policies ENGL513 Composition Theory & Pedagogy
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Need to be in touch with me?
Lee Torda, PhD Interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies 200 Clement C. Maxwell Library 508.531.1790 Teaching Website: www.leetorda.com |
OFFICE HOURS: By appointment. Email me at [email protected] with times/days you'd like to meet, and I will respond within 24 hours.
“Let’s save pessimism for better times” --Eduardo Galeano |
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Why do we teach writing the way we do? How does writing instruction fit into the larger goal of effective literacy instruction? Whether explicitly articulated or implicit in our teaching practice, theory is at the heart of sound teaching practice—or, as we will refer to it, of pedagogy. In this course, we'll examine influential theories in the teaching of writing and situate our own practices within those theories. We'll begin with a brief history of writing instruction and then focus on those theories that have been most influential in shaping the goals, content, and methods of the field of writing studies (Composition) and consider how they might also shape your own practice of the teaching of writing in whatever classroom space that might take place. We'll also consider digital writing contexts and how these are expanding the ways we theorize writing and the work of literacy instruction generally. While you'll become acquainted with a range of theoretical perspectives on teaching writing, the central goal of the course is to help you locate those theories that will best ground and enrich your own practice.
TEXTS
NOTE: All reading will be provided to you. If you are interested in purchasing the texts the reading comes from, you can research them here:
Linda Adler-Kassner & Elizabeth Wardle
Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (Classroom Edition)
Gary Tate , Amy Rupiper, & Kurt Schick , H Brooke Hessler (Editors)
A Guide to Composition Pedagogies
Irene L. Clark
Concepts in Composition 2nd Edition
Asao Inoue
Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (This is a free .PDF located on the WAC clearinghouse website)
Kakali Bhattacharya
Fundamentals of Qualitative Research
Erec Smith
A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment
COURSE OUTCOMES
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
REQUIREMENTS
Attendance & Participation: This is a graduate level class that meets once a week. Attendance is expected for every class. Please know, though, that I'm reasonable and if you talk to me about your situation, I can most likely accommodate you. However, missing more than five classes will most likely mean that you will not be able to pass the course.
Reading Responses and Class Discussion Board. Each week there is reading due, you are responsible for a 500 word response. Your response should attempt to make an argument about what the central values/ideas/argument of a particular reading or set of readings are. This kind of response is something that was a central part of my own graduate education, and I have found that, all these years later, I still use these one-pagers in my own professional life as a teacher and scholar. I mean for them to serve the same purpose in your own graduate and professional life. When we meet in person, you should bring your 500 words, printed out, to class. You should expect to share these responses with me and with your colleagues. During the weeks that we are synchronous online, be prepared to post a version of your reading response to a discussion board during class time. Please note, you can prepare for that post as you would for the reading responses we write week to week; however, the discussion board posts will be specific applications of the reading and will require a much shorter word count. They will be active documents in our class that will structure the online class time. Specific details for this assignment are located here on our class website or from the drop down menu at the top of this page.
Monday Update. Every Monday, or as close to Monday as I'm able, I will post a Monday Update to this website. You can access it here or in the drop down menu. This might be a letter or a video or a recorded powerpoint. The gist of the Monday Update will be to try to bring together ideas from our class discussions when we meet in class and discussion board posts when we meet synchronously. I will make a point to credit you with excellent ideas and to connect them to the excellent ideas of your colleagues. I may not mention every student every week. But you should not feel like you've done something wrong if I do not mention you and you should not feel penalized if I disagree with you. This is a neutral space to bring together ideas that come out of our class and our reading together. I will send out an email when the Monday Update posts and while it is not required that you read it, I hope you will come to our Tuesday class having done so.
Informal presentation. The pedagogy presentation is your only formal presentation responsibility. There will, however, be a number of occasions where you will be responsible for presenting your work-in-progress to the class. This kind of informal presentation is considered part of your regular participation in the class.
Formal Writing
There are four pieces of formal writing due during the course of the semester. Two are rather modest; two are more substantial. Specific details for these assignments can be found by clicking on the title of each below or from the drop down menu at the top of this page.
