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Instructor's Handbook & Guide |
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Why Drew University's College of Liberal Arts requires that students satisfy a writing requirement
Why Drew offers English 1-A, English 1, and English 2
There are many arguments against separating students based on rather arbitrary placement decisions. There are as many arguments for doing this, though, especially at a small liberal arts college where the faculty has articulated a strong commitment to writing. Perhaps for this reason, SAT placement is used at many other colleges like Drew. For middle class students in liberal arts colleges at least, SAT scores are a fairly good indicator of what the GPA will be at the end of the first year without intervention. Separating students by SAT score allows us to provide that intervention, and preliminary studies show that students who have enrolled in the two semester stretch sequence English 1-A/English 1 (those with SAT I-verbal scores of 520 and below) have higher GPAs at the end of their first year than those in the SAT I-verbal range above them. By separating students in this way and keeping class size small, we allow writing teachers to focus on the specific needs of the students both in class and individually outside of class. There is a reduced likelihood of some students being bored while others are left behind. In other words, serious writing instruction can occur where and when it is most needed.
The programmatic goals of English 1-A, English 1, and English 2
All three courses have as their goal that students both strengthen their writing skills and learn habits and strategies to help them continue that process once the class is over. All three classes focus on the writing skills that students need if they are to succeed in college, and to do that they need to also focus on thinking and reading skills. To be effective, though, the classes need to help students see the importance of writing outside the classroom: in their personal lives and in their future careers and civic lives. All three classes should present writing both as a way to record meaning and a way to make meaning; as a way to report knowledge and ideas and as a way to persuade others to accept that knowledge and those ideas. Such a dual emphasis should help students to understand the importance of writing and what is at stake if they accept the narrow view of writing as a skill, a punishment, or a trial. Students should leave our classes seeing writing as an option, a reasonable response to a number of situations, and a way to participate in the literate society in which they live. If students leave our classes technically proficient as writers but not confident of themselves as writers, we have not empowered them.
If this sounds too abstract, the specific course descriptions below
might help:
English 1-A
Some of the skills taught in English 1-A are considered to be "pre-college" skills, which is why students enrolled in the two semester stretch English 1-A/English 1 sequence only earn six academic credits for the two courses (two credits for English 1-A and the normal four credits for English 1). Many colleges teach such a course as if the need to strengthen one's writing skills indicates inferior intellectual skills. For this reason most textbooks designed for "basic writers" are insultingly simple in their assignments and reading selections. Traditionally, grammar and sentence structure were taught in such classes as drills: students filled in work books, completed computer programs, or memorized verb endings and sentence structures and repeated them on tests. Pedagogies such as this may be of minimal benefit to some students, but there is no evidence that the "knowledge" transfers from workbook to prose writing. The students may be able to apply the drills to editing papers, but they certainly don't become empowered or confident writers. Many are justifiably offended by the material and shut down altogether in the classroom.
There's another problem with this approach: people tend to rise to the level expected of them, and if you expect little, you tend to get even less. Courses that treat weaker writers as if they are also weaker thinkers tend to confirm their own prejudices. Many students in English 1-A can describe a lifetime of papers covered in red inked "corrections" without a single comment about what works in the paper. They will describe the frustration of writing papers about things they care about only to have the content ignored in the rush to point out every error. Some have this frustration compounded by the short attention spans produced either by environmental factors or by learning differences. In college, we invite students into the academic community and invite them to help us make meaning. This process should start at the very beginning, and should drive the pedagogy of English 1-A.
The first step is to discover and strengthen the skills our students already posses. For a student with weak writing skills to have made it to college, he or she must have superior skills in other areas. We often find that weaker writers are powerful orators. Many are able to use words persuasively but not to organize them into a formal written argument. Many care deeply about issues but are unable to translate that emotion into the objective prose of college papers. Others are afraid to try their hardest when they write for fear of failure. Many of them dread writing classes because they have been humiliated in the past. So English 1-A is designed to be challenging. Our role as teachers is to help the students read challenging material and write about the most challenging topic: language itself.
However each instructor designs the class, that class must challenge students to think about rhetoric and turn that thought into prose. English 1-A focuses on rhetoric for many reasons. Students need to be able to structure an effective argument in order to do well in college, and students in English 1-A tend to lack this skill. But a good understanding of the role of ethos, logos, and pathos in argumentation provides more than just the names for strategies of argumentation: it provides an understanding of how language works. To understand how language works is to understand the importance of advanced literacy skills. Such understanding provides a powerful motive for learning other elements of argumentation and writing. If students find these theories difficult they will benefit the most not from having someone explain those theories but from learning how to explain them to themselves. And that is the challenge to the teacher of the course.
