English 513 – Seminar in Teaching College English
Fall 2018, CRN 40165
Tu/Th 2:00-3:50pm
Room: HU107
Instructor: Andrew Lucchesi
Office: HU 371
Email: Andrew.Lucchesi@wwu.edu
Office hours: Weds 11am-12pm, Thurs 12:30pm-1:30pm
This syllabus is subject to adjustment throughout the quarter. We’ll discuss this in class if this happens.
About the course
This class explores the questions all composition teachers face—not just in their first year in front of a classroom, but throughout their careers. What does it mean to teach writing? What do we expect of our students as they learn? What does it mean to be a teacher? What do we expect our students to be in response? How does our work as teachers coexist with our lives as researchers, students, and creative writers? How can our teaching matter—to our students, to ourselves, to the world outside our classrooms?
This class is framed around such questions. Your work will be to answer them, as best you can in this moment, using your daily experiences in the first-year writing classroom as your guide. We’ll read a range of scholarship together as a way to help us approach these questions with more confidence—with an awareness that these questions are not new, and the struggle to answer them is not ours alone. Writing Studies is built on contradictions and disagreements: about what writing is, and what it should be; about what a writing class is, and whom it should serve; about what teaching is for, and what it can achieve. While you may not leave this class with settled answers to these questions—indeed, it’s my greatest hope that you don’t—I hope that they can help focus you in your development as a writing teacher, to point you toward a way of teaching and a way of learning that matters to you.
What I hope you’ll learn
This class is designed to support the English department’s programmatic goals to help you write and read effectively in a variety of genres and media and examine similarities and differences of language systems and social discourses.
In addition to these programmatic aims, I designed this class to help you, new first-year writing teachers, toward a few developmental goals:
- To develop a personal practice of reflecting on your goals as a teacher and the interactions you observe between yourself and your students;
- To develop an awareness of the central debates that surround first-year writing as a class, both on the scale of daily teaching practice and on the scale of its function within the larger institution;
- To develop a professional interest in teaching and classroom-based scholarship as an extension of a robust academic career;
- To develop a personal philosophy toward the work of literacy education that is consistent with and supportive of your political or ethical worldview.
How to access the class
I hope this class will provide an accessible, fair, and affirming environment for you all. As you will see, this course is deeply concerned with matters of equity and respect for difference. In terms of the work we’ll do together this means a few things:
- All course materials, writing projects, and in-class activities must be equally usable by every student. If you ever encounter difficulties taking part in class or making use of class materials, please contact me immediately. If the difficulties are arising because class materials or activities don’t align with your physical, sensory, or psycho-social abilities, please know that the Disability Access Center can offer you personalized support, both for this class and all of your other classes at Western.
- All class discussions, whether in person or in writing, must be respectful of our shared human dignity, which includes our personal differences in terms of race, gender, sexuality, culture, and upbringing. Anyone expressing antipathy or disrespect for others in this class will be asked to leave the course or be referred to the Equal Opportunity Office or other appropriate university resources.
- All personal writing you do in this class is within your own authority to disclose. Your daily teaching journal is a private space. I will be collecting it every few weeks, but I promise that I will not read anything you do not want me to. Simply fold over the pages you want to keep private, and I will respect that. Likewise, many of the short-form blog posts ask private questions about your thoughts as a new teacher. You always have the option to post these either with a password or set to private view.
- All writing you produce for this class remains your property unless you wish to donate it to the class once the quarter is over. We will be writing on a WordPress site, which will be closed off only to class members during the quarter. Once the quarter is over, I will be opening the site to public view. Before I do this, I will give you ample opportunities to hide or remove material from the site that you don’t wish to make public. Whatever you leave there will be a permanent feature on the course site, which I hope to show to future sections of this course and interested scholars from other institutions.
What the rules are
This class is subject to some important university policies. If you ever have questions about these, please don’t hesitate to contact me or to reach out to the appropriate offices.
- Academic integrity – Western has official policies concerning academic integrity, which you are expected to abide by in this and all your classes. See full details at http://www.wwu.edu/integrity/
- Ethical computing – Western has official policies concerning ethical and responsible computer use. See full details at http://atus.wwu.edu/responsible-computing-acceptable-use
Projects and Assessment
I’ve designed this class on a modified contract system. Completing all the work to the minimum requirements earns you an A-. Aside from the ungraded teaching journal, each project has the potential to either maintain this contract grade (if complete) or to earn penalties if incomplete or not submitted. The final project can be extended in a number of ways to earn bonus points, either to erase penalties or boost your grade to an A.
If you miss more than two classes, your final grade will lower by 1 full letter. Unless we have a specific arrangement in advance, missing four classes will keep you from passing the course.
- A) Daily Teaching Journal
Each class session will begin with about 15 minutes of journaling about what’s happened in your teaching life since we last met. Your journaling will provide the seeds for your later projects, especially the Group Teaching Performance and Pedagogical Research Design. I will collect your journals every two weeks.
