Writing Process Reflection for the Dorothy Dow Project

As an educator, I use digital technology constantly. I use it in my teaching, I use it

in my planning and curriculum design, and I use it in my professional development. I

pride myself on the “figure-it-out” mentality that has allowed me to continually improve

my skills with digital technology over the course of my teaching career, and I am always

interested in finding new ways to make digital technology help my instruction or the

instruction of others. At my school, I’ve had the opportunity to lead several professional

development workshops on designing and effectively using classroom websites, and I am

always exploring new platforms for web design that would best suit my needs as an

educator. All that being said, when Dr. Gross introduced the idea of creating scholarly

websites as an option for our final project for his class, I immediately knew that was the

route I wanted to take. Throughout the course, we examined many examples of student

and professional scholarly websites that, while excellent in terms of content, I found

either difficult to actually use or aesthetically underwhelming. On a professional level, I

found this best exemplified by the Victorian Web, a website that hosts an absolute

treasure trove of valuable scholarship in a format that is clunky, confusing, and outdated.

While I knew that of course my actual research was my first priority, I also wanted to

ensure that my final project effectively harnessed the aesthetic power of digital tools

readily available, and I wanted to organize it so that it would be a clear and useful

resource. In short, I wanted it to be a resource I would want to use.

As I discussed in my reflective statement, my work on this project was some of

the most challenging and fulfilling research I completed at DePaul. As I approached

revision on this project, I first considered my purpose and audience. Dr. Gross and I had

discussed this question throughout my process: was my work an effort to bring critical

attention to the merit of Dow’s work, or was it a resource for teachers and students who

wanted to expand their exposure to Jazz Age poets and poetry? In revision, I decided that

my work would be most suitable as tool for teachers and students. Although making a

case for Dow as poet worthy of critical attention would be an exciting task, I did not feel

well versed enough in the poetry of her contemporaries to be able to persuasively argue

that case. While I did read Master’s Spoon River Anthology and several books of Edna St.

Vincent Millay’s poetry while working on this project, I feel like I would need at least a

year of devoted reading and research in order to make my case to the caliber I would

want it to be. In considering Dow’s poetry from a teacher’s perspective, however, I was

confident in my expertise.

In its original stage, several elements of the website were included primarily to

satisfy course requirements, such as the process essay I wrote for Dr. Gross’ class. These

elements I either retooled or eliminated in order to make the website a stand-alone entity;

for example, the elements of my process essay that survived now exist as part of my

introduction to the site in an essay called “Why Dorothy? Creating the Dorothy Dow

Project.” Based on some of my feedback from Professor Gross, this essay now includes

critical discussion of several of Dow’s poems in addition to further discussion of why her

work is relevant to teachers and students. I added an entirely new page of teaching

resources curated from my research into web resources for teaching about the Jazz age,

and I added substantially to my page specifically on teaching Dow’s poetry. I am quite

happy with my sample lesson for teaching Dow’s poem “Cabaret,” which requires

students to engage in active reading, discussion about the poem, analytical writing, and

creative writing. Finally, I carefully reviewed each page on the website, adding additional

context and analysis where needed, and reorganized the order of the pages for added

clarity.