To End Zionism and For a Free Palestine: How Do We Do ‘Very Effective’ Writing?

A note to the reader: I am a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) fellow at New York City College of Technology (City Tech) for the academic year 2024-2025. One of the requirements of the fellowship is to contribute a blog post per semester on the Open Lab. I posted mine on Friday October 25, 2024. It was called: “To End Zionism and for a Free Palestine: How Do We Do ‘Very Effective’ Writing?” The following Monday however, my blog post was taken down because the City Tech administration evaluated that it was “outside the scope of content specified for blog posts in the WAC Fellows Handbook.” An email exchange ensued, with the conclusion that I was “free to resubmit a blog post that is within the scope of the assignment.” To this end, you will find below the initial blog post a new submission (“Addendum: what this has to do with WAC“) which places the issues at hand in conversation with WAC principles and teaching writing in the (CUNY) classrooms. I am very grateful to my friend and comrade A. formidable scholar of composition and rhetoric, who shared their expert feedback on previous drafts.

To End Zionism and For a Free Palestine: How Do We Do Very Effective Writing?
October 25, 2024

Seventy-six years into the colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and a year into what legal scholar Maryam Jamshidi has described as an “exceptional display of annihilation that other genocidaires could only dream of,” the Israeli army, with the full financial and diplomatic backing of the United States, further reinforced its barbaric siege on the Palestinian people living in Gaza. Journalist Hossam Shabat reported: “what’s happening in the Jabalia refugee camp can be summed up as a rapid extermination mission; we have never seen anything like this.” As I write this, the Israeli army is rounding up dozens of Palestinian men, with their hands tied and blindfolded — they will be buried alive or join the approximately 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails and be subjected to torture, organ theft and rape. The fact that the Palestinian people are still standing on their land is a testament to their steadfastness.

This blog post is part of a series of reflections authored by doctoral fellows at New York City College of Technology on teaching writing to CUNY students. As a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) fellow, I am responsible for improving the writing skills of CUNY undergraduate students. The WAC program organizes workshops with faculty to share best pedagogical practices and workshops with students to help them write strong and well-rounded arguments supported by evidence. But when the earth-shattering horrors in Gaza make the heart break a hundred times a day, when depraved monsters celebrate the killings of heroic fighters, when the mainstream media broadcast genocidal propaganda, and when our very own university represses and brutalizes the students who protest that genocide, it is tempting to be skeptical: what could a pen and paper possibly do? Admittedly and to paraphrase Leila Khaled, writing “doesn’t liberate land.” Khaled who was in fact asked about the Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) movement recognized its effectiveness: “BDS, of course, on the international level it is very effective. But it doesn’t liberate, it doesn’t liberate land. If there’s BDS all over the world, and the people are not resisting, there will be no change.” Could the same be said about writing? The task at hand for us, academics, graduate students, writing fellows, is to figure out how to do “very effective” writing, and how to put it to good use, hoping that we remain loyal to the martyrs. 

CUNY for Palestine, a solidarity group of students and workers organizing for Palestinian liberation at the City University of New York, recently invited Professor Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University to give a talk “One Year Since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide & Resistance” at the CUNY Graduate Center – a talk that had previously been censored by Wake Forest University. Professor Abdulhadi’s talk offered historical elements to locate the attacks of Al-Aqsa flood of October 7, 2023, within the long and proud tradition of indigenous resistance to settler colonial occupation and described the apocalyptic scale of the ongoing US-backed genocide of the Palestinian people [1]. Throughout her remarks, Professor Abdulhadi also shared a few personal anecdotes: among those was the story of a younger Rabab Abdulhadi – not yet the award winning and widely read university professor – who wanted to take up arms and join the Palestinian resistance but was told by her elders that she would serve the resistance better if she stayed far from the frontlines and firearms. Rabab Abdulhadi followed that advice and became a writer and an educator with a scholarship deeply grounded in the material needs of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Revolutionary writing has always been an essential part of liberation struggles. The writings of Palestinian scholars from Ghassan Kanafani to Basel Al-Araj to Rabab Abdulhadi both narrated and strengthened the resistance because the analysis wasn’t intended “as academic exercise or to fill a gap in the literature […] its real value is in its potential to transform the way we look at, and interpret, the world around us.” 