This project is fundamentally ungraded. I won’t be evaluating the quality of your journaling. It is an integrated part of class time.
- B) Short-Form Blog Posts
After most classes, I will ask you to write a brief, informal blog post for our class WordPress site. The posts are meant to accompany what you’ll be reading and to give us a space to process through together how the readings interact with our experiences as writing teachers. These posts aren’t meant to be carefully planned or revised, and you shouldn’t spend more than 20 or 30 minutes writing them.
You may skip two blog posts throughout the quarter. Beyond that, you begin accruing penalty points. Each post skipped is worth 0.5 penalty points. Each whole point lowers your possible grade for the class by 1/3rd.
- C) Reflective Annotated Bibliography
In weeks 3, 4, and 9, I will ask you to contribute an entry to our class Reflective Annotated Bibliography (RAB). RAB entries follow a four-part structure: (1) a citation in MLA format, (2) a detailed summary, (3) a quote bank, and (4) an analytical reflection. Each entry will be around 3 pages at least, and no more than five pages total. I’ve posted some model annotations on our Canvas page.
During weeks 3 and 4, I am asking you to hunt down teaching-related articles from a list of Writing Studies journals. For week 9, I am asking you to select a chapter from one of two edited collections on Writing Studies research methods. You will post your entries to our class WordPress site using the category label “bibliography”.
Each entry earns a potential value of two points, so six points total. One-point RAB entries satisfy each of the four RAB components. Two-point entries use the summary and analytical reflection sections to contextualize the article in reference to other scholarship, debates, or to your own plans for projects D or E. If you earn fewer than five out of six points in this category, you will lose 1/3rd of a letter off your final grade for each point below five.
- D) Group Teaching Performance
In weeks 5, 6, and 7, we will set aside an hour each class for activities you will design in groups of three. These activities can be wide ranging in terms of approach and topic. The one constraint is that the activity should be inspired in some way by what you’ve written in your teaching journals. Perhaps this means you want to create a role-playing activity where we simulate a classroom scenario. Perhaps this means you want to bring in a personal archive of texts for us to analyze using a particular theoretical lens. It will be your groups’ job to develop a concept and to lead the class in your 1-hour experience. If you fail to present as part of a group, or if you miss two other groups’ presentations, you will lose 1/3rd of a letter off your final grade.
- E) Pedagogical Research Design
Rather than ending the class on a definitive, final achievement, I want you to end it with a plan for the future. Rather than just thinking of yourself as a writing teacher, I want you to think of yourself as a pedagogical researcher—someone who conducts purposeful research in the classroom. So, looking forward to your Winter 2019 section of English 101, what kind of pre-planned experiment or observational study could you carry out?
Your finished report should do the following five things: (1) identify a teaching-focused research question you could study, (2) identify a scholarly discourse within Writing Studies that your study would contribute to (citing at least two sources), (3) describe the practical methods involved in carrying out this study, (4) present your full English 101 schedule for W19 including the milestones of your research, (5) include an appendix with any data-gathering documents necessary for the study (informed consent forms, surveys, etc).
In total, this report only needs to be 5 or 6 pages. If you decide you want to actually carry out this research next quarter, I will walk you through the process for applying for official institutional research approval. This may develop into an excellent scholarly project to submit to journals or include in PhD applications.
Unlike projects B through D, Project E offers bonuses. Completing the project earns two points, while not completing it earns two 1/3rd letter grade penalties. However, you can earn bonus credits by expanding the scope of your research design. You can earn a 1/3rd letter grade bonus for your final grade by
- incorporating two additional sources into your review of the scholarship,
- cite and summarize at least two pieces of methodological scholarship when describing your research methods,
- designing a study with more than one justifiable central research method,
- write a new assignment for your English 101 class to accompany your study,
- convert your project design into a complete IRB exemption application before our scheduled final exam period.
Class Schedule
Week 1 – Theory meets practice
Th – 9/27 What is it to teach writing?
Rd: Murray, “Writing and Teaching for Surprise”
Rd: Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (2011)
Blog: Choose a passage from Bean and a passage from Murray’s “Surprise.” Write a blog post in which you describe your expectations for what it would mean to teach writing this quarter. Compare your expectations to Bean and Murray’s respective descriptions of what teaching is, how it functions, or how it’s done.
Week 2 – Good and bad ideas about writing
Tu – 10/1 What is writing good for?
Rd: Danielowitz and Elbow “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching”
Rd: Elbow “A Contract for Final Grade of B in First Year Writing”
Blog: Write about your classroom as an ecosystem, a community, or some other complex collective structure. What are the forces that provide stability, infrastructure, order? What are the forces of chaos? What symbioses exist? Where is your nieche, and what is it your role to do? Who are the other beings who exist here, what are their various characteristics and their roles?
Th – 10/3 Are students as laborers, co-workers, professionals? Are teachers
as bosses, coaches, managers?
