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After reading the lesson plan, please refer to the bottom of the lesson plan for self-reflection questions to assist with your next steps!
Short Lesson Plan
Students will be able to:
Write effectively across multiple rhetorical contexts related to real-world sustainability issues, engage with complex and contested âwicked questionsâ that resist easy answers, and think critically about the nuances of negotiating a more sustainable world with others. Students will practice writing in the varied and difficult contexts around real-world sustainability issues. Students will reach these goals by working through varied readings, activities, and sub-questions scaffolded around a central sustainability theme.
Rationale and Context
Writing courses centered on sustainability offer a powerful opportunity to engage students from a wide range of disciplines. By anchoring a course in a single compelling âwicked question,â one that is complex, contested, and unresolved, instructors can motivate students, foster interdisciplinary thinking, and make writing feel purposeful and relevant.
This lesson plan template is designed to help instructors identify and develop their own big question. It encourages reflection on how others have approached sustainability-focused writing courses, and offers a framework for generating sub-questions, selecting readings, and designing activities that support student writing across multiple rhetorical contexts.
Learning Objectives & Goals
Primary Objective: Instructors will be able to choose a "big question" or focus for a writing class that incorporates complex and varied sustainability issues.
Reflective Practice: Instructors will reflect on big questions used by others and experiment with sub-questions and multi-disciplinary approaches to assess their options.
Purpose: To motivate students, practice the importance of writing across multiple contexts, and encourage complex thinking regarding sustainability.
Further Development (Next Steps for Instructors)
After a primary "wicked" question is chosen, faculty will need to develop a comprehensive syllabus of readings, activities, and support materials for their courses (see the example syllabus in the attached files).
Resources
Instructor Biography
Matthew Newcomb teaches rhetoric, writing, and literary theory at SUNY New Paltz, with a focus on argument, environmental writing, and science writing. He is a Sustainability Faculty Fellow and former writing program administrator.
Selected Publications:
Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities: Bridging the Rhetoric Gap (Routledge, 2023).
âHurricane Styleâ in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2020).
âFire Insurance: Evangelical Environmental Escapismâ in ISLE (2018).
âSustainability as a Design Principle for Compositionâ in CCC (2012).
SELF- REFLECTION: INVITATION FOR EDUCATORS:
1) Finding your âwicked questionâ
- What sustainability issue do you find yourself returning to even outside of work? Could that unresolved tension become the anchor for a course?
- Have you ever tried to write your way through a hard problem? What did that process teach you that you could not have learned just by reading or discussing it?
- What is the difference between a question that is merely complicated and one that is truly âwicked?â How do you explain that distinction?
2) Writing as a tool
- When you assign writing, are you primarily thinking about what students will produce, or about what they will work through in the process. How might shifting that emphasis change your prompts
- What kinds of writing do your students do outside your classroom? How might those rhetorical contexts be brought into conversation with more formal academic writing?
- Do your current assignments ask students to write for someone? Where could a real or imagined audience make the stakes feel more genuine?
3) Sustainability across disciplines
- Which disciplines outside your own do you feel at least equipped to bring into a sustainability conversation? What is one small step toward bridging that gapâa reading, guest speaker, a co-taught unit?
- Your students arrive from wildly different majors and backgrounds. How might a shared âwicked questionâ surface unexpected expertise in the room, and how could you design space for that to happen?
- How does sustainability show up in the form of your course, not just the content? Are there ways your syllabus, pacing, or workload could itself model more sustainable practices?