I can’t know for sure why Professor Abdulhadi shared that story of her younger self, but one thing it did for her audience of CUNY students and workers is to immediately raise the stakes of our academic work, here in New York, in the belly of the beast. If we weren’t going to fight the settlers that occupy Palestine, we should at least try to write something useful. As we salute the courage of the resistance fighters defending their people on the frontlines, we who are not sacrificing our lives in the struggle for liberation, and have made a living of producing academic scholarship, must take our writing seriously. 

The goal is to sabotage the fabrication of that liberal veneer that transforms settler colonialism and genocide into glossy academic talking points [2]. As university workers we write articles, books, conference papers, syllabi and assignments, occasionally department statements and union resolutions, which together help sustain the myth of the university as a great producer of knowledge, a champion of learning and democratic debates. At CUNY this myth is particularly easy to dispel because our university has partnered with Zionists organizations and received funding from Zionist policymakers. The claim that CUNY builds knowledge “for the public good” only stands if one leaves the humanity and dignity of the Palestinian people out of the equation. And so, it’s a moral duty to figure out how our work (and for me here, our writing) fits into that system, even more so because CUNY directly collaborates with the U.S. and Israeli institutions that have caged in Palestinians without food or water, have relentlessly targeted them with terror airstrikes, and have burned down hospitals. It is a moral duty to figure out how our work (our writing) can unequivocally support the resistance against Zionism, so that the children of Palestine can grow up free, and in the words of the martyr resistance leader Yehia Sinwar, “be safely Palestinians, so that they can be much more than Palestinians” — in an interview published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on October 4, 2018, the journalist asked Sinwar what kind of life he hoped for, Sinwar replied: “ I want my kids to dream of becoming doctors not to treat only the wounded, but cancer. Like all the kids of the world. I want them to be safely Palestinians, so that they can be much more than Palestinians” [3].

Endnotes:

[1] The talk was not recorded, however a separate event titled “One Year of Genocide in Gaza: Dispatches from Palestine & Lebanon,” a panel conversation hosted by Professor Abdulhadi on Oct 10, 2024, is available on YouTube.
[2] See for instance: Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira, eds. 2014. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Edwards, Erica R. 2021. The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire. New York: New York University Press.
[3] For an English version of the interview, see journalist Francesca Borri’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/francescaiaiaborri/posts/yahya-sinwarinterview-with-the-leader-of-hamas-in-gazafrom-la-repubblica-italy-o/1954610794582074

Addendum: what this has to do with WAC (a response to City Tech administrators)
Jan 24, 2025

The question in the title of the original blog post (“how do we do very effective writing?”) is a common starting point in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) conversations. WAC pedagogy at its core is about centering writing in the classroom with the understanding that students who engage in consistent and repeated writing activities are more likely to deepen their understanding of the course materials. WAC workshops and certifications equip educators with pedagogical strategies so they can move away from the model of the lecture-based class and instead incorporate writing activities in their classes (of different lengths, scopes and levels of difficulty) throughout the semester. 

For the WAC movement, “effective writing” happens when students “write to learn.” John C. Beans’s Engaging Ideas, citing writing theorist Peter Elbow, makes the case for writing “not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message.” His book describes a wide range of writing activities for educators to adopt so writing remains frequent and enjoyable (for varying audiences, with different purposes and stakes, and within different genres). WAC promotes a pedagogy of iteration, revision, and interaction. Foundational to WAC is the principle that teachers must approach writing as a process (keywords are scaffolding, exploratory writing, free writes, low stake assignments, peer-reviews, revision) instead of teaching writing as a product.

Departing from this perspective, the above blog post was an invitation for college educators to consider that their own writing and their students’ writing are still a product. Colleges and universities are institutions actively participating in the capitalist, settler colonial, genocidal U.S. economy (see for instance Kannan et al.; Bousquet et al.; Hubrig; Kareem from the field of composition studies, but also Wilder, Mahadeo, Bradley, hooks, Ferguson and more from across the disciplines). When students and professors write, their writing is part and parcel of a wider enterprise that culminates with the university’s outputs: cultural and political discourse (CUNY calls it “being at the center of the conversation”), data analysis and policy recommendations (“knowledge as a public good”), as well as a trained workforce for City and State employers (“New Yorkers from all backgrounds with in-demand skills”). 

At a time when CUNY’s claim to serve the people has been shattered by its blood-soaked commitment to stand with Israel’s genocide, I wrote this blog post to ask how our writing fits into that system. Specifically, I considered the possibility that WAC-infused pedagogical spaces with their emphasis on “writing as a process” have obscured the very material effects of our writing and our students’ writings on the world. Nothing new here. Many (Maraj; Kynard; Alexander and Jarratt) have noted how institutionally vetted pedagogical spaces on campus are unconcerned with (and maybe strategically obfuscate) students’ writing because of the fear it might be revolutionary and transform the way we look at, and interpret, the world around us.” To bring it back home: when City Tech students write flyers, banners, and social media posts (and more) in beautiful prose, presenting evidence and with a compelling thesis statement, to call out their administration and demand CUNY divest from settler colonialism and genocide, their writing isn’t featured on the Open Lab website, they are targeted with repression and violent intimidation. 

Writing scholar-administrators like LaGuardia Community College’s Dominique Zino directly locate the project of WAC in the recent history of CUNY, suggesting that this history can inform writing instruction and administration on campus. In the late 1990s, CUNY students faced the brutal force of budget cuts, a scrapping of the Open Admission rule, and increased militarization of the campuses, i.e. reforms of austerity and abandonment targeting the Black and Brown working class student body. Mayor Giuliani and his appointees on the CUNY Board of Trustees led the charge with the racist and classist idea that CUNY was “an institution adrift” and in need of neoliberal transformation. Strategically, they embraced the white moral panic over the decrease in “academic excellence” (also known as “our students can’t write”). To address this fabricated crisis, college instruction was to focus on the “basic skills” of reading and writing. So in 1999, the Board of Trustees mandated that each college “intensify and expand its programmatic efforts to strengthen the teaching of writing in courses across the curriculum.” This was to be done with the assistance of CUNY Writing Fellows, advanced and specifically trained doctoral students that would assist in the development of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum programs on the campuses. 

This terrible origin story requires that we (the CUNY writing fellows in question) think critically about the institutionalization of WAC at CUNY and its implications two decades later. My blog post drew inspiration from composition scholar-teachers like Aja Martinez, Eunjeong Lee, Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan, and Carmen Kynard (the latter three of whom are current/former CUNY faculty and/or writing-program administrators) who have observed how WAC and adjacent programs can function as norm-making spaces at the service of “raising academic standards” through the delineation of acceptable vs. unacceptable writing (the weaponization of writing pedagogy to control students).

This does not mean that teaching and learning writing at CUNY has always been unidimensional and hierarchical. There have been a multitude of counter-hegemonic initiatives to reclaim writing pedagogy from institutional capture. In fact, a call for papers for a 2025 special issue of The WAC Journal noted how WAC at CUNY predates and exceeds its institutional framework. Liberatory and community-oriented writing practices have shaped our institution throughout the 20th century, with CUNY undergraduate students at the forefront (see Zeemont’s The Act of Paper and Okechukwu’s To Fulfil These Rights). Recently, students and faculty have collaborated in shaking up entire WAC programs to make them anti-racist, multilingual, multi-generational, public-facing and accountable to the community (see the transformation of the WAC program at Lehman under the leadership of Vani Kannan). Oftentimes, these initiatives were met with administrative repression (see the recent censorship of the “Globalize the Intifada!” panel at a CUNY WAC conference). Taking inspiration from these efforts, I consider it is imperative that writing pedagogies at CUNY move toward practices that actively stand by the heroic Palestinian and regional resistance, who fight (in the words of CUNY alumna Fatima Mohammed) the “most advanced, immoral and lethal forces of the world.” My blog post was an invitation to locate the work we do at the City Tech WAC program within the ongoing struggles for a liberated Palestine that shape our students’ and colleagues’ lives as writers in and beyond the classroom.

