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Weekly Module 
- Module 10: The coded gaze
- Module 9: Let’s chat abt ChatGPT
- Module 8: Mid semester “Work In Progress”
- Module 7: Writing as an equation
- Module 6: What even is writing for engineering?
- Module 5: A detour
- Module 4: Crafting new worlds
- Module 3: Who benefits from science
- Module 2: Science is probably not neutral.
- Module 1: Asynchronous Welcome!
Module 10: The coded gaze
Hi! Hello!
It’s so funny, I talk so much about access and being kind to yourself and yet I feel this innate urge to apologize for being unavailable last week. So I guess I will say I’m sorry because I do really care about your learning space and I hope that comes through. I think that it does. But this semester, like most or all semesters I would argue, is untenable because the conditions that we’re expected to perform under are unrealistic for any bodymind (bodymind is a Disability justice term). So for any bodymind that is looking to have any amount of joy for the time that we’re here on this planet earth — yeah, it’s rough out here people. I apologize for the rant, I can’t help myself. I also don’t understand why we’re expected to be productive constantly. But that is another byproduct of white supremacy culture. So. All the more reason to flip the script.
Please DM me if you need any support or feel lost or just want to say hello. I’m here for you and hope this asynchronous space can still feel human.
Let’s jump back into thinking critically about the fields inside engineering and the sciences. This goes for everyone, but especially for Computer Science majors — have you considered the ways in which your field has bias? the ways your field has a profound impact on how society is shaped?
I’m not sure if these questions are being raised in your other courses (I hope they are! Tell me if they are!) and since we’re considering both rhetoric and composition, these questions must be taken into account.
For this week, I would like you to watch this 13 minute talk by Dr. Joy Buolamwini about facial recognition and the effects when the sample set skews white and male.
For the module comment, I would like you to consider the following:
Take note of 2-3 rhetorical issues Dr. Buolamwini raises that speak to you. For me, it was her reframing of the “under-sampled majority” as a way to think about who is represented in most technological spaces and who is erased. So often we say “minority” when speaking about the people of the global majority who are not white and that set standard creates an intentional bias which has real implications (think policing, thinking community funding, think incarceration rates).
Have you ever considered algorithmic bias when using your devices?
What are some ways we can shift the dominant data set?
If you have an experience of algorithmic bias that you want to share, I welcome it in this space but it is not required.
Thanks everyone for staying engaged and enjoy the rest of your week!
Module 9: Let’s chat abt ChatGPT
Hey everyone! I hope you had a great break and were able to get some rest and rejuvenation. We don’t have much longer in the semester so I am going to try and provide you with as much applicable content as I can, so that you leave feeling like you’ve gotten something from this course!
Cool, so. ChatGPT, the enemy of English professors and probably all professors everywhere, right? I actually think the premise of ChatGPT is great and if it’s a useful tool for you to get started in the writing process, then I fully support it.
But, if you haven’t already realized, it has the potential to create a sophisticated word salad that doesn’t have much meaning underneath what it writes. I guess all of this is to say that if you are going to use it, make sure you can back up your claims with real research (like what we’ve been doing in arxiv).
https://www.pbs.org/video/can-computers-really-talk-or-are-they-faking-it-xk7etc/
I also love this video from 2021 that explains how ChatGPT works (in case you don’t already know). TL:DR version is that it puts sentences together based on statistical analysis, not word comprehension.
For this week, please watch the video and then I want you to find give me three examples where you find errors in ChatGPT’s response. Let us know what the original prompt was and then show where it veers off course.
Let’s not forget that behind every tech advancement, there’s a human pulling the puppet strings! Oh and if you disagree with me on ChatGPT, put that in the comments too. I would love to hear varying opinions.
Thanks everyone!
Module 8: Mid semester “Work In Progress”
Okay let’s do this! We’re about halfway through the semester and I want to make sure you all have ample opportunity to practice writing in genres you’ll be asked to do in different classes.
This Work In Progress is meant to be messy. It’s meant to be like a draft, my interest is not in the finished product. This assignment is two-fold; I really want to redefine writing and shift away from the polished text-centric document that most of your professors expect and call “writing” to something that is more fluid and acknowledges all the points of labor that it takes for you to create that final submission piece. And of course the second part of this is just practicing the act of writing because we build fluency with practice.
And to quote Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs “But I am not outside this process. I am inside these repeatable practices. I am becoming something else. We are becoming something else. Which is why we need a ceremony.”
Consider this assignment a ceremony, a way to get to know yourself better. In Composition and Rhetoric we call it metacognition, being able to identify what you know.
