This site contains projects from First Year Writing courses at DePaul University, in which we explore some of the changing literacy practices associated with reading and writing, using the New York Times — in both print and digital platforms — as our primary text.
We began in the Winter Quarter 2013 with inquiry projects that asked students to take a position on whether we should be reading the New York Times in print or in digital formats. In that course, we depended on individual preferences, observations, experiences, and speculations—no secondary-source research was required.
The next quarter, Spring 2013, we picked up where the previous class left off (with seven returning students), and we researched a wide range of secondary sources from several disciplines to help support the claims people wanted to make about these kinds of emerging literacy practices.