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English 830: Teaching Composition Chapter 5 — Your Composition Course

Chapter 5 Required Materials and Tasks

For July 10 Wednesday: Meet @ Commonplace Coffeehouse

  • For this Wednesday class, we will meet at Commonplace Coffeehouse
  • Commonplace Coffeehouse
    • Location: 1176 Grant Street; Indiana, PA 15701
    • Phone: 724-465-6529​
    • The coffeehouse is located near the Subway at the edge of campus (down the hill from Jane Leonard Hall)
    • The coffeehouse is inside a large building called Campus Edge
    • There is free parking outside
  • Commonplace has great coffee and nice breakfast food
    • You don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want to
  • We will meet in the outer atrium just outside the coffeehouse
    • Who ever arrives first, please grab the big table
  • This will be a more casual and slightly noisier experience, but hopefully you will enjoy it

Due July 10 Wednesday: First Draft of Your Composition Course Syllabus

  • Create or Revise a Syllabus for a College Composition Course Syllabus
    • If you have taught college composition before, go over your syllabus and decide how you might improve it
    • If you have never taught college composition, create a new basic syllabus for the course
    • If you wish to work on a syllabus for a different course, you may do so, but the course must require students to do substantial writing
    • You may plan your syllabus for a specific semester or just organize it by weeks (Week 1, Week 2, etc.)
    • You don’t need to include every last detail for your syllabus, but create enough of the course syllabus so we can understand your general plan for the course
    • We will discuss the first draft of your Course Syllabus in class

Chapter 5 Class Activities

Part 1. Socializing (15 minutes)

  • We will begin the class with a little informal chat over coffee and/or breakfast
  • I have chosen this coffeehouse location deliberately to give you an embodied experience
    • Hopefully this will create for you an important memory from your in-person time in the summer CAL Program
    • I do feel, philosophically, that an 8 a.m. class needs a little coffee

Part 2. Small Group Discussion of Your Composition Course Syllabus (60 minutes)

  • Give each person in your group time to discuss their course syllabus (it might be a composition syllabus or some other syllabus)
  • Let the teacher discuss their design ideas, their rationale for their choices, and the philosophy behind their design
  • Offer thoughts, responses, and feedback
  • Be sure to point out the strengths of the syllabus

Part 3. Pedagogical Narrative Experiences (30 minutes)

  • Narrative Theory: Creating storied experience
  • Embodied Pedagogy: Building memories which are rooted not only in the mental but the physical, emotional, and even spiritual
  • Rhythms of the Semester
  • Social nature of learning
  • Talking about teaching
  • Reflecting on your teaching practices
  • Learning from other good teachers
  • Learning from sources
  • Preparation for the future

Part 4. Full Class Discussion (30 minutes)

  • We will take turns letting each person talk for about 5 minutes about their course syllabus
  • We will go by group
  • We will have group members add comments and thoughts after the teacher talks

Part 5. What Should First Year Composition (FYC) Be About? (10 minutes)

The Challenge

According to Combs, FYC struggles with the following challenge:

    • “First-year composition is essentially a methods course that has no proprietary topics other than writing itself. Unlike the sciences and humanities, FYC must borrow writing topics from other disciplines. While a course in macroeconomics or physics will follow a fairly predictable regimen, the subjects and methods of writing instruction are virtually limitless, even when, in the usual case, English departments set specific course objectives (Lagunoff, Venezia, Su, & Jaeger, 2010). The latitude of composition instructors to decide what to put into their syllabi, even within departments, may explain why common benchmarks are lacking across the discipline.”
    • Or, more simply, says Combs, “First-year composition, then, is whatever the professor says it is.”

Typical FYC Approaches

  • Writing Transfer Theory
    • According to Combs, “development of writing style and good writing habits, the traits that allow a student to learn what he or she knows and does not know by writing” (Curtis & Cowell, 2014; Zinsser, 1988); also follows from WAC/WID principles
  • Current-Traditional Paradigm
    • Product over process, rhetorical modes (narration, description, exemplification, process, cause and effect, compare and contrast, and argumentation)
  • Learning by Writing
    • Writing as a system of inquiry; the research paper; field research methods; data analysis; writing genres
  • Writing as a Way of Knowing
    • Wants students to develop “clear thinking”; encourages writing about topics that are not controversial or to write about such issues without getting into the emotional parts of the issue
  • NCTE Framework
    • Combs summarizes NCTE’s focus as, “an emphasis on the habits required for college-level writing. It does not, however, rely solely on attitude but states the need for students to know the conventions of their writing genre and their audience, to be able to extract information, from multiple texts and other media, and to synthesize that information into their own texts.”
    • A list of discourse categories is not included

Part 6. Small Group Discussion (10 minutes)

In a small group, discuss the following question which emerges from the readings about composition course design:

  • Of all the different approaches one can take to FYC (see Combs article), which approach does your group support the most and why?

Part 7. Full Class Discussion (10 minutes)

  • We will discuss various pedagogical approaches to FYC

Part 8. Full Class Discussion (5 minutes)

1. emphasizes the rhetorical nature of writing;
2. considers the needs of real audiences;
3. recognizes writing as a social act;
4. enables students to analyze and practice with a variety of genres;
5. recognizes writing processes as iterative and complex;
6. depends upon frequent, timely, and context-specific feedback from an experienced postsecondary instructor;
7. emphasizes relationships between writing and technologies; and
8. supports learning, engagement, and critical thinking in courses across the curriculum.

  • Enabling Conditions. Sound writing instruction:

9. provides students with the support necessary to achieve their goals;
10. extends from a knowledge of theories of writing (including, but not limited to, those theories developed in the field of composition and rhetoric);
11. is provided by instructors with reasonable and equitable working conditions; and
12. is assessed through a collaborative effort that focus on student learning within and beyond writing courses.

Assignments

Due July 15 Monday: Course Requirement–Cool Course Assignment

Due July 15 Monday: Teacher Website Materials

  • For this project, you need some personal materials that we will be posting on your Teacher Website. Please bring the following:
    • A quote that helps capture some of your personal philosophy
    • A nice photo of yourself (this is very useful but optional for people who guard their privacy extremely closely)
    • Your Curriculum Vitae

Due July 16 Tuesday: Course Requirement–Course Syllabus

Due July 16 Tuesday: Required Readings on Teaching Multilingual Writers

Optional Materials on Composition Pedagogy

The following resources may be useful to you in choosing a pedagogy on which to ground your composition course: