I think this new question we’re being asked to contemplate is something I don’t necessarily have the bits and pieces to figure out. At the institution I did my undergrad at, there were constant conversations of the way that our version of ENG 101 enhanced the experiences of students and prepared them for work later on.

At the university where I did my undergrad, there was a push for two required writing classes because (at least from my perspective) many of the students who entered into upper-division courses did not have the writing skill required to be successful in those upper division courses. This was specifically a problem at a STEM school where they had a lot of 4-year degrees that required 5 years of work and had a difficult time incorporating the teaching of writing into their disciplinary classes. I saw all of this from the writing center side of things where we were asked to support these students on an individual basis or we partnered with classes to try to make things better for them. So this complicated my ideas of what the role of FYC is supposed to play in the institution in general.

Although the reading pointed out that FYC might be the people who perpetuate “correct” writing, it’s still not something that’s ethically sound to dismiss the discussion of, in my opinion. Many writing centers right now are writing diversity and social justice statements, and in analyzing those during my undergrad we started to have a conversation about why completely rejecting the “standardized-academic-voice” etc. was not a beneficial claim to make as something that exists within and contributes to the institution, especially if we were going to be an activist for institutional change at large (especially in the context of a writing center). However I think it’s something that we, as teachers who will see almost all students within the university pass through a FYC course, need to try to negotiate as well.

For me, this connects back to the idea of WAC that I remember Andrew mentioning (somewhere in the deep dark back of my mind and the unorganized chasm of my email). I think that something ENG 101 and its long distant cousins at other institutions should try to prepare students for writing they’ll encounter outside of the ENG 101 class. To me this means not only challenging the very ingrained and sometimes-less-helpful writing models/tools that students come in with—the five-paragraph essay as an example—but also get them to think about the different elements and the contexts they’re writing in and why those are important (thinking about audience, purpose, intent vs. impact, among other things) and how the modes they’re using to communicate these things are important. Trying to think about the assignments we are doing in our ENG 101 class in this way has helped me commit to and, hopefully in-turn, convince my students to commit to it as well.

I think that I keep getting tripped up on the overly idealistic tone and suggestions of what we’re reading sometimes. We can definitely be progressively changing the system and the standardization of what writing is or what people think it is, but in order to make greater institutional change and be seen as valuable in more ways, I think that we also need to think about what others expect of ENG 101 as well and negotiate both of these ideals. These ideals in my mind (at least as I’m sitting here and trying to think through what gets me so frustrated) is 1. doing what we can in the short amount of time we and making it meaningful in a multiplicity of ways (hopefully ways that get at what our goals are as an ENG 101 program), and 2. also trying to give the students and The Institution (more of a big idea of the upper administrators and what they expect from us along with what professors might expect their students to learn about writing and whatnot before their classes) what they might want and expect from an ENG 101 class. It sounds silly, but I think it’s important that we are thinking about how we don’t exist within a vacuum and that in order to make change within the greater institution (which is what I feel like all of this idealized writing is doing—though Crowley does discuss this in terms of funding before briefly touching on issues of power and privilege) we need to negotiate what that means when we story an ENG 101 program like this and when we try to find our own cultural identity.

We can’t change everyone’s ideas about writing, but I think that we can try to make them realize why writing is important, and try to have open conversations with students about why writing will be important within their discipline so that they feel/understand that they have transferable skills. Ideally this would happen, but I wish that the readings we were doing talked much more about identity (of both teacher and students) and how that contributes to these ideas of a classroom and program within an institution. I just can’t stand the lack of intersectionality in a lot of what we talk about when we talk about The Institution because the institution is built of the people within it. And I think there are more productive ways to think of the ENG 101 classroom as a space that subverts the institution. I want to read more about the ways the institution is subverted inside the classroom. I know that I personally tried to draw my student’s attention to the fact that they are inside an institution because it’s something I think it important to pay attention to.

These realities we exist in and co-create are a social construction and what we’ve read so far talks about this ideal like it’s the only way. I’m just a little bothered by the way the types of classes we are teaching are talked about so metaphorically (this term is being used in the way that Krista Ratcliffe uses the term in her Rhetorical Listening Theory) and not conducive to the realities of what teaching it and who it is for, and I think part of that might come down to (at least for me) is that I don’t think the teacher is really the most important person in the classroom.