This best done in Google Docs if you can, or any word processor that will allow you to add notes to what you’ve written. The content for this assignment will come again from an academic article of your choice. You can either use the article you already looked up on arxiv or pick a new one. I want you to then choose a section to “write” that you want to practice. Maybe you’ve been struggling with the Methods section on your lab reports and you want some practice with writing that segment. Try using the moves and steps that we have already checked out.
The metacognition part is that I want you to then make margin notes about places you’re struggling, or places that are you’re finding easy to write. Do you get into a flow? Does it all feel like pulling teeth? Where is it in your body? Are your shoulders tense? Are you remembering to breathe? We’re collecting data on your process that you will then have as something to look back to for your own personal reference.
Our ceremony is learning ourselves so that we can enter these academic spaces with more personal information that allows us to feel grounded regardless of what assignment comes your way.
Module 7: Writing as an equation
Hey everyone!
How are you? I guess we’re sort of half way through the semester? Next week I’ll introduce our mid semester project (spoiler: it will be low stakes and more writing practice). Now that we’ve thought about the broad strokes of writing and a bit about research, I want to get granular.
I asked you to watch a few videos from Craft of Scientific Writing. I think it’s a decent source to check out if you want to continue practicing specific parts of writing scientific articles, and I would recommend book marking it as something to go back to when you have to write different documents in other classes.
Now to the details of writing for in this technical genre. Did you know that it is common practice to mimic writing styles in academia? We mimic what people have done before us and change the content. Academics rarely write from scratch. This is a helpful tool! We can use a formula to make the writing easier.
For most scientific documents, we use a sentence formula that is not dissimilar to a math equation. These formulas are constructed through a system of “moves” and “steps”.
Dr. Budsaba Kanoksilapatham created a worksheet that shows the different moves and steps in a typical academic research paper. Each “move” is the information you’re trying to claim/establish and each “step” is how to support the move. The PDF is attached below. Dr. Kanoksilapatham shows the various moves and steps for the Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion section of a journal article. We can even pause for a second and think about how most articles even follow the same formatting convention (as a clue to support my statement that academics are rarely writing from scratch and instead repurposing much of what has already been written).
For this week, I would like you to return to https://arxiv.org/ and find an article where you can identify the different moves and steps within the document. Identify and highlight the various sentences that are in the IMRD worksheet. You can do the analysis on any one of the four sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, or Discussion – just make sure the article you choose has a good example of one of the sections. A pro tip (and I had a student a couple of semesters back do this): she was having some challenges in her chemistry labs with the discussion section of her reports, so she decided to use this assignment as a way to really peel back the layers of the discussion section and figure out how to write it.
My hope is that by demystifying the code of how these scientific articles are written, you’ll be able to access the act of writing with a bit more ease.
That’s all for now! Next week we’ll get back on track working towards collective liberation.
Module 6: What even is writing for engineering?
Hey everyone!
As always, thank you for both your thoughtful responses and patience!
I want to consider this idea of “writing for engineering” since it’s the title of this course and what most of you are hoping to learn about this semester.
The concept of “writing for engineering” that this course is modeled after is really built around the needs of engineering students in an academic setting. Lab reports, technical descriptions, all of these genres (think forms or formulas) of writing are important to further your student career but not so applicable once you leave academia. I can say this now that I’m solidly in the tech space and working with engineers every day.
So I want to proceed in a way that allows you to practice writing conventions you’ll have to do in your classes and then we’ll focus on figuring out the writing that actually happens out in the real world in your field.
For this week we’ll focus on the foundations of technical academic writing so you can transfer what you learn here to your other courses.
I am here to show you tips and tricks for how to write within this very niche genre (genre is a category) of technical writing. As we get further into this section of the course, I am going to show you how to write research sentences like equations.
But first we have to look at the basics and zoom out a bit on the rhetorical (art of persuasive speaking or writing by focusing on audience) structures of writing for engineering.
Penn State has a technical writing program and they have put out a decent set of short videos (link in transcript) that break down the process of technical and science writing. I want you to finish this semester and have some baseline understanding of the writing expectations in your field.
For this week I want you to check out the following videos:
Introduction: Importance of Writing of Engineers and Scientists (2min) → It gives an example of types of writing you might encounter in your fields
Analyzing Purpose → you should listen to the breathy professor because he explains rhetorical design choices in different writing forms that you will see in your courses and might be asked to write within.
Analyzing Occasion → the student starts to break down different language and formatting conventions that you will find in engineering documents. Please know that these are not “better” than other types of writing, but they are the formats used for technical writing.
Once you’ve checked out the videos, please search arxiv, an open-access archive for scholarly articles, and find an article in your field that has some of the conventions mentioned in these videos (you might not find all, you might find more), then pick a few pages and digitally write in the margins what you’re seeing. I’ll share a student example I have from last semester on Slack. Also if this is confusing, message me and I’ll try to explain myself better.
Okay, that’s all I have for now! I’m looking forward to seeing what you all come up with!
(student example below)
Module 5: A detour
We’re heading into a bit of a detour. My plan was to start covering the specifics of what we’re calling “writing for engineering” this week, but I actually want to hear from you all first about your wants/needs/desires from this course.
I preach a lot about student agency and I now I feel like I haven’t meaningfully checked in on you. I guess better late than never, and I’m sorry I didn’t do this sooner.
Academia is a funny place. We’re socialized to believe that we need academia more than it needs us. And what arises from this untruth, is that students are often forced to endure whatever structures are put in place to protect the institution (not the student).
So here’s the exercise: you are the consumer of your education — you’re most likely paying to be here, and even if a lot of it is covered, you’re spending your time within this system in order to receive a product (transferable skills and a degree?).
- What would you like to takeaway from this course (transferable skill) by the end of this semester?
- What learning systems have worked for you in the past and what has been the outcome of those experiences?
- What learning systems do not work for you and you do not want to see replicated here (or anywhere)?
I was going to do this as a survey but I think it might be powerful to have all of our ideas together in one place. I bet there will be common themes. Hopefully based on your responses, I can better tailor the rest of the course to your needs. Professor Chris Emdin does cogenerative dialogues in K-12 science classrooms to shift the balance of power away from being solely in the hands of the teacher, so this is a bit of a riff on that.
We’ll dive into “writing for engineering” next week and start practicing different conventions within your respective fields.
Thanks everyone!!
Module 4: Crafting new worlds
Hi everyone!
Your responses have been so engaging, thank you! For anyone who might have missed a module so far, take a moment to check out your classmates responses, I think it will help situate you in the conversation.
I like to start the semester with Science Under the Scope, because I think it unveils the reality in how our environments (not just natural, think social systems too) shape our reality. There might be certain truths we think are irrefutable (tbh I even challenge 1+1 = 2 because doesn’t 2 also signify a third, new thing?) but there is no way to separate our humanness and biases from the science we do, no matter how hard we try. I’ll keep offering examples through the rest of the semester.
So, what if instead of proclaiming neutrality, we embraced our subjectivity and crafted a new world entirely? As Wang alludes to, capitalism and whiteness will always be extractive and create unbalanced hierarchies; that is their function. Is there a way for people to experience abundance outside of these systems? What if we put our energies into crafting that type of world? There are people already working towards a world outside these rotting constructs. We can look to Black women and femmes who have been sharing with us Afrofuturistic dreams forever.
In Octavia Butler’s science fiction, there is room for disabled Black femmes, they are often the heroines. This isn’t a literature course, but I highly recommend reading any of Butler’s post-apocalyptic work where the systems that were in place failed and it’s up to the true innovators to create something new.
Okay maybe that was a bit of a tangent from our text, but it’s all connected. I had a friend come over for dinner a few weeks ago, they’re a designer, and they challenged me to think about how much my life is impacted by other people’s decisions. They said “look at your phone, Steve Jobs and his team designed that, what would you have done it differently?” The School of Poetic Computation (link) states that “poetic computation is a relational practice organized around communal study” and lecturer Olivia McKayla Ross poses the question: “what if software was made by people who love us?”
For this week, let’s finish up Science Under the Scope sections nine, ten, and eleven. And please respond to any two of the questions I posed to you in this module (lol I posed a lot). I want to hear from you!
Next week we’ll change gears a bit and look at some writing in the field of engineering so that we can practice the form.
Thanks everyone!
Module 3: Who benefits from science
Hey everyone! I’m loving all of your thoughtful responses to these sections. It’s great to see you take some time and sort of chew on these ideas about neutrality and objectivity. I’m sure plenty of professionals in your respective fields never do this deep dig, it’s provocative af! and forces us to really take into consideration how the work we do impacts the world around us (ick! feelings!)
I was planning on finishing up Science Under the Scope, but I think we can break it up between this week and next week just to really take our time. There’s no rush! we have nowhere to get to! Urgency is a trait of ableist white supremacy culture (bonus personal growth points if you have a moment to check out the link), it perpetuates the myth that we need to be productive to be valuable, that we need to be doing labor to have value. Fuck that noise.
We will take our time, let’s let this all marinate.
Segments eight, nine and ten of Science Under The Scope dive deeper into the real world impacts of uneven resource distribution and how that siphoning of resources by the overly resourced (usually white people) will intentionally minoritize other people and keep hold of power. Wang shows us this through breaking down “who benefits” from science industry funding. This is not the science we think about when we’re dissecting frogs (do the youth even still do that? I’m old and I still remember those little frog organs omg).
