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.
You will finish this course with an excellent syllabus for teaching college composition (or another writing course) and an engaging writing assignment for which you have developed an effective assessment. We will also talk about AI and explore how using AI shapes writing, so that you will understand both the power and the limitation for how this new technological tool is changing the nature of writing.
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 and experiences teaching composition and generating composition 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 by every class member is essential for success in this course.
To facilitate this socially-based learning, students in this class will read and share their writing 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, significant class time will be allocated to read and discuss everyone’s writing for the course.
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. (That means I will try to get myself to stop talking all the time; please help me to keep quiet by speaking up yourself!) 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.
Holistic Embodied Pedagogy
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/the celestial also play a role in human well being, particularly in helping us to think about a universe beyond ourselves.