Perceiving Writing As a Process, Not a Product

Supposedly there is a quote by author John Dufresne that goes “the purpose of a first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written”. Unfortunately, as with many historical quotes, I can’t find where or when he said it, but that doesn’t diminish its sensibility. When I came to know this quote, I immediately interpreted it as a type of ‘done is better than perfect’ logic. A (badly) written thesis is still better than the (obviously great) thesis existing solely in my mind, so let’s buckle up, push this draft out, and we can move on to the next writing hurdle. In a sense, it motivated me to produce writing, because a product is better than no product.

I feel that this production perspective on writing was also encouraged by my education. Typically, most courses I took during my bachelor and master’s degree culminated in a term paper where students could demonstrate their mastery of the subject. I say culminated because there wasn’t really a practice built around submitting several drafts. On occasion I was asked to submit an outline first which was supposed to detail the paper’s premise and arguments. This typically resulted in me scrambling a skeleton together, because I didn’t know yet what I was going to write about. Also, which element of the subject one had mastered exactly tended to be open to interpretation, since most term paper assignments were not specific. I recall taking a course one semester that was called International Relations and my term paper discussed Harry Truman dropping the bomb, which seemed to make perfect sense at the time.

Lately, my perspective on writing has changed though and that is due to being a part of the Writing Across the Curriculum fellowship program (WAC) at City Tech. The nice thing about City Tech is that we’re exposed to the WAC pedagogy, mostly via discussing John Bean’s book Engaging Ideas (2011). Bean talks (writes really) a lot about the relationship between writing and critical thinking. The whole premise of the book is that writing is an active learning task, which evokes a high level of critical thinking. Why is it an active learning task? Because writing is simultaneously a process of doing critical thinking and the product that communicates the results of the critical thinking.

This blew my mind. Mainly because I perceived writing as a product alone for years. And, as mentioned above, not just any product but the end product: The written culmination of all my thinking efforts. This view does not acknowledge at all the thinking that goes into the writing. It can essentially be summarized as: Think first, write second. Whereas Bean’s perspective posits: Write first, you’ll think during. Consequently, he takes this philosophy even further: Writing does not only trigger thinking, it strengthens the thinking itself. Though this perspective may be new to me, this feeling is familiar: Being forced to formulate (and justify) my ideas often strengthened the ideas themselves.

So my perspective has shifted from perceiving writing as the end of the thinking, to the process of thinking itself. I think this resonates so much with me because it explains why I had such trouble scrambling a skeleton together in college. At the time I thought I was just a bad student who couldn’t think together an outline, but there were good students out there who could. However, the whole assignment now strikes me as curious. How am I supposed to think together an outline, without any of the writing (thus thinking) having taken place?

Moreover, WAC’s philosophy around critical thinking explains my issues with the lack of focus in term papers. Critical thinking is most evoked by problems (Kurfiss, 1988). Therefore, part of teaching critical thinking is making problems apparent to students. Most term paper assignments I encountered were not problem focused. Most of them didn’t seem to have any focus at all which is how I ended up writing about Truman and the bomb at the end of the International Relations course. I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with that, but I do realize now that unspecific term paper assignments do not evoke critical thinking. Plus, the whole concept behind the term paper seems to foster the perspective of seeing writing as an end product instead of a process.

