Course Description
Applies research in composition, rhetoric, and writing studies to the teaching of college composition in diverse contexts and with diverse student populations, including multilingual writers. Links research based-practices to curriculum design. The course covers best teaching practices such as responding to writing, performing assessment, and interacting with students in the college composition classroom.
Course Overview
English 830: Research and Practice of Teaching College Composition is designed to be a very practical and hands on course about how to best teach writing. We will discuss writing course design, including universal design principles, writing assignments, and assessment. We will talk about pedagogical philosophies and social justice issues. We will discuss how to make your course a welcoming place for all students, and look at diversity, equity, and inclusion issues.
You will finish this course with a good syllabus for teaching college composition (or another writing course) and an excellent writing assignment which you have developed an effective plan for assessing. You also finish this course having written a strong Teaching Pedagogy Statement and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Statement, both documents commonly required for composition teaching job applications.
Best of all, this course should give you a valuable opportunity to do the kind of careful reflection, sharing, reading, and thinking that all teachers need to improve their pedagogy.
Course Philosophy
I design this and every course based on current pedagogical theory as well as my personal beliefs about teaching and scholarship. The works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky lead me to believe that learning takes place through social interaction. For this reason, active in-class discussion is essential by every class member.
To facilitate this socially-based learning, students in this class will read and share their writings with each other. The work of other people in this course is just as valuable as works published by professional authors, and we will treat it as such. For this reason, adequate time will be allocated to read and discuss everyone’s writing for the class.
As the teacher of this course, I will strive to make sure that all voices are heard and that no one voice is privileged, not even my own voice. Following the work of Kenneth Bruffee, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford, I’ll ask students in this course to work collaboratively on some projects to increase opportunities for dialogic thought.
In this course, I will employ a number of teaching practices that are focused on physical experience. While the academy traditionally has placed so much of its focus on cognitive development, in recent decades, scholars have begun to understand that learning is a holistic experience, tied to physical and emotional experiences as well as mental experiences. The body, heart, and mind are all interlinked. And scholars have also begun to explore the ways conceptions of spirit/faith also play a role in human well being.