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ENGL567A: Short Paper #1: Door to the World of Composition
by Edmond Chang
Written for |
It is no surprise that the first line of my course description comes from Ursula K. Le Guin: “First sentences are door to worlds.” The next line is all me: “In a manner of speaking, English 131 is the first sentence of your university experience.” I have taken to heart and to philosophy that first-year classes are vital in inspiring, inviting, or impressing on students that college has use-value, exchange-value, and personal value. I remember one of my first courses in college was an introductory fiction writing workshop, which was lively, encouraging, challenging, and taught me what university could be like, and I decided since becoming a teacher that I would set a high standard for my class and for the benefit of my students. My course description plainly says: “In a fundamental way, English 131 is a gateway class, a class that will set a critical and analytical standard and inform and influence and hopefully enrich your other courses.” In addition to and beyond the teaching of composition, I want my class to hook my students, to be more holistic, be about students’ interests and lives on-campus and off, and to be fun. If you were to ask Richard Fulkerson, who wrote “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” he would most likely classify me as part of the “social turn” in teaching composition. My class and my teaching philosophy would align with the “Critical/Cultural Studies” (CCS) model. However, I am a strong collaborator, coalitionist, and have aspects of the Expressionist and Process camps as well. My goal in English 131 is not to teach them all of “cultural studies” but to introduce them to terms, ideas, methodologies. My course description reveals this: “This particular incarnation of 131 also promises a healthy inclusion of popular culture, cultural studies, politics, gender studies, everyday activism, new media, and experiential learning.” English 131 is just a first look, a first taste, a first encounter with new things, new vocabulary, and new connections. Of course, the writing process (as vehicle for critical thinking) remains central to the class. My course description announces: “English 131 promises a quarter of writing, reading, discussion, library research, asking questions, more writing, revision, more reading, more discussion, critical thinking, analysis, fun, and even more writing and revision. It is a writing class after all.” I tell my students that they will be doing a lot of writing and that practice is important to any skill. I do believe that every student is or can take on the mantle of writer (to which Kay Halasek in “Redefining the Student Writer” would object) and that writing is improvable. My description says, “The class takes as a basic assumption that writing is a skill and that, like any skill, it can be improved through guided practice.” (It is a line that several of my fellow TAs have borrowed.) Students must understand that writing is central to academia, that they can improve their writing, that their class is connected to other classes, that their skills are transferable or translatable to other classes. I think first-year classes, English 131 included, has to be about identifying and making connections. The studies by Lee Ann Carroll, “A Preview of Writing Development,” and Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz, “The Novice as Expert,” both come to similar conclusions that students need to find ways to connect what they are doing, how they are doing it, where they are or are going, and who they are in order to be successful. English 131 must be and must be shown to be a part of a constellation of courses, experiences, and skill sets. Carroll cautions that writing is not a “unitary ability simply applied in a variety of different circumstances” (6) and that faculty across disciplines must “support novice writers in [their] periods of transition as writers work out their own strategies for learning in new roles” (27). Sommers and Saltz’s study concludes, “[W]hen students are able to see what they can ‘get’ and ‘give’ through writing, they speak passionately about writing as the heart of what they know and how they learn; writing is not an end in itself but is a means for discovering what matters” (146). I believe my course description touches on this idea of connection, of transferability: “By the end of the quarter, the goal is that you will be well versed in the English 131 course outcomes and be prepared to face the writing and reading challenges you encounter with the confidence and competence of a critical reader, writer, student, and citizen.” However, after reading about the struggles of writing students in Carroll and Sommers and Saltz, I believe making explicit the goal of connection and transferability, which I do in lecture almost every day, is necessary in the next incarnation of my description. Demonstrating that writing can improve and that English 131 is connected to and transferable to other classes may help mitigate the students’ need for instant gratification and evaluation. In the end, they want and we must give grades. However, the portfolio process and the course outcomes do provide a way to belay stamps of approval or inadequacy and to focus on improvement and connection. The back-end structure of English 131 is very different from my previous composition class experience. However, in every course I have taught, there has always been some sort of rubric of evaluation and set of goals. Students and teachers need rubrics, touchstones, to gauge process, progress, and understanding. Though the English 131 outcomes are very specific, clinical, and worded legalistically, they need not be prescriptive. I include the course outcomes and grading rubric as part of my course description and policies and allow them to remain in the background, to serve as a skeleton or scaffold. As the quarter progresses, my instruction and students’ apprehension of the outcomes becomes more apparent as we learn to parse, use, and employ the outcomes. The research and statements made by the WPA Outcomes Group and by UW SOUL all identify a need for clear expectations on the parts of the teacher and the student. The WPA report says that students “often become aware that writing demands differ from one discipline to another…[and] rather than seeing these requirements as part of the way the discipline creates knowledge, students regard the requirements or assignment demands as emerging from the whims or preferred styles of their individual TAs or professors” (3). It is important for students to learn to navigate and negotiate the terrain of the university. Isn’t learning (for both teacher and student) all about negotiation? I realize that I will remain decidedly a Critical/Cultural Studies composition teacher with underpinnings from Expressionist and Process camps. I also realize that I can make changes to better my practice. I know I need to make the idea and the practice of creating connections, creating coalitions of knowledge and knowledge production, and of framing transferability of knowledges and skills literal. Connection and transferability must become part of my course outcomes. I also now realize that I have taken argumentative writing as a standard for composition classes for granted. My previous post was deeply and classically rhetoric-based. I know now that my students have some to little experience in argumentative writing, that they find it the most difficult kind of writing (according to WPA and UW SOUL). Therefore my course description, outcomes, and experience must demonstrate the genre of argumentative writing as well as its importance, applicability, and transferability outside the English 131 classroom.
Works Cited
Beyer, Catharine H., Gerald Gillmore, Matthew Baranowski, and Naomi Panganiban.
"Writing at the UW: The First Year." University of Washington Study of
Undergraduate Learning Internal Report. February 2003.
Carroll, Lee Ann. "A Preview of Writing Development." Rehearsing New Roles: How
College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale: SIU Press, 2002. 1-28.
Fulkerson, Richard. "Composition and the Turn of the Twenty-First Century."
College Composition and Communication 56.4 (June 2005): 654-687.
Sommers, Nancy and Laura Saltz. "The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year."
College Composition and Communication 56.1 (September 2004): 124-149.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition."
College English 63.3 (January 2001): 321-325.
© 2005 EYC.
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