Literacy History. The literacy history is a nearly cliché writing assignment in many first year writing classrooms—and well beyond. It seems fitting to start the semester by imposing the same assignment on ourselves in an effort to understand what we really what to know when we ask our students what is your literacy history. This short, 750 word text, is mainly a personal narrative that we will develop, workshop, and turn in in the earliest part of the class. It is an opportunity to ground our further study in our own lived experience as readers and writers, as well as to introduce the assessment and workshop practices that will be a central feature of the class.
Reverse Annotated Bibliography. For many of you, this will be your first time taking a course that is not a literature class. The field of Rhetoric and Composition, or as it is more commonly called now, Writing Studies, conducts research in very different ways from literature, invokes very different theories and theorists, and considers very different texts (including student writing). Thus, the first major assignment of our class will ask you to deconstruct a current and important theorist and his work. We will be reading, as a class, Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching & Assessing Writing For a Socially Just Future. We will read a portion of the text together and then, in small groups or pairs, the class will divide up the rest of the text. Individuals will locate and read three of the articles used as reference for their assigned chapter and then write a short review of how those articles inform Inoue’s larger argument. You will present informally to the class on what you found. The point of this assignment it to simultaneously introduce you to the field in its most current form as well as to build a foundation of key theories and theorists from the field that informs it. NOTE: The live link embedded above takes you to a PDF of the entire book. In keeping with Inoue’s eye to social justice, he has made the book freely available on the WAC Clearinghouse website.
Auto-ethnography/ethnography/case-study. As I indicated above, research in Writing Studies looks very different from research in Literary Studies, but it can be difficult to approximate the breadth of difference in a graduate class. This assignment is meant to give you some experience in one of an important research method in the field as well as one that feels very different from literary analysis. You will make note of the overly long title for this assignment. As I write, I don’t know what backgrounds the members of our class bring with them—and what sort of access they have to classrooms of readers and writers. To that end, this assignment will take better shape once that information is better filled in. Essentially, however, the general movement of this assignment will be to observe a classroom—your's or someone else's—or conduct an interview with a student writer (I can help with that), and construct an argument about writing theory and pedagogy out of it. Though it is not required, you may elect to further this work in your final project for the class.
Final Project. Here again, this last project of the semester will take better shape once I know more about you and you understand more about the class. Students will have the option of extending the work they begin in the ethnography/case-study assignment, develop an original research question on a theory/pedagogical practice in writing studies, compile a substantial annotated bibliography on a particular pedagogical practice, create a writing unit plan and theoretical rational, or propose a larger scale curriculum shift for the K-12 ELA classroom. This work will take up roughly six weeks of our class and will include in-class, whole class workshops. You’ll have the opportunity to meet and talk with me one-on-one about your project as well.
Formal Presentations: Pedagogy Presentations. During the second half of the semester, using The Guide to Composition Pedagogies, folks will present individually on a particular pedagogical school. You’ll sign up for these presentations just before midterm. On the day of your presentation, you’ll be responsible for laying groundwork, leading discussion, and engaging the class in writing activities and practices that help us to learn something about various kinds of writing pedagogies. Keep in mind that due to the nature of our course, there may be some presentations that are in person and some that are online.
EVALUATION
As will become clear to you very quickly, this course, as are all of your courses, based on certain pedagogical premises that inform the assignments, requirements, and, of course, assessment and evaluation of the course. I use a combination of “spec/contract” grading and portfolio assessment.
Spec/contract grading lays out very specifically what you have to do to earn a particular grade for each assignment. The “spec” part is the requirements. The contract part is what grade meeting the different requirements earns you: essentially, we, you and I, are entering a contract whereby we both know at the outset how your grade is earned.
You might be more familiar with portfolio assessment. Essentially, The portfolio allows me the chance to give you credit for the things that grading individual papers will not let me do: effort and revision and improvement. A system like this makes room for you to develop as a writer—it makes room for failures and eventual successes. Revision as a requirement is built into the spec/contract described above and the portfolio is a place to showcase that revision, to reflect on it and to identify what you’ve learned (it works in other ways too, that we will talk about in class).
This means that while you will receive extensive feedback on all of your writing while it is in process; you will receive letter grades at the midpoint and at the end of the semester. At midterm and at the end of the semester, you will put together materials representative of your performance in the class to that point. You will receive the results of how well you met the contract for a particular assignment, and you will receive a grade letter outlining your entire performance in the class. We will meet one-on-one during the mid-point of the semester for a grade conference. I'll respond to final portfolios in writing. Complete information about portfolios is available here on this website as well as from the dropdown menu above.
Most of all, your success in this class will depend upon:
Breakdown of assessment percentages. Different assignments require different amounts of effort. The percentages that accompany each of the requirements in this class should give you an indication of the time and energy that each should take up in your student life.
Reading Responses/Discussion Board Posts 20%
Literacy History 10%
Reverse Annotated Bibliography/Midterm Portfolio 20%
(Auto)ethnography/Case-study 15%
Pedagogy Presentation 15%
Final Project/Final Portfolio 20%
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. How you could plagiarize in a class like this, I don’t know, but please do not.
Students who require accommodations. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented disability should come to see me with written documentation and suggested accommodations before the end of the first week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time.
Other Resources on Campus. There are a wide variety of services available on our campus that you might want to know about but also might just be too inundated with information to remember you have access to, so I'm including links to a variety of places on campus that I think you might want to know about. First and foremost is probably the counseling center and the wellness center. Other places you can go if you want to connect with folks: the LEGCIE Center, the Pride Center, the campus food bank, and Commuter Services. All of this is in addition to the graduate school staff, who are always happy to help you navigate your graduate career, as is the graduate coordinator in English, Halina Adams. You most likely already know this, but you can reach out to Halina at [email protected].
ONE LAST NOTE
I am very aware that many of you are working adults with busy work and family lives. I am always trying to balance the demands of a graduate level course makes on a student with the lives I know you are leading. I’m trying to make this class as useful to you as possible without it being overly burdensome. It’s work, not six flags, but I don’t want it to become your favorite thing to hate either. If as the semester progresses we need to alter our course to accommodate our shared burdens, then we’ll do this. I enjoy this material so much and want you to find some joy in it as well. Good luck to us.
Why do we teach writing the way we do? How does writing instruction fit into the larger goal of effective literacy instruction? Whether explicitly articulated or implicit in our teaching practice, theory is at the heart of sound teaching practice—or, as we will refer to it, of pedagogy. In this course, we'll examine influential theories in the teaching of writing and situate our own practices within those theories. We'll begin with a brief history of writing instruction and then focus on those theories that have been most influential in shaping the goals, content, and methods of the field of writing studies (Composition) and consider how they might also shape your own practice of the teaching of writing in whatever classroom space that might take place. We'll also consider digital writing contexts and how these are expanding the ways we theorize writing and the work of literacy instruction generally. While you'll become acquainted with a range of theoretical perspectives on teaching writing, the central goal of the course is to help you locate those theories that will best ground and enrich your own practice.
TEXTS
NOTE: All reading will be provided to you. If you are interested in purchasing the texts the reading comes from, you can research them here:
Linda Adler-Kassner & Elizabeth Wardle
Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (Classroom Edition)
Gary Tate , Amy Rupiper, & Kurt Schick , H Brooke Hessler (Editors)
A Guide to Composition Pedagogies
Irene L. Clark
Concepts in Composition 2nd Edition
Asao Inoue
Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (This is a free .PDF located on the WAC clearinghouse website)
Kakali Bhattacharya
Fundamentals of Qualitative Research
Erec Smith
A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment
COURSE OUTCOMES
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Demonstrate a working knowledge of the history of writing instruction in the University and how that history connects to a modern k-12 classroom as well as a university education in general.
- Identify significant theories of composing processes in writing
- Connect theories of composition with pedagogical practice
- Research and apply writing theories and pedagogies in ways that influence his or her own writing and/or teaching practice.
REQUIREMENTS
Attendance & Participation: This is a graduate level class that meets once a week. Attendance is expected for every class. Please know, though, that I'm reasonable and if you talk to me about your situation, I can most likely accommodate you. However, missing more than five classes will most likely mean that you will not be able to pass the course.
Reading Responses and Class Discussion Board. Each week there is reading due, you are responsible for a 500 word response. Your response should attempt to make an argument about what the central values/ideas/argument of a particular reading or set of readings are. This kind of response is something that was a central part of my own graduate education, and I have found that, all these years later, I still use these one-pagers in my own professional life as a teacher and scholar. I mean for them to serve the same purpose in your own graduate and professional life. When we meet in person, you should bring your 500 words, printed out, to class. You should expect to share these responses with me and with your colleagues. During the weeks that we are synchronous online, be prepared to post a version of your reading response to a discussion board during class time. Please note, you can prepare for that post as you would for the reading responses we write week to week; however, the discussion board posts will be specific applications of the reading and will require a much shorter word count. They will be active documents in our class that will structure the online class time. Specific details for this assignment are located here on our class website or from the drop down menu at the top of this page.
Monday Update. Every Monday, or as close to Monday as I'm able, I will post a Monday Update to this website. You can access it here or in the drop down menu. This might be a letter or a video or a recorded powerpoint. The gist of the Monday Update will be to try to bring together ideas from our class discussions when we meet in class and discussion board posts when we meet synchronously. I will make a point to credit you with excellent ideas and to connect them to the excellent ideas of your colleagues. I may not mention every student every week. But you should not feel like you've done something wrong if I do not mention you and you should not feel penalized if I disagree with you. This is a neutral space to bring together ideas that come out of our class and our reading together. I will send out an email when the Monday Update posts and while it is not required that you read it, I hope you will come to our Tuesday class having done so.
Informal presentation. The pedagogy presentation is your only formal presentation responsibility. There will, however, be a number of occasions where you will be responsible for presenting your work-in-progress to the class. This kind of informal presentation is considered part of your regular participation in the class.
Formal Writing
There are four pieces of formal writing due during the course of the semester. Two are rather modest; two are more substantial. Specific details for these assignments can be found by clicking on the title of each below or from the drop down menu at the top of this page.
Literacy History. The literacy history is a nearly cliché writing assignment in many first year writing classrooms—and well beyond. It seems fitting to start the semester by imposing the same assignment on ourselves in an effort to understand what we really what to know when we ask our students what is your literacy history. This short, 750 word text, is mainly a personal narrative that we will develop, workshop, and turn in in the earliest part of the class. It is an opportunity to ground our further study in our own lived experience as readers and writers, as well as to introduce the assessment and workshop practices that will be a central feature of the class.
Reverse Annotated Bibliography. For many of you, this will be your first time taking a course that is not a literature class. The field of Rhetoric and Composition, or as it is more commonly called now, Writing Studies, conducts research in very different ways from literature, invokes very different theories and theorists, and considers very different texts (including student writing). Thus, the first major assignment of our class will ask you to deconstruct a current and important theorist and his work. We will be reading, as a class, Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching & Assessing Writing For a Socially Just Future. We will read a portion of the text together and then, in small groups or pairs, the class will divide up the rest of the text. Individuals will locate and read three of the articles used as reference for their assigned chapter and then write a short review of how those articles inform Inoue’s larger argument. You will present informally to the class on what you found. The point of this assignment it to simultaneously introduce you to the field in its most current form as well as to build a foundation of key theories and theorists from the field that informs it. NOTE: The live link embedded above takes you to a PDF of the entire book. In keeping with Inoue’s eye to social justice, he has made the book freely available on the WAC Clearinghouse website.
Auto-ethnography/ethnography/case-study. As I indicated above, research in Writing Studies looks very different from research in Literary Studies, but it can be difficult to approximate the breadth of difference in a graduate class. This assignment is meant to give you some experience in one of an important research method in the field as well as one that feels very different from literary analysis. You will make note of the overly long title for this assignment. As I write, I don’t know what backgrounds the members of our class bring with them—and what sort of access they have to classrooms of readers and writers. To that end, this assignment will take better shape once that information is better filled in. Essentially, however, the general movement of this assignment will be to observe a classroom—your's or someone else's—or conduct an interview with a student writer (I can help with that), and construct an argument about writing theory and pedagogy out of it. Though it is not required, you may elect to further this work in your final project for the class.
