Project Description

Chrystel Oloukoï (Geography) and Morgan Vickers (Law, Societies & Justice) joined the Writing@UW Fellowship to collaboratively rethink how students engage in complex, interdisciplinary writing projects. Chrystel teaches Dark Ecologies, which draws on film, theory, and environmental humanities, while Morgan teaches Reparations: Race, Recognition, and Remediation, a course rooted in legal studies and historical inquiry. Both courses grapple with questions of justice, history, and form; and both faculty members sought to reimagine final assignments to better support critical thinking, rhetorical flexibility, and meaningful synthesis.

In Dark Ecologies, Chrystel developed a sequence of low-stakes assignments to support students in crafting a final curatorial essay that analyzes film sequences alongside critical theory texts. Their project responds to a common challenge: students often approached film analysis descriptively, summarizing rather than building a clear analytical point of view. To address this, Chrystel created a step-by-step assignment structure that builds specific skills across the quarter—from observation to synthesis to argumentation. Each stage is supported by targeted prompts, sample materials, and structured peer review. The emphasis is on helping students identify relationships across media and develop compelling arguments that draw from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

In Reparations: Race, Recognition, and Remediation, Morgan redesigned the course's assignment structure to help students develop grounded, action-oriented proposals for how reparations—or broader forms of social repair—might be implemented. The new structure guides students through a scaffolded process in which they research the legal, historical, and social dimensions of a reparations case, mirroring the stages of policy development. This redesign responds to a common challenge in the course: students often approached the topic abstractly rather than engaging with the practical implications of their proposals. The revised assignment also opens possibilities for public engagement, such as presenting their recommendations to local groups like the Seattle/King County African American Reparations Committee.

Materials

  • Assignment Prompts and Rubrics (forthcoming)
  • Scaffolding Materials for Dark Ecologies (forthcoming)
  • Revised Syllabus for Reparations (forthcoming)

Transforming Writing Instruction Through Collaboration

Morgan and Chrystel participated in the fellowship with distinct course projects, but both focused on helping students move from summary toward analysis, and from isolated tasks to scaffolded, purposeful writing. Fellowship sessions on threshold concepts, scaffolding, and rhetorical genre analysis offered tools and language to support these goals.

Though their disciplinary contexts differ, their projects intersect in meaningful ways. Both centered writing as a method for developing complex ideas and emphasized form, genre, and audience awareness. Their collaboration also opened space to explore shared structures—like cross-listing, aligned assignments, and potential co-teaching—that could further support student learning across their departments.