What behavior is expected of me in our online class space?

The code of conduct for this course is taken from Ryan Cordell’s, which was adapted from the Northeastern Feminist Coding Collective’s.

  • It’s okay not to know: Assume that no one inherently knows what we’re learning. We all come to this class with different backgrounds and abilities; none of us (including the instructor) will know everything and that is okay! Encourage a space where it’s okay to ask questions.
  • Be respectful: Do not use harmful language or stereotypes that target people of all different gender, abilities, races, ages, ethnicities, languages, socioeconomic classes, body types, sexualities, and other aspects of identity.
  • Collaborative and inclusive interactions: Avoid speaking over each other. Instead, we want to practice listening to each other and speaking with each other, not at each other.
  • Use “I” statements: focusing on your own interpretation of a situation, rather than placing blame or critiquing someone else.
  • Harassment clause: The following behaviors are considered harassment and unacceptable in this community (these are borrowed from the Django Code of Conduct):
    • Violent threats or language directed against another person.
    • Discriminatory jokes and language.
    • Posting sexually explicit or violent material.*
    • Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”).
    • Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms.
    • Unwelcome sexual attention.
    • Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.
    • Repeated harassment of others. In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop.

My personal note: Like any course that engages issues of power, some of what we cover in this course may well be sexual or violent in nature. You are adults, and you will be expected to exercise your judgment. Before you post something, consider the form in which you are representing it, and what that may suggest about its usefulness. Are you offering it for critique and to add to discussion, or are you glorifying it or trying to provoke a response? Is this form of depiction necessary when another form might suffice? Could engaging with it re-traumatize someone? Is it disrespectful to the person it depicts to reproduce it? Should you post something with sensitive content, please use content warnings.

What might my discussion posts look like?

Because this is a discussion-based course happening asynchronously online, most all of our “classroom” interaction will take place in text on Canvas discussion board posts. If you’ve been to a YouTube comment section ever, you know that comment threads can be toxic rather than respectful. In a classroom environment, these posts can be a chore, busywork, formulaic — dare I say algorithmic… — so much so that it’s become a meme.** At their best, however, class discussion boards can be sites of semi-public and collaborative learning. Since I would like to encourage a generative space rather than one that is for show or mis-values metrics, I will not require you to post a specific number of times a week or reply to a specific number of people.

Please consult the following guidelines when posting:

  • Please write your posts in well-developed paragraphs. Create a new thread to start a new thread of discussion, but read and respond to your peers’ posts as a potential springboard for your own ideas first when possible. You likely know how to do this given the ubiquity of comment threads on social media, but I encourage you to think consciously and with care about the practice of commenting. Please try to build a conversation, listening and considering others’ thoughts in addition to itching to contribute your own. Just saying you like what someone said or agree or disagree is rarely enough — expand, and add your perspective in your terms. When responding multiple times to your peers’ posts, I will of course not expect each response to be multiple paragraphs, but it’s okay if they are.

  • While we are often trained to be argumentative in academic writing, please try to think of these prompts as opportunities to bring your varied backgrounds to think through the course material rather than to take already-held positions to defend. This is our space to learn together. While my expertise guides me in selecting and contextualizing these readings, I don’t know everything, and I am thinking through these texts again with you. Some of you may be more familiar with reading academic articles from the humanities than others. Some of you who are familiar with critical work in English may still find our course readings challenging, since they speak to different fields with different readers and different traditions. So, please feel free to ask questions of the texts we read (to the group, not only me!), use the terms of one text to interrogate another, and weave in course concepts as the term continues.

  • I want to hear your voice as you think through these texts. My field understands the practice of writing as a means of thinking and learning, not as something you do to communicate after all the thinking is done. I encourage you to be informal in your posts: please feel free to use “I” (which academics do all the time, when it’s appropriate to the genre!) and include personal reactions, as much as you are willing to share. However, also know that personal reactions and initial impressions are the raw beginnings, not the substance, of critical analysis.

  • While they can be informal, these posts must be developed in that they reference specific parts of the readings and/or your peers’ posts. They must address the prompt, and they should demonstrate that you’ve been doing the reading and apply terms and concepts
    you’ve worked to get throughout the semester. Please remember to use appropriate attribution when you do, which might look different in a forum post than in a formal paper. You might use more signal phrases, offering page numbers when applicable. For example:

    • According to Beck,…

    • This reminds me of Jonathan Bradshaw’s concept of “rhetorical exhaustion,” which for him is…

    • Bucher writes/suggests that…(97).

    • When Tim said [in his post yesterday] that…

  • Please remember that you have multiple audiences in these posts: your fellow classmates and me. As I hope becomes clear over the course of the term, we have different backgrounds and standpoints, and I encourage you to draw from those rich experiences. When you do, please define terms that may be unfamiliar to those outside your field. Determining when this is appropriate is a skill to build. On that note, there is a difference between letting an awareness of your audience shape your writing versus writing to give your reader what you assume they want to read, which eclipses your own insights and purpose. You are probably very good at this point in your life at delivering instructors what they seem to want, but I ask that you please avoid that in our course. Your assumptions may be very wrong, and it misses the point of the posts: I want to read what strikes you about the material.

  • Since it bears repeating, please follow the above code of conduct.

(In the spirit of good attribution, I thank Dr. Beth McCoy at SUNY Geneseo for introducing me to discussion forums done well, and also for much of this language.)

**No, I don’t subscribe to this subreddit.