Final Project. Here again, this last project of the semester will take better shape once I know more about you and you understand more about the class. Students will have the option of extending the work they begin in the ethnography/case-study assignment, develop an original research question on a theory/pedagogical practice in writing studies, compile a substantial annotated bibliography on a particular pedagogical practice, create a writing unit plan and theoretical rational, or propose a larger scale curriculum shift for the K-12 ELA classroom. This work will take up roughly six weeks of our class and will include in-class, whole class workshops. You’ll have the opportunity to meet and talk with me one-on-one about your project as well.
Formal Presentations: Pedagogy Presentations. During the second half of the semester, using The Guide to Composition Pedagogies, folks will present individually on a particular pedagogical school. You’ll sign up for these presentations just before midterm. On the day of your presentation, you’ll be responsible for laying groundwork, leading discussion, and engaging the class in writing activities and practices that help us to learn something about various kinds of writing pedagogies. Keep in mind that due to the nature of our course, there may be some presentations that are in person and some that are online.
EVALUATION
As will become clear to you very quickly, this course, as are all of your courses, based on certain pedagogical premises that inform the assignments, requirements, and, of course, assessment and evaluation of the course. I use a combination of “spec/contract” grading and portfolio assessment.
Spec/contract grading lays out very specifically what you have to do to earn a particular grade for each assignment. The “spec” part is the requirements. The contract part is what grade meeting the different requirements earns you: essentially, we, you and I, are entering a contract whereby we both know at the outset how your grade is earned.
You might be more familiar with portfolio assessment. Essentially, The portfolio allows me the chance to give you credit for the things that grading individual papers will not let me do: effort and revision and improvement. A system like this makes room for you to develop as a writer—it makes room for failures and eventual successes. Revision as a requirement is built into the spec/contract described above and the portfolio is a place to showcase that revision, to reflect on it and to identify what you’ve learned (it works in other ways too, that we will talk about in class).
This means that while you will receive extensive feedback on all of your writing while it is in process; you will receive letter grades at the midpoint and at the end of the semester. At midterm and at the end of the semester, you will put together materials representative of your performance in the class to that point. You will receive the results of how well you met the contract for a particular assignment, and you will receive a grade letter outlining your entire performance in the class. We will meet one-on-one during the mid-point of the semester for a grade conference. I'll respond to final portfolios in writing. Complete information about portfolios is available here on this website as well as from the dropdown menu above.
Most of all, your success in this class will depend upon:
- Meeting all of the requirements described above;
- The quality of your written work, including how successful your revision work is;
- The quality of your effort in the class, in workshops, in class discussion, in your groups, in conferences, and in general;
- Your demonstration of a willingness to try new things, think in new ways, and explore different perspectives as both a reader and a writer.
Breakdown of assessment percentages. Different assignments require different amounts of effort. The percentages that accompany each of the requirements in this class should give you an indication of the time and energy that each should take up in your student life.
Reading Responses/Discussion Board Posts 20%
Literacy History 10%
Reverse Annotated Bibliography/Midterm Portfolio 20%
(Auto)ethnography/Case-study 15%
Pedagogy Presentation 15%
Final Project/Final Portfolio 20%
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. How you could plagiarize in a class like this, I don’t know, but please do not.
Students who require accommodations. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented disability should come to see me with written documentation and suggested accommodations before the end of the first week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time.
Other Resources on Campus. There are a wide variety of services available on our campus that you might want to know about but also might just be too inundated with information to remember you have access to, so I'm including links to a variety of places on campus that I think you might want to know about. First and foremost is probably the counseling center and the wellness center. Other places you can go if you want to connect with folks: the LEGCIE Center, the Pride Center, the campus food bank, and Commuter Services. All of this is in addition to the graduate school staff, who are always happy to help you navigate your graduate career, as is the graduate coordinator in English, Halina Adams. You most likely already know this, but you can reach out to Halina at [email protected].
ONE LAST NOTE
I am very aware that many of you are working adults with busy work and family lives. I am always trying to balance the demands of a graduate level course makes on a student with the lives I know you are leading. I’m trying to make this class as useful to you as possible without it being overly burdensome. It’s work, not six flags, but I don’t want it to become your favorite thing to hate either. If as the semester progresses we need to alter our course to accommodate our shared burdens, then we’ll do this. I enjoy this material so much and want you to find some joy in it as well. Good luck to us.