profile “essay.” Whom they interview will largely depend on the theme of the course, but the point is that they should be able to recognize what makes their subject unique and to what extent they are ‘typical’ of a group or issue. To do this, students will need to ask a number of open-ended questions, elicit stories. They should gain enough information about their subject to paint (or to write, photograph, or video) an authentic picture of their subject and what they represent. This assignment should be recorded as a written and/or audio transcript.
Profile “Essay”:
Purpose: To reshape a transcript - a set of questions and answers - into a project that conveys a specific message about a group or an issue.
Students will compose/create an “essay” that says something about a group or issue to a specific audience. The audience is for the instructor and/or the students to decide. If they are ‘using’ a student to show the issue of parking at SJSU, they may want to appeal to SJSU administrators, CalTrans, or policy-makers. They may also want to simply draw attention to an issue, like the campus protests, to help their fellow students better understand the issue or a side of it.
Container Three
Container three is meant to bring students into a topical academic discourse. By now, they’ve considered who they are individually and as members of a larger community. They have something to say that the rest of us need to hear. In the last container, we listen.
Launch Activity:
Purpose: To introduce students to a broad subject of research within which they will eventually need to tease out a focus.
Students will compose/create something that has them engaging with an issue or event of thematic relevance. This may be a response to a (polemical) text or a preliminary study of a group or issue. This activity, in whatever form it takes, should foster curiosity and allow students to identify themselves as stakeholders in an issue/event of importance to them.
Research Analysis:
Purpose: To give students the time and space to look into and analyze a particular side of or diverse sides of an issue.
Students will compose/create a research project that reflects what they’ve learned about an event, issue, or an affected group. Perhaps they acknowledged the impact food scarcity had on them on a child in Container One and profiled a volunteer from SJSU Cares in Container Two and now want to discover more about food banks or those who rely on them. This may consist of studying a group or an issue; either way, it should help lay the groundwork for students’ last course-specific assignment of the year, the persuasive essay.
Persuasive “Essay”:
Purpose: To usher students into a formal academic discourse in which they can contribute both personal and extrapersonal knowledge/expertise.
Here, our students’ audience will be ‘academic’ - which we know can mean different things, carry different connotations. Important is that they realize themselves as peers in ‘our’ community and that they are practicing the things ‘we’ value: making a claim, integrating and analyzing evidence, bringing different sources into conversation. Their “essay” - whether in written, photographic, and/or video form - should take a stand and offer us the information we need to engage with it in a meaningful way.
As part of this curricular redesign, we agreed on three possible ways to apportion the assignments from each container across the two semesters. It is up to each instructor to choose the version that best aligns with their teaching philosophy.
The first version backloads the course, so the entire first semester is dedicated to introspective inquiry and community-building. In this version, students begin working through the second container, often by way of a request for interview, before writing their midyear self-reflections. In the second version, students dip their toes into their first project for Spring Semester while still ending each semester with the metacognitive act of self-reflection. In the final version, students end the first semester by starting the next. This allows for the feeling of continuity despite the winter break that falls between the two semesters.
For ENGL 1AF, students receive either credit (CR) or no credit (NC). Students who finish Fall Semester with a 70% or higher will automatically carry on into Spring Semester. However, because the Spring Semester grade (A-F) represents the cumulative percentage of both semesters, students don't necessarily need a 70% to receive credit for fall. In fact, studies have shown that Stretch students tend to become more comfortable, confident, and successful during the second semester. Therefore, it is up to the instructor to determine if a student who falls below 70% at the end of Fall Semester will have a fair chance of passing Spring Semester with a C- or higher.
We also reviewed our assessment practices. Whereas before, we had Stretch students engaging with both the CLOs and GELOs for their midyear and end-of-year self-reflection essays and ePortfolios, we are now focusing solely on the GELOs - the learning objectives used for the A2 Written Communication requirement. Below is the prompt we used for the 2023-24 midyear self-reflection essay, which we will transform into a multimodal assignment for the 2024-25 academic year. The spring self-reflection/assessment prompt will be the same as that assigned to Spring Semester ENGL 1A students.
The success of Stretch English depends on the collaborative efforts between students and instructors. Below you can meet the Stretch Faculty Learning Community for the 2024-25 academic year.