The composition program at Drew has two equally
important goals arising from our understanding of the role of writing in
a liberal arts education. At the end of their composition courses,
it is our hope that students will not only be more proficient writers,
but that they will also be more confident writers who recognize the power
and pleasure of writing. Writing is a way to express meaning,
but it is also a way to make meaning, and
we want our students to understand this distinction and learn to use writing
to express and to make meaning in their coursework and in their lives.
We are not satisfied if students only learn to be effective writers of
college-level prose without learning to feel more "at home" in writing
than they did at the beginning of the course. What matters to the
teachers of composition at Drew is that their students learn why
powerful writing matters: that it can change their worlds, their
lives, their relationships, and themselves. Once they have learned
why they should write, our students have a reason to learn how
to write effectively. By the time they graduate from Drew, our students
are proficient writers, but they are also writers who have something to
say and feel comfortable saying it.
Methodology and Pedagogy of the Drew Composition Program
Composition classes at Drew are all taught as a combination of discussion and workshop. Whether the class meets in a regular classroom or a networked writing lab, and whether the students read a traditional textbook reader or on-line newspapers, the goals and theoretical underpinnings are the same. Each reading is an example of something the students could do. Each discussion is designed to teach something about writing--whether that is a concrete skill or a sense of the power that can be achieved through the written word. Each writing assignment is designed to practice specific literacy skills, but also to stimulate the students' growing sense of confidence as writers. Among the kinds of writing taught will always be summary, synthesis, analysis, comparison, and argumentation. Mechanical skills include thesis development, prewriting, organizing, drafting, paragraph development, correct citation, revision, and editing, along with any specific needs of particular students.
In one class students may follow the run up to local and national elections, analyzing the rhetorical strategies used by the candidates in their web pages and elements of argumentation used in their press releases and the transcript of their speeches. Students in such a class will compare the arguments, biographies, imagined audience(s), and rhetorical strategies of the candidates through the prose that describes and represents them. Students may also engage in additional research on the district, specific issues of concern to that candidate, or the political process itself. In addition to formal writing they may participate in newsgroup discussions with students in the class and with students in other classes using the same syllabus. In another class students may read The New York Times on-line and select issues or events to follow as they unfold. Writing assignments will include summarizing and synthesizing stories, comparing coverage of the story in different sources, and researching background information to those stories. This class may also include newsgroup discussions, in addition to individual weekly e-mail "dialogues" with the instructor. A third on-line class might compare Internet research with library research, teaching the students to make effective use of the Internet to learn background information for a topic and to formulate research questions. In this class, students might create a carefully researched and documented web site as part of the final project.
In each of these classes, whether on-line or traditional, the focus is on literacy skills and on the students' own writing. While the grade for the class takes process and effort into consideration, grades are based primarily on the final product that students can create as a result of the class: the written text. In English 1 this is evaluated through a mid-semester and a final writing portfolio evaluated by all of the English 1 writing instructors. In the other classes it is evaluated by the course instructor, on the basis of a final portfolio and interim grades.
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