The example Wang gives is the difference between scientific research funding for cystic fibrosis (which predominantly affects white people) and sickle cell anemia (predominantly affects Black people).
How does this under representation happen? “The reason the answer to all of these questions is kind of the same – (middle class folks, white folks, folks with access to science ed, folks who see themselves represented in science, by science, as scientists) – is not by chance or some inherent factor of culture or biology. The reason is because our world’s histories of injustice, oppression, marginalization, and white supremacy have created this segmentation, this privilege.”
And so when we start to think about the intentional and systemic oppression of non-white people by white people and people who uphold white supremacist ideals, it becomes clearer how scientific research and data skews to favor a specific group.
For this week, please read eight, nine, and ten, and share two or three areas of research or technological development that might have bias towards people in power. Extra points if you can find something like this in your field (we’ll be doing writing project later this semester, you might want to use the content you find now).
Thanks everyone! Next module we’ll finish up Science Under the Scope. Have a great week!
Module 2: Science is probably not neutral.
Hey everyone!
Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments on the first module. It seems like you enjoyed the first three sections of Science Under The Scope. Before we jump into the content of the text, I want to mention why I chose it. This course is a “writing composition” class so we get a chance to consider different forms of “writing”. Most of my students think that writing is the five paragraph argument essay they had to do in high school, but it’s so much more! I love this graphic text because it shows how something “non-traditional” can advance critical science discourse. Remember that there are always ways to communicate beyond the written word! I’ll talk more about this throughout the course, I just wanted to point it out for anyone who’s been into comics or coding and thought those genres weren’t writing.
I want to consider this statement at the top of the third section “the biggest danger of objectivity is that it allows us to pretend that science is entirely neutral” → this fixation on “objectivity” is a way to distract us from the reality that nothing is neutral because no science is created in a vacuum. But let’s sit with this for a second, because I feel like students frequently get uncomfortable pushing up against the myth of neutrality. What does it mean for you that science needs to be neutral? How does it challenge your understanding of the field if it turns out the science is biased? Does it make you uncomfortable? (spoiler, it’s okay if the answer is yes, it made me uncomfortable the first time I realized it).
Now let’s tie this into writing composition: the same hypothesis holds true – most research journal articles that contain this “objective” research are crafted in a genre (specific format) meant to elicit authority (voice). “The information contained here is important because we said so (that’s rhetoric!).” The way facts are displayed is deliberate and makes it difficult to refute (intentionally, again rhetoric). So what does it mean if a journal article looked more like this text that we’re reading and contained critique of the existing systems that are in place?
For this week, please continue to read Science Under the Scope. I’d like you to get through section four, five, six, and seven and then consider: who didn’t go into science because of one or more structural barriers and what impact does that have on how we currently perceive scientific accomplishments? Throw your ideas in the comments section please!
Module 1: Asynchronous Welcome!
Welcome to our course site! I’ll introduce myself again for anyone who missed it — my name is Andréa, I use she/her pronouns and I’m so excited to be with you this semester.
This course will be a model for what is possible when care and love for students is centered instead of the directives from a non-living (usually harmful) academic entity. This Writing for Engineering course will explore topics within the field of engineering that center Black, Disabled, and queer voices. We will challenge the concept of neutrality in science, read from a graphic textbook, and practice writing through blog responses. If you’re enrolled, you get an A. Grades are surveillance systems set up to police students with no proof of positively impacting learning outcomes (article attached if you want to challenge other professors’ policies).
We are listed as an online course, so we will be meeting asynchronously for the rest of the semester. This means that each week I will post a module, and the hope is that you’re able to engage with the module (comment, send me a message, read the section I offer) within a week’s time.
On the homepage of the course site, I try to explain how this course will run, so poke around and most questions about what will be asked of you this semester, should be revealed. If you have other questions, please send me a Slack DM, I respond there the fastest.
A little more about me: I’m Autistic, a professor and a PhD student at the Graduate Center, have two little little kids, and work a full time job in tech as a UX Researcher for Sony Music Entertainment. I’m an abolitionist and I’m very excited to see how you all rebuild this world into something beautiful.
For this first week, tell me about yourself. Who are you? How did you end up at CCNY? Do you need me to help you start an uprising in any of your other classes? It can even be a 30 second video if you want, I’d love to see you face. You can send this to me as a DM on Slack.
Lastly, please read these first three sections (links: one, two, three) of Science Under the Scope. It’s a graphic text, so it should take about 15 mins to read. And answer this question in the comments section of this post: when were you taught that science was objective? and after reading these first sections, what do you think?
