April 28, 2005
A&S council rethinking how writing is taught
A proposed change in the writing requirement for students in the College of Arts and Sciences will be among the items under discussion next week at a meeting sponsored by the college’s Writing Council.
Set for 3:30 to 5 p.m. Monday, May 2, in the Walker-Ames Room, Kane, the meeting is officially called “Next Steps: A Public Forum on Transforming Student Writing,” and it’s designed to solicit input from the campus community.
“Two years ago we had a meeting like this at which we talked about the then-current Undergraduate Curriculum Writing Committee,” said John Webster, the college’s writing director. “Some recommendations were made and implemented. Now the question is, what’s next?”
The earlier recommendations called for the creation of both the Writing Council and the writing director position Webster now occupies. Since then, Webster and the council have put together two pilot projects — a collegewide writing center and a special workshop for faculty. Now they’re suggesting a fundamental change in the way students learn writing.
“What current practice has been is to have one composition, or C course and two writing intensive, or W courses,” Webster explained. “The C course is a gateway from high school writing to college writing. But 10 weeks isn’t a long time to learn this. The council feels we owe it to our students to do more. So we’re entertaining ways of reorganizing and rethinking our three required courses.”
The idea the council will be floating at the meeting is to require two C courses and one W course, and to alter the way the two latter courses are taught. The first C course would be administered, as it always has been, by the English Department. But the second course would not be done by any one department. Just how it would be administered is yet to be decided, but the council has some definite ideas about how this course, and the W course to follow, should be taught.
“The old thing was, if you knew some grammar and some style, you were fine. That’s part of what we offer in the composition courses run by the English Department,” Webster said. “But by itself the old model won’t work. We can give students a certain level of writing skills, and we do a pretty good job of that. What happens, though, is when you put a student with pretty good writing skills in an unfamiliar situation where they don’t know the forms, they don’t know the conventions, they don’t know what knowledge means in that field, their writing doesn’t sound very good. What we need is to work with disciplinary faculty so they can first of all see what skills their students come in with, then see how to meet students where they are and show them how to use the skills they’ve got to negotiate the demands of disciplinary writing.”
The new workshops created by the Writing Council this year have already begun this collaborative work. Called the 4 by 4 workshops, they have brought together groups of four faculty from each of four departments with the idea of revising classes to be more writing rich. The faculty went through training in the fall and taught a revised course in winter. Some of them presented their revised courses at a follow-up meeting.
One of those presenters, Judith Stone-Goldman from Speech and Hearing Sciences, said she felt excited by the results she got when she incorporated ideas from the 4 by 4 into her teaching.
“I incorporated writing for different purposes into the class,” she said. “I used to assign a paper and graded it, but this time I had students write in reaction to a video they’d seen, or in reaction to the reading they were doing. I also had them write preliminary papers and then revise them.”
Stone-Goldman said this approach seemed to help students learn through writing, and therefore changed their previous attitude that writing is not important. She also created, in collaboration with a colleague, what Webster calls a “grading rubric” — criteria by which to judge the writing — and it wasn’t all about grammar and style.
“We tried to define what it means to write well in our field,” Stone-Goldman said. “We came up with things like being specific and accurate and using powerful examples to back up your ideas.”
She said students liked having the rubric and told her they used it when they were working on their papers.
Another presenter, Lorna Rhodes from the Anthropology Department, said she created a sequential writing project for her students. They did two practice papers that were low stakes, then a final one that was high stakes. Because she was working with graduate students, she asked them to present their final paper as if they were on a panel at a national conference, complete with limited podium time and questions from the “audience” of their classmates.
“The students told me the process helped prepare them for the final project and that the project pushed them forward into a role they don’t usually have at this stage of their careers,” Rhodes said. “As graduate students they already knew how to write conventional papers, but this approach created a sequence in which they could experiment with writing as an integral part of learning how to relate to the material of the course.”
That’s exactly the kind of writing Webster and the council are after. The idea of having the 4 by 4 was to introduce these methods to a group of faculty from a given department in hopes that those faculty would share what they’d learned with others. Rhodes said she and her colleagues in Anthropology plan to do just that by offering a departmental workshop in the fall.
In the meantime, Webster and the council hope to draw others into the conversation about writing at the meeting.
“We will try to outline where we’ve been, where we are and where we see us going,” Webster said. “And we will invite people to participate with us in a set of conversations. We’ll have a presentation, then divide into groups, with a member of the council at each table.”
Although the new writing requirement, if adopted, would only apply to students in the College of Arts and Sciences, that translates into about 65 percent of the total student body.
“I’m sure people engaged in the teaching of writing in other parts of campus will be quite interested in what we do,” Webster said.
The meeting is open to anyone who is interested. No pre-registration is required.