Therefore, my change in perspective on writing is accompanied with a change in interpretation of Dufresne’s quote. Done is still better than perfect, but the quote no longer encourages writing as a finished product. Instead, it now encourages me to perceive writing as a thinking process. Perhaps I can remind myself best by rephrasing it: “The purpose of a first draft is not to get it right, but to get thinking” (free after supposedly John Dufresne).

Could we flip the fellowship, or Why are we doing this in year 5?

I just started my Writing Across the Curriculum year at City Tech and I love it. I’m getting taught how to teach. Specifically, how I can use writing to promote critical thinking, without the extra grading load. How I can move from a lecture-centered course to an assignment-centered course (Bean, 2011). Thanks to WAC, I’m working towards becoming a “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on the stage” I’ve apparently been (Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991).

Although I’m grateful (very grateful), I wonder, why now? I’ve been teaching at CUNY for four years. Until now, I received zero formal pedagogical training. Instead, I was sent two example syllabi and that was it. To infinity and the wolves. No one wants to disappoint, so four years later my “pedagogy” consists of a grassroots hodgepodge involving many conversations with colleagues, self-organized workshops, Teaching and Learning Center support etc. My inner socialist points out now that much of this training went unpaid because it came out of my own initiative and, therefore, my own time but in any case: Can’t we do it differently?

Of course, we can. No one thinks that training teachers how to teach is a bad idea. But, the struggle is in the implementation. Initially, I thought that WAC was a great contender to provide this much needed pedagogical background. All we have to do is move WAC from year 5 to year 1 and – poof – future teachers don’t have to self-scramble pedagogical skills. A central issue with this idea is the variation within WAC program execution. Each campus has defined their own set of goals when filling out the WAC Fellowship. Therefore, although my fellowship has a pedagogical focus, this may not be the case for other positions. This variation is detrimental to the goal: Training teachers to teach and the solution being moving WAC.

So if not WAC what then? There is the Teaching and Learning Center. Apart from individual consultations they offer all kinds of workshops. Although I have personally benefited from the support the TLC offers, relying on them to provide the necessary teaching background is naive. Graduate students would have to add this search for pedagogical self-improvement on top of their other responsibilities. Plus, I expect the occasional workshop won’t do the trick. But, the TLC also offers an entire course on pedagogy to graduate students. This course is also worth zero credits. Nonetheless, had I known about this I might’ve actually considered taking it – thinking back about all the hours I spent just figuring it out – and that’s how this problem persists.

The problem being: Although everyone agrees that providing pedagogy 101 to future teachers is a good idea, it’s not a priority such that implementation of this idea has been successful. The thought of shifting WAC has been expressed before. Most recently, one of my fellow CityTech Fellows mentioned it in our WAC WhatsApp group (specifically: “also, this bean book is great! i wish i had it when i was actually teaching”). More formally, this thought is expressed in a ten-year review of the WAC program at CUNY: “… there is a greater need for professional development of Enhanced CUNY Fellows prior to their fifth year of the fellowship” (Aries, 2010:26). The review was published ten years ago, yet here I am, doing WAC in my fifth year.

Similarly, although the Teaching and Learning Center has been lobbying for a required, credited course on pedagogy (keywords underlined), they didn’t get that far. Some of the push-back is coming from PhD programs themselves, not wanting to give up a program course in exchange for the one on pedagogy. So, although I don’t criticize or invalidate the TLC’s work, they are currently yet another helpful resource graduate students have to go out and locate.

There’s a compelling tragedy in a problem that everyone agrees is important, but nevertheless persists. I don’t have a solution either other than raising it every so often, like in this blog-post. Hopefully, we make some moves by continuing the discussion. I know that there were plans to reevaluate WAC again before COVID hit. Also, the TLC itself is a relative new resource and their Summer Institute and the zero-credit course are all steps in the right direction. No one thinks training teachers is a bad idea, but until we hash this out, we clearly think it’s an acceptable idea to send unprepared teachers into the classroom.

