Common Description: Writing Boston is a writing-intensive course that utilizes Boston as a theme to teach basic writing skills. Through engagement with readings about the City, this course develops students’ writing, critical analysis, and information literacy skills. The course centers assignments that require observing, reflecting, drafting, and rewriting. Through active inquiry tied to readings about the City and writing assignments tied to research and proper use of technological tools (including AI), students develop basic information literacy and college-level writing skills. Below is a list of descriptions of all of the sections of WRI 101: Writing Boston. Please note that not all sections are offered every term. Refer to Workday for the most up-to-date course listing information.
Writing Boston: Athens of America
This writing course will focus on exploring Boston as a model for America. The course’s title is a reference to Boston’s self-described role in American society. As America’s Athens, Boston’s politics were central to the formation of the United States itself. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, in fact, served as a model for the U.S. Constitution of 1789. And the mode of United States economic development also followed in the footsteps of Boston: extensive international trade, later paired with intensive industry inland. Like Athens, Boston became a cultural hub, and, like Athens, it developed an elite-run political system characterized by inequality.
Writing Boston: Apartheid Schooling
This writing course encourages students to develop a critical perspective on Boston’s history of struggle against educational inequality and residential segregation. We will contextualize Boston’s policy approaches to educational desegregation—including busing and the Metco program—within national patterns of residential segregation, educational resegregation, and the testing, accountability, and charter school movements. To gain a perspective on residential segregation within Greater Boston, we will examine the history of Urban Renewal efforts in Boston and community resistance to it.
Writing Boston: Boston Childhoods
This writing course considers the ways Boston-set literature imagines the real lives and concerns of young people in the City. By reading and writing about childhood experiences, we’ll investigate how art imitates life, and vice versa. Along the way, you’ll learn how to compose a college paper and assist others in the act of writing. Here, we emphasize the skills of analysis, argument and—especially— revision as we practice writing with intention for a college audience.
Writing Boston: Boston and Climate Change
This writing course explores the relationship between the Boston economy and the global climate change problem. Specifically, we will learn about current initiatives undertaken by the city to build its climate resilience and strategies that the city can implement, and choices Bostonians can make to mitigate the adverse effects of the city on its environment and future. The various writing assignments will help students to develop their written communication skills and demonstrate their understanding of the central theme of this course, Boston’s role in the global climate change problem.
Writing Boston: Boston’s Neighborhoods
This writing course invites students to look beyond the tourist attractions and media portrayals of Boston and to consider life in the neighborhoods in which the majority of Bostonians live. Students will visit, research, and get to know one of Boston’s neighborhoods: its people, its geography, its public spaces, its businesses, its assets, and its challenges.
Writing Boston: City as Text
This writing course will consider the City as a text itself and explore the cultural politics, landscape, and environment that make up the human geography of Boston. Through various readings and writing projects that will hone skills students can draw on in future classes, we’ll use the City as inspiration for inquiry and consider what makes Boston such a unique place to live and learn.
Writing Boston: Food is Love
This writing course explores themes of food, culture, and identity through active reading, discussion, and writing. Food is inextricably linked to culture and identity, and reflects many aspects of who we are and where we live. This course emphasizes the role of food in the development of personal and community identity, highlighting aspects of Boston’s local food system and journeys of Boston immigrant populations spanning the city’s history. Students are encouraged to practice skillful, responsible, and authentic writing to cultivate confidence and growth as writers.
Writing Boston: Nature in Boston
This writing course will explore the role nature plays in our lives and show how Boston has managed its natural resources and what challenges still lie ahead. Through multiple writing assignments, students will look at the science behind nature conservancy and critically evaluate the projects Boston and the larger eastern Massachusetts area have taken to preserve ecosystems and slow climate change.
Writing Boston: Navigating News in the Hub
This writing course aims to introduce students to Boston’s history of news as well as its current state. We’ll discuss news literacy by discussing sources, credibility, and the practices of journalism by looking at news broadcasts (TV and radio), print, digital, and social media. We are going to discuss and practice skills to write authentically, ethically, and professionally. Through our writing we’ll reflect and analyze the relationship between news, audience, and society.
Writing Boston: Sci-Fi and Ethics (3+2 Dual Degree Engineering and 3+1 Computer Science + Library and Information Science only)
This writing course will explore the future of robotics and artificial intelligence through science fiction. These sci-fi writings contain reflections on various societal scenarios discussed from an ethical and human emotional standpoint. Using these readings, we will explore societal outcomes and ethical dilemmas that may arise from technological advances currently in progress in Boston.