Reflection: Edition Project
Margo Kolenda-Mason, University of Central Arkansas
Class materials
The ethos of many women writers courses, especially those focused on the premodern period, tends to be one of discovery. Students are introduced to voices that they’ve never heard before and become aware of a new version of history that is more expansive than they have often assumed it to be. Such an experience can be thrilling, but it can also be destabilizing. I designed this editing project to align with both feelings, allowing students to try something outside of the standard essay form as a way of generating knowledge while also building up their authority and agency.
The Course:
I implemented two versions of this assignment in Fall 2025, one for a First-Year Seminar called “Reading Renaissance Women,” which enrolled 45 students across 2 sections, and one for English MA students in a seminar class titled “Early Women Writers.” This was my first time teaching a course centered on women writers, and designing this for two opposite ends of my teaching spectrum allowed me to test out a number of things.
At UCA, our FYS courses are attached to Living Learning Communities, but in practice only about half of my students were in the associated communities (one for Women in Public Health, the other for those interested in Arts & Humanities courses). Still, this does ensure a fair degree of buy-in even though students have a wide array of majors and interests. These courses have two goals. One is to acclimate students to college, and a fair amount of time is spent introducing UCA resources and building particular skills. In fact, one of the biggest changes I will be making the second time around is paring down the reading even more to make space for class visitors and such. The other major goal is to provide students with a deep dive into a specific topic their very first semester, so that they can learn about a specialized field and build community right away. This course worked well for that, especially because a number of early women writers are already thinking about community in various forms (Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish, etc.)
The first-year course was a pan-European class that began with a global unit and included continental writers. This helped to scaffold their reading skills by beginning with writers in translation before getting to early modern language. The MA class focused only on England, but was more temporally expansive, including medieval material alongside the early modern. Overall, I found the class and assignment easily adjustable for the different levels and contexts. One thing that is worth noting in both the syllabi and assignments is that these courses used non-traditional grading mechanisms (labor-based grading for the FYS and ungrading for the MA class). As such, I wasn’t as concerned with creating a rubric or detail about assessment in the assignments as other classes might require.
The Assignment:
I designed this assignment to engage the first-year students, and to show them how research in literature can be active, current, and impactful. Once I decided to partner with the WWP and utilize their repository of text, I knew this offered something special for my graduate students as well.
Both assignments share the same core principles, but the FYS version is scaled down, has more specific requirements, and is a group project (mostly groups of 5). To accommodate the extra challenges that groupwork has, students first completed a work plan where they reflected on individual strengths and weaknesses, determined roles for themselves, and had transparent discussions about workflow, timelines, milestones, and group values. They also submitted a proposal in which they selected a text and offered a preliminary articulation on their editorial stance and goals. Both of these were helpful time management mechanisms and reduced, though did not eliminate, intrapersonal issues. The proposal also allowed me to intervene early If students made a selection that wasn’t suitable for the occasion.
MA students worked individually, but likewise had to submit a proposal in advance, ensuring that they began this in a timeframe that would allow for their success. MA students could choose between an editorial and pedagogical option. Two of them teach full time and were most energized by the syllabus inclusion pitch, using WWO to get to know a new text and imaging how it might fit into their current classroom context. The remaining six students chose the editorial version and were excited to dig into a text and get to know it with this degree of intimacy.
In both cases, students were asked to approach the chosen text from a variety of perspectives. The introduction provided a macro-level perspective on the text and author as a whole, glosses and footnotes allowed them to think carefully about audience, and the formatting and modernization slowed them down and demanded attention to minutiae. At all levels, this gives students significant ownership over their choices, though it asks them to articulate how those choices were made. For the FYS, a portion of all class sessions in the final weeks were dedicated to working on this project so that students could troubleshoot issues particular to their context.
I did not set out to build a website, and it was only after seeing the assignments come in that I thought they should be shared with a wider community. While the texts in the Renaissance Women Library are made by non-expert editors, they are available to view and download for the general public. Students loved doing this and I am so proud of what they have been able to create, which surpassed my expectations for how this would go!
