As I said in my midterm reflection, going into this course I was not sure what to expect to learn from this class. I wasn’t sure why this class was a requirement and thought it would just be another silly general education requirement that wouldn’t actually help or prepare me for my future career at all. After completing this course, I have to say that this was one of the most helpful courses I have taken so far while at UC Blue Ash. Not only did I learn writing skills to help me in my career but for life in general. As you look throughout my ePortfolio, you can see a transformation in my work and my education. You will also see a growth in my confidence as a reader and a writer.
My first blog post/project was our work on our profiles we created for the Activist. When we started this project, we had just gotten into learning about genre and discourse community. While I did not know what discourse community exactly meant, we had great resources provided to us that helped me learn. In the article “Discourse Community,” I like how the article not only defined it but gave examples. I as a college student found the example of a college setting very helpful and relatable. I also found it intriguing how it related it to genre as well. I liked how it describes why this is so important in writing literature. Having a clear definition of what discourse community is helps make it easy to understand and think about as well. The portfolio was a perfect introduction assignment for this course. It wasn’t asking for too much out of us since we didn’t know much yet, but it helped prepare us for what we had instore for the rest of the course.
The Collaborative Photo Caption article is what helped me learn how to write in groups or partners. Combining ideas can be difficult. Trying to compromise and make the work evenly is also very difficult. I think that it is very important to learn how to work as a team for everyone. It can be a challenge, but it is an appropriate skill for every type of career path one might go down. A photo caption project was something I was completely lost about and had no idea where to even start. I think that making it a group project made it a lot easier and we were able to learn off of each other. However, I still wasn’t exactly sure how to describe a genre at the time. The article “Genre in the Wild” really helped shaped my perception. After I read through this article, I came to a conclusion of how important the term genre is in the world. It is especially important in writing. I think that the image provided by “Social Media World,” shows how important it is in the social media world and gives great examples of genres in today’s society. I am more of a visual learner for sure and graphs and images really help me learn and understand subjects better. I found it very interesting when the writer says, “genre is an act of language.” That when you think about it is a perfect way to think about genre in the world and how it is used. This helped me apply genre to the work I did in the Photo Caption List project.
Halfway through the semester we did a midterm reflection assignment to display what we have learned from the course so far and what we are looking forward to the rest of the semester. The midterm reflection was a great assignment that made us think about how satisfied we are not just with the course but how our education became more developed. It pushed my thinking of what I have learned that will help me in my future career path. Like I said in my midterm reflection when I was talking about the beginning of the course, “I had no idea how to even create a blog post or what to even write about. I did not know what a genre was or even what a photo caption was besides a caption on Facebook or Instagram.” Looking at my midterm reflection I am very satisfied with the outcome of this course.
When it came to our journal entries and our green book, I can see a growth in my maturity in my writing. In the beginning, looking back I can see I did not think anything of this course and thought it was a silly requirement that would be easy to pass. As time went along, I became interesting in what we were learning and became determined to work hard and do good on all my assignments. I reflected a lot on my work and was very professional about my strengths and weaknesses in this course. What really made everything seem more relevant to me like genre for example was the article we read, “Genre Awareness for the Novice Academic Student: An Ongoing Quest.” Being a student who is studying genre I found this article very interesting. It shows the importance of educating ourselves about genre. Reading this made me aware of genre and what the goal is for students to understand about the term genre. It is also interesting hearing what they are doing to change our academic system to help students learn and be more aware. It also helps hearing the opinion as to why it is so important for us to learn about it.
However, there was a sudden change in our learning about a month before the end of this course that threw all of us off track. The pandemic, covid-19, brought a big change in our learning. Instead of meeting in our normal classroom three times a week everything switched to fully online instructing. For some people it was easier while others it brought even more stress. I saw this challenge and was scared at first. I have taken a couple online courses before, but they were easier classes that were more independent work and learning. Outside of school many other changes were occurring due to the pandemic, restaurants, stores and salons all closed. I lost my job and have been completely stuck inside and distanced from others besides family. When this all happened, I had to come up with ways to stay productive in schoolwork and other priorities. I wanted to share those ways and advice with others.
Shortly after we switched to online, we were asked to write our own original journalistic texts. I immediately thought about genre and how this pandemic could be an interesting genre to talk about in my writing. I used this to my advantage and wrote something that actually was useful to me and I wanted it to be useful to other students as well. My text titled, “How to stay motivated while all classes are online due to Covid-19,” was inspired by the sudden change that happened in our academic learning. I came up with my own top ten useful tips I wanted to give out to my fellow UC classmates. I wanted to write something that wasn’t just interesting and relatable, I wanted it to be helpful and useful for the intended audience.
The course concepts, genre and discourse community, are two things that will be relevant for my future career path. I am studying psychology and my goal is to become a licensed clinical psychologist. There will be a lot of writing and journalistic texts that I will have to read and reflect on not only throughout college but when I start my career. I was able to relate genre and discourse community to the study of psychology. One article that I recently found was “Genre, Identity, and the Brain: Insights from Neuropsychology,” by Irene Clark. This article connected the term genre to every side of psychology and made it so intriguing to someone like me who is studying this.
This course was overall one of the most helpful classes I have taken at UC. It is a course that focuses not on just reading literature but understanding it and writing it. I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to take this class and learn many skills that will help me professionally. As a writer I grew and flourished, I am able to understand the meaning behind every type of literature, and not just reading a book. I took aspects from every resource provided to us and made it relevant to my own life and career.
Works Cited
Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild.” Press Books , https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/
CCCC, “Discourse Community” secure.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CCC/0641-sep2012/CCC0641PosterDiscourse.pdf.
Johns, Ann. “Genre Awareness for the Novice Academic Student: An Ongoing Quest.”
Irene Clark, “Genre, Identity, and the Brain: Insights from Neuropsychology”
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