Rd: Excerpts from Bad Ideas About Writing (2017) including, Brayson, “First-Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing” (18-23), Wardle, “You Can Learn to Write in General” (30-33), Butts, “The More Writing Process, the Better” (109-116), and two others of your choosing.
Blog: Teach us about the two chapters you chose. We’ll need a summary of what they say, as well as an explanation of how they compare to the chapters we all read together. Don’t be shy about your opinion of this book’s approach to tone, critique, or idea building.
Week 3 – Cleaning out our closets
Tu – 10/9 How was Writing Studies (mis)conceived?
Rd: excerpt from Sharon Crowley Composition in the University (1998)
Blog: What do you think English 101 is to Western as an institution, or to the students and faculty as a community? What freight does it carry? What work does it serve? What might be different between the role English 101 is meant to serve from the one it really does?
Th – 10/11 Should we be doing this?
Rd: Dolmage, “Steep Steps” from Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (2017)
Rd: McRuer “Composing Bodies: or, De-Composition: Queer theory, Disability Studies, and Alternative Corporealities”
Blog: To what degree do you think about your students as having bodies? How real to you are their corporealities, their cognitive capacities, their mental coherence? How real is your body-mind to your students?
Due Sunday: Reflective Annotated Bibliography #1
Week 4 – How to English 101
Tu – 10/16 What is abject to first-year composition?
Rd: Bartholomae, “Writing With Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow”
Rd: Elbow, “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict of Goals”
Rd: “Interchanges: Responses to Bartholomae and Elbow”
Blog: What is the central belief, assumption, or mantra of your writing classroom?
Th – 10/18 What is first-year writing really for?
Rd: Alexander and Rhodes, “Flattening Effects: Composition’s Multicultural Imperative and the Problem of Narrative Coherence”
Blog: What makes you different from your students? To what extent are these differences within your control? To what extent are they valuable or damaging?
Due Sunday: Reflective Annotated Bibliography #2
Week 5 – Pushing progress
Tu – 10/23 Who am I when I teach?
Rd: Inoue, selections from Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (2015)
Blog: To what extent do your students seem aware of the world around them? Do they hold coherent worldviews? What are the scopes of those worldviews? How do you find evidence of these, or their absence, in their writing?
Next class: Group Teaching Performance – A
Th – 10/25 Who can I be within these systems?
Rd: Freire, The Banking Model of Education (Ch2), from Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1963)
Blog: What can you imagine as the most powerful impact of teaching first-year writing for any given student? Taken to its most idealistic extent, what can a class like this do?
Next class: Group Teaching Performance – B
Week 6 – Liberatory possibilities
Tu – 10/30 What am I doing for my students?
Rd: Shaughnessy, “Diving in: An Introduction to Basic Writing” (1976)
Blog: What is it that makes your students struggle as writers? Is it a lack of some knowledge, or a misunderstanding of some principle, or an ambivalence toward authorship? What is it that frustrates their success?
Next class: Group Teaching Performance – C
Th – 11/1 What do my students really need?
Rd: Rose, “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block” (1980)
Blog: What do your students believe about writing and themselves as writers? If you could peer into their heads when they sat down to write, what do you think they’d be saying to themselves?
Next class: Group Teaching Performance – D
Week 7 – Rule breakers
Tu – 11/6 What do we learn from student struggle?
Rd: Three student responses to “Rigid Rules”
Rd: Three student “Writing Emotions” essays
Blog: What is your responsibility when you respond to student writing? What, if anything, do you feel as you prepare to read student work, or as you compose feedback, or as you hand that feedback back to your students?
Next class: Group Teaching Performance – E
Th – 11/8 How do we guide student growth?
Rd: Moore Howard, “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism”
Blog: What kinds of behavior are truly toxic to your class ecosystem? Is there a taxonomy of importance in toxic student behavior?
Week 8 – Something’s wrong here
Tu – 11/13 What leads our students astray?
Rd: Dolmage, “Imaginary College Students” from Academic Ablesim: Disability and Higher Education (2017)
Blog: What does it mean for students and teachers to be adversarial? What does it look like, and how does it happen? Is this relationship inherently negative?
Th – 11/15 What do we expect our students to be?
Rd: Selected chapter from Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies (2012) OR
Rd: Selected chapter from Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research (2012)
Due Sunday: Reflective Annotated Bibliography #3
Week 9 – Tools of the trade
Tu – 11/20 Why does writing happen this way?
Rd: Dunn, “Using Sketching, Speaking, Metaphors, and Movement to Generate and Organize Text” from Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing (2001)
Blog: What are you planning for your Pedagogical Research Design?
Week 10 – Centered on the margins
Tu – 11/27 What can help us write?
Rd: Brueggemann et al, “Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability”
Th – 11/29 Who can teaching writing let us be?
Blog: Who do you want to be as a teacher?
Week 11 – Grand designs
Tu – 11/4 Research design presentations
Th – 11/6 Research design presentations
Week 12 – Final Exam Period
Due: Pedagogical Research Design