Activity Journal Assignment
Objectives
As part of the third-year course, Playing, Sports, Cultures (WGS331, Winter 2025) the Activity Journal is a weekly, low-stakes writing assignment designed to encourage students to connect course concepts from feminist cultural studies of sports, play, and movement practices to their own lived experiences. Starting with the first tutorial, students maintain a journal where they reflect on activities, practices, or experiences relevant to the course, guided by prompts from their TA. The purpose of the journal is twofold: it deepens understanding by linking theoretical ideas to personal experiences, and it allows the TA to engage with students’ evolving perspectives throughout the term. The assignment is structured to prioritize authentic, individualized reflection, making it difficult for generative AI tools to substitute for genuine engagement. Full credit is awarded for thoughtful, meaningful entries that demonstrate active participation and connection to course material.
To support this assignment, I journaled along with the students each week and shared my entries at the start of every lecture. (They were handwritten to mirror what I was asking the students to do, so I posted them to my lecture slides and read them out loud to begin each class.) This not only allowed me to model what I was hoping for from the students in terms of self-reflexivity, making connections to course concepts, and so on. It also served as a grounding practice to begin lecture, reminding students each week that the course is, at heart, about about why we play, how we move, and the conditions in which we do these things.
Process
- Beginning the Journal: Students start their journal in the first tutorial by responding to prompts provided by their TA, focusing on activities or experiences relevant to the themes of gender, identity, power, and representation in sports and movement cultures. We provide free journals as well as markers and stickers to allow them to decorate the covers.
- Weekly Reflection: Each week, after participating in the tutorial, students write a journal entry that reflects on the week’s activities, discussions, or personal experiences, explicitly tying their reflections to course concepts or readings.
- Connecting to Course Themes: In their entries, students are expected to make meaningful links between their lived experiences and the broader topics explored in the course, such as feminist perspectives on sports, inclusion, representation, and the cultural significance of play and movement.
- Submission and Review: At the end of each tutorial, students submit their journal entry for their TA to review, ensuring ongoing feedback and engagement.
- Maintaining Authenticity and Integrity: Students must ensure that their journal entries are original and reflect their own experiences and insights. The assignment’s emphasis on personal reflection and individualized connection to course material discourages the use of generative AI for composing entries; any use of AI must be limited to brainstorming or outlining and must be transparently disclosed.
- Ongoing Engagement: This process is repeated weekly, with the expectation that consistent, thoughtful participation will result in full marks for the assignment.
Future-Focused Skill Development
This annotation assignment directly aligns with the University of Calgary’s STRIVE model. Students demonstrate transparency by maintaining weekly journals that capture their authentic, original reflections linked to course themes, with any generative AI use limited to brainstorming or outlining and always openly disclosed. The assignment fosters responsibility by requiring students to consistently produce individualized responses that connect their lived experiences to feminist cultural studies perspectives, thereby nurturing ownership over their learning and emphasizing ethical academic practice. Finally, the journal strengthens validity through ongoing, formative assessment and feedback from TAs, supporting students in accurately synthesizing course concepts and self-assessing their growth as critical thinkers and reflective learners. This approach ensures substantive learning engagement that prepares students for responsible scholarship.
Student Feedback
Professor Trimble shares: This assignment was very well received by students in the pilot year. They enjoyed the low-stakes writing opportunity as well as the chance to get crafty by decorating their journals and doodling in their weekly entries. One student wrote to me after the course was finished: “I ended up using 2 of my journal entries as the basis for papers this term” and they “were really really helpful in thinking through ideas. more so than the proposal even. I was dubious at first but I really came around to them.”
My course evaluations also included the following anonymous comment: “I also appreciated that everything in the course felt reciprocal. T never asked us to do anything she was unwilling to do herself. If T asked us to do a personal reflection, she would read us hers first.”