Aries, N. (2010). Writing Across the Curriculum at CUNY: A Ten-Year Review. City University of New York. https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/about/administration/offices/undergraduate-studies/wac/WAC10YearReportJune2010.pdf

Bean, J. C. (2011). Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. John Wiley & Sons.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., and Smith, K.A. (1991). Cooperative Learning: Increasing College Faculty Instructional Productivity. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 4. Washington, D.C.: George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.

 

Utilizing WAC Pedagogy to Support Your Professional Development

Learn and Lead

Faculty introduced to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) principles often note how implementing WAC practices may support their students’ academic development.

What teachers may not immediately realize is that WAC pedagogy can also support their own professional development in the following ways:

  1. Be More Productive

In their article Enhancing Pedagogical Productivity, Walvoort and Pool (1998) discuss how implementing WAC techniques can reduce costs in relation to outcomes. The authors argue that by varying the modes of content delivery (e.g., journal writing, group activities, and peer review), faculty can free up time previously devoted to delivering class content through lecture. Additionally, by designing scaffolded assignments and implementing WAC best-practices for grading, faculty can further free up time while improving learning outcomes. By becoming more pedagogically productive, faculty can devote more time to research, publications and other important aspects of their professional development.

  1. Expand Your Research and Publications

In conjunction to freeing up time to devote to research and writing, your experiences with WAC pedagogy can itself be the focus of your research and writing. You could examine several outcomes related to implementing WAC practices, including student interest in class topics, pass/fail rates, exam grades, writing quality, etc.

Several journals are devoted specifically to WAC pedagogy. For example:

  • Writing Across the Curriculum
  • Language connections: Writing and reading across the curriculum
  • Language and Learning Across the Disciplines

Other journals that publish WAC-related research:

  • American journal of Education
  • Assessing Writing
  • College Teaching
  • Research in the Teaching of English
  • Communication Education
  1. Be a Stronger Collaborator

Faculty often collaborate with their colleagues on projects. In the same way that WAC principles help improve student critical thinking and writing skills, applying these principles to your own work can have the same effect. For example, you may realize that it’s helpful to scaffold your own group projects, with due dates for outlines, drafts and peer reviews. Further, your feedback to collaborators may improve when you focus on higher order concerns and provide forward-looking feedback, without copy-editing your colleagues’ work.

  1. Improve Your Teacher Evaluations

Improved teaching performance is related to a teacher’s sense of satisfaction and commitment to teaching (Hughes, 2006; Peterson and White, 1992). Research further supports that student achievement is closely tied to the quality and training of the teacher (Darling-Hammond, 2000). By completing WAC training and implementing WAC pedagogy, teachers are better prepared and often increase their performance and sense of satisfaction, which in turn translates to more positive evaluations from both colleagues and students.

For example, one study by Blakeslee, Hayes and Young (1994) provides support that faculty who participated in WAC training differed significantly from non-participating faculty on attitude and teaching behavior. Specifically, participating faculty were more likely to view writing as a means for learning rather than testing, developed stronger writing assignments, and spent significantly more time answering student questions.

Positive teacher evaluations are associated with several professional development factors, including increased publication record and improved job opportunities (Feldman, 1987).

 

References

Blakeslee, A., Hayes, J., & Young, R. (1994). Evaluating training workshops in a writing across the curriculum program: method and analysis. Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, 1(2), 5-34.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement. Education policy analysis archives, 8, 1.

Feldman, K. A. (1987). Research productivity and scholarly accomplishment of college teachers as related to their instructional effectiveness: A review and exploration. Research in higher education, 26(3), 227-298.

Hughes, V. M. (2006). Teacher evaluation practices and teacher job satisfaction (Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri–Columbia).

Walvoord, B. E., & Pool, K. J. (1998). Enhancing pedagogical productivity. New Directions for Higher Education, 1998(103), 35-48.