Feminist Online Writing Courses
Civic Rhetoric, Community Action, and Student Success

Letizia Guglielmo

Analysis: Discussion Board Etiquette

During the first week of class, with Simmons and Grabill’s (2007) assertion in mind, that shared information leads to community building (p. 424), the next opportunity for civic action involved students creating collaboratively an etiquette/guidelines document to guide their use of the discussion board. Typically, as I prepare and post course materials for a new online course, I create these guidelines on my own, and I felt strongly that I, too, as a member of the course community would offer suggestions and guidance as necessary.

My larger goal, however, was to allow students to take greater ownership of these guidelines and to consider more carefully the significance of the etiquette document to their learning and participation in the course. I suspected that students would be more likely to participate fully and frequently in discussion activities if they were involved in setting the expectations as co-teachers, and I made a deliberate effort to link this activity specifically to the overriding idea of civic rhetoric and writing to change and to shape communities. With the goal of offering students evidence of the decentered approach toward which I was working, I included this prompt on the discussion board:

Listen

As a member of the community, I also wanted to post a message to begin the thread yet did not want to stifle students with my ideas at the outset; instead, I reminded students of the purpose of the discussion board activity and offered a few general ideas to open the thread:

Together, we are creating a list of guidelines, expectations, and rules for etiquette on the discussion board. What would you like to see included in this kind of document? Consider length and content of posts, frequency of posts, general format, etc. I, too, will offer some suggestions as the discussion progresses and will compile a final document from this discussion. Looking forward to reading your ideas.

Again, similar to the responses to their peers’ biography postings, this activity was not required, yet I wanted to invite students to participate and to explain why I believed that the activity was important to their work within the course and to the overall development of community.

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