In the spirit of the upcoming Teaching in the Wild West CTLE Conference in April for my final Write6x6 post of 2025, I am hitching up my reflection horse and sharing a little of my trailblazing efforts. I hope you find something you can use on your own trails.
When my students got lost in the digital wilderness, I saddled up a semester-long trail ride through the Gaucho Urban Garden to lead them back to nature’s frontier. For several years, I have been working on an experiential learning experience that incorporates problem based learning for the students in my English Composition class. This year, I have expanded my approach in a way that I think is worth sharing. It all began in week one with the students tracking their digital technology use. Before heading to the garden, we had to face the truth about our digital habits—like recognizing when your trusty steed has become a stubborn mule. So, the students spent a week journaling about their technology use, using apps to track their time on their phones and paying attention to what they were doing with their time.
The week that followed was one of the more challenging ones. The students chose the most ornery of stallions to break, the technology they found was the most addictive. They broke up with that technology for seven days, journaling about their experience and about what they did instead of that habit. All the while, the students researched the mental and physical impacts of digital dependency. This part of the project culminated in an essay where they linked their research with their findings on their personal experiences. For many of the students, it was eye opening.
Next came the experiential learning component, the students began to work in the Gaucho Urban Garden. At the Gaucho Urban Garden, my students traded their digital spurs for garden gloves and learned that cultivating ideas requires getting your boots dirty. For one hour each week, the students would learn from a biology instructor about the care, maintenance, and upkeep of the garden. They planted seeds, harvested crops, learned about fertilizer and watering cycles, repaired sprinkler systems, and took ownership of an experience that most of them have never had before. All the while, they journaled about their experiences, what they were learning, and what foods they grew and ate. So many students ended up looping in their friends to the garden that we had more than just my students involved, and they kept coming back! This experience began as they were breaking up with their technology and continued through to the very end of the semester.
Then, the students began the research stage, where my students began to explore the possible solutions to digital dependency. My buckaroos rounded up solutions like skilled wranglers, corralling research into annotated bibliographies that would make any trail boss proud. They gathered sources, took notes, and explored solutions that would eventually be applied in their final essay. They got to know the skills they needed for the researching process and spent time in the library gaining new approaches from those friendly Gauchos, the librarians.
The next stage was a home based activity that also involved research and reflection. The home composting project. Their home composting adventures were like taming wild territory—turning kitchen scraps into gold just as surely as any prospector struck paydirt. The students researched what it takes to compost and began working on a small scale composting project that they digitally journaled about. The digital journals weren’t just campfire tales—they were carefully mapped trails showing others how to follow in their footsteps that led to the next stage of the course. Creating “how-to” TikTok style (or Youtube short) videos around composting or gardening, or in some way related to their suggested solution. Creating those ‘how-to’ TikToks was like learning to quickdraw—communicating their solutions faster than a gunslinger at high noon.
Once these stages were completed, it was time to bring together all the elements they’d gathered along the trail, like a skilled scout who knows how to read the landscape and find the clearest path forward. The students wrote an essay that brought together all of the ideas, the projects, and their experiences with the research. With a combination of metacognition, reflection, research, and rhetoric, the final essay hits every learning objective in the course. The students were able to demonstrate the skills they had learned in composition and apply those skills in a way that made it obvious why the skill was important.
Basically, in this wild west approach to teaching composition skills, these digital cowboys and cowgirls had learned to rope, ride and wrangle their way to a healthier balance between technology and nature. The students have told me that this has been an incredibly fun way to apply the things they need to know for future classes, and I have watched them grow as learners. As they ride off into the sunset, I know they are prepared for blazing their own trails.