English 1-A should encourage students to see language at work around
them. A traditional journal may invite them to record random instances
of rhetorical force, or they may be asked to explore specific uses of rhetoric
in advertisements, political documents (speeches and web sites for example),
magazines, or song lyrics. What matters is the focus on language,
followed by writing assignments that also focus on language. Teaching
students to understand theories of language rather than rules of grammar
invites them to explore meaning rather than to simply follow rules (and,
perhaps, to be alert to moments when conventions like the avoidance of
split infinitive are treated as rules--to understand language as a dynamic
force rather than a static cage). An understanding of the importance
of ethos, though, also helps them to see why grammar rules might
matter after all.
English 1
English 1 is the standard entry level writing course also known as English 101 at other schools. At some colleges, such a course focuses on the "four modes of writing" (illustration, narration, description, persuasion), or the writing process (prewrite, write, rewrite), generally using a combination of short fiction and model essays as the core of the class. But English 1 is not like those courses in any way. We do not use any literature (fiction or poetry). We do not teach the four modes. We do not present model essays, discuss the content, and then invite students to imitate the style or respond to the content. At Drew the writing courses focus on writing. If students read material in preparation for class, class discussion focuses on that text as a written text. Content and form are related, and discussion of content must acknowledge that. Students might read a text and then write a summary of that text. Discussion of content would then focus on which material should be included in the summary: which material was important and how to identify it. Students might synthesize or compare several texts, and again discussion of the content of those texts would focus on identifying material to synthesize or compare--and would occur after the writing assignment. Such discussion strengthens reading and critical thinking skills and helps students use them in the service of writing. Similarly, discussion of the rhetorical strategies employed by other writers helps student writers to see the range of options available to them and analyze the effectiveness of those options in the context of specific essays.
English 1 should focus on developing general academic writing skills. Students leaving the class should know how to effectively summarize, synthesize, analyze, and compare written material. They should also know how to develop a thesis, organize an argument, select appropriate sources to support a thesis, and incorporate those sources correctly into a paper (English 1 includes a library component). Finally, they should know how to revise and edit a paper so that it conforms to the expectations of the college. These latter skills are most effectively delivered via writer's workshops, in which small groups of students read and respond to specific aspects of each other's prose under the guidance of the teacher. Workshops encourage active and collaborative learning: two skills that students will use in college and in the work place. If students have learned to analyze the rhetorical strategies employed by professional writers, applying that same analysis to writing by their peers and then to their own writing helps them to see themselves as part of a community of writers. Such repetition also helps to connect the various activities in the class and build on earlier discussions.
The final assignment for English 1 is a research paper on a topic of
the student's own choosing. Earlier assignments work well if they
lead toward that assignment, inviting students to explore topics for further
research. The more the content of writing assignments can be connected,
the more students are likely to see writing as a series of connected acts.
A successful research paper will require some summary, some synthesis,
some comparison, and so on. Too often students leave writing classes
with the idea that there are different types of writing that do not overlap:
one of our goals in English 1 is to challenge this idea. Another
is to challenge the idea of the audienceless, purposeless paper.
In addition to standard academic conventions of writing, students should
be encouraged to consider the role of audience in shaping the reporting
of researched material and the importance of purpose and bias. They
should be asked to identify an audience for the paper and explain why their
research is significant (what purpose it serves). As in English 1-A,
ethos,
logos and pathos may be useful concepts to introduce,
along with Wayne Booth's triangle of speaker, audience, and subject.
Successful English 1 students will not only learn what choices are
available to them as writers, but will also take responsibility for the
choices they make when they write and analyze the choices of others in
the same way.
English 2
English 2 teaches many of the same skills as English 1, but it assumes that students enrolled in the class need to be reminded of many writing skills rather than instructed in them. The emphasis for the whole seven weeks is the final research project, which may be presented as a formal paper or as a website (although the web site must be preceded by a linear draft of the material to be included on the site). Some students in English 2 will have taken English 1. Others may have been exempted from writing but decided to take the class because they plan to write an honors thesis. The remainder will be students who scored 620 or above on the SAT I Verbal examination. It is therefore very important for the class to emphasize audience and purpose and encourage sophisticated (but manageable) research topics. The primary goal of English 2 is to enhance the writing skills of the students enrolled in the class, reinforce academic conventions and rules of citation, and encourage the students to explore topics and make meaning about issues that they may explore in subsequent classes.
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| This page is part of a handbook written by Sandra Jamieson for Drew University Composition Instructors. Please don't reproduce any parts of it without telling me. You are welcome to link to anything in this handbook that you find useful, but again, please tell me you've done that. Thanks! |