Welcome to my site of perpetual tinkering. I am forever trying to design a better, more purposeful course for freshman composition. While you’ll find a lot of basics here, you’ll also find the poetry, artwork, and historical framing I use to help my students expand their understanding of literacy’s place in their lives. I believe that to teach writing is to teach thinking and that the best teaching materials foreground this fact. Writing isn’t an empty medium for communicating preexisting thoughts; it has a power of its own. I aim to connect students with that power, encouraging them to write for discovery, for learning, for meaning-creation, and for identity-formation, while building their understanding of how discourse shapes our world. Doing all this within fourteen short weeks requires flexibility and a selection of material to draw from. Here is where I host the resources I’m currently using or considering as raw material, in the hopes that other instructors might benefit from my work. I will continue to curate this site as my experience and knowledge increase, but I hope to keep it small and manageable and adaptable for classrooms beyond those I teach in at CUNY. If you have suggestions or tips you’d like to share, please contact me at my personal email address: nicole.walker@gmail.com. To see more artwork by Jimmy Stewart, the illustrator and graphic designer who drew the beautiful images on the home page, check out @jimmystewartart.