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

Letizia Guglielmo

Analysis: Biographies

As their first discussion board assignment, students were asked to post a short biography before the end of the first week, introducing themselves to their peers and beginning to create and to share an identity with their peers and with me. Generally, within the f2f classroom, I am not overtly personal in this introduction on the first day of class and share with students only the basics including my education, my time at KSU, my specialization in Rhet/Comp and Computers and Writing, and my Italian heritage.

Throughout the semester, however, I reveal much more about myself in class discussions, on Monday or Tuesday morning in describing something that took place over the weekend, or simply in passing while chatting with students before or after class. This spontaneous community that develops within the traditional classroom is one significant aspect to teaching and learning that I believe is missing online because we have fewer opportunities, as one student noted in a survey response, "to be spontaneous."

In an attempt to reveal my identity as a member of the online community and to help students begin to make connections with me, during this semester, my biography posting included more personal details in the hope that students would follow my model and would reveal a bit more than their names, hometowns, and majors. My goal here was to help students to understand that the online environment requires a more deliberate construction of identity since traditional visual cues are absent. I included the following prompt for our first discussion:

Listen

Again, as a member of the community, I posted my biography to open the thread, sharing with students information about where I grew up, how long I had been living in the south, where I completed my undergraduate and graduate work, and the focus of my current research. I also referred to my husband, living in downtown Atlanta, and teaching yoga at a local studio to help students to create a complete picture of their instructor.

In response to my invitation to post a biography and with my own, more personal biography posting as a model, all of the students’ biographies included details beyond name, hometown, and major as I had hoped. Of the thirty-eight study participants, 36.8 percent included details about their families, including mentioning husbands, siblings, and parents.

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