Winter 2024 ENGL 471
Instructor: Dylan L Medina
Course Description and Outcomes
Although the teaching of writing as a practice has existed in various manifestations for hundreds of years, it has primarily existed as a subject of study since the 1960s and the emergence of the “process movement.” Prior to the 1960s, writing instruction consisted mainly of teaching and evaluating product-oriented skills such as organization, paragraphing, sentence construction, grammar, spelling, and so forth. These “technical” skills were meant to help students prepare and present their texts—their written products—to teachers who then corrected them (often with the infamous red pens). By the 1960s, however, writing teachers, influenced by work in creativity research and cognitive psychology as well as by political exigencies, became interested not just in the finished product of writing but in the processes of its production, hence a shift in focus from a product- to a process-driven writing instruction that we now call the process movement. While today the product approach is far from extinct, the process movement has nonetheless played a large role in making the field of composition studies—and this course, for that matter—possible by giving writing teachers and scholars something to study in addition to something to teach, namely the conditions—socio-political, material, linguistic, psychological, and cognitive—that shape writers’ composing processes. As a result, the past sixty years have witnessed a wealth of research studies, theories, and practices that examine and encourage students’ writing development.
This course will introduce you to and help you work with some of these approaches that guide the study and teaching of writing. We will explore the different methods of teaching writing that have emerged in the last fifty years, from text production to assessment. We will examine the research and theories that underscore these methods, starting with the emergence of the process movement itself and then inquiring into its various manifestations in the years since, including the impact of new media and an increasingly globalized and multilingual reality. Along the way, we will think critically about the values and assumptions that guide these approaches and whose interests they serve, so that we all can become more self-reflective readers, writers, and teachers. Most of all, I would like this course to give us a chance to think about what it means to teach writing, to develop and share our own goals for teaching writing, and to generate and articulate practices that will help us achieve these goals in the contexts of the schools, communities, and state-mandated requirements in which we teach.
As such, the course goals are as follows:
- To familiarize you with the various theories and approaches that inform writing instruction.
- To help you develop the critical ability to examine the values and assumptions behind the various approaches (whose interests they serve, what they enable and what they prevent).
- To provide an opportunity for you to conduct writing-related research.
- To introduce you to a theoretical vocabulary that will allow you to articulate your goals as a writing teacher.
- To give you a chance to develop a range of teaching materials that will help you achieve your goals in the context of grade-level and state and national standards.
Course Outline
This course is currently going through some redesign, and as such there will be some changes to the outline below. However, I see this course following these major thematic units. Each unit will be broken into one (1) or more weekly modules. You will have assignments due on Fridays. I'll be expecting that you've gone through each week's readings at least once by class on Thursday to facilitate discussions.
Weekly Flow
Each week will have a rhythm to it, I hope. We have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Unless I note otherwise, Tuesday will be instructor lead discussions and activities. I will be using that opportunity for us to discuss difficult concepts that you'll encounter in the readings and make connections between the current week and previous week.
On Thursdays, after the first week, one group per week will be leading discussion for the first hour. If the group takes the entire two (2) hour block, that's fine. If not, I'll pick up the discussion for the second hour. The group will be leading discussion on the readings assigned for the week. I'll be expecting that you'll have done those, and if it feels like we haven't, I do reserve the right to use a quiz to assess my suspicion.
You will generally have some form of work due on Friday or Monday (we'll discuss this in class on the first day). Each week will be different, and I intend to make assignments cumulative, so if you miss a weeks' assignment, it will make the following week much more challenging.
Units
Pre-process: Writing Studies started in the United States just after the American Civil War (late 1860s), and it was a response to increasing enrollments that went along with post-war urbanization. This paradigm was rooted in Enlightenment thought and is largely frowned upon today.
Process: In the middle of the 20th century (give or take) the focus shifted away from Enlightenment views of writing and towards writing as some sort of process. Most students I have met have taken a class in writing that was influenced by the Process Movement. Basically, if you write in stages (pre-writing, draft, revision, polishing, submission) then you are doing process.
Post-Process: This is what I'm going to call the movements from the 1980s and 1990s that followed the process movement. They introduced the notion of writing as a social phenomenon. Seeing writing in this way means we need to focus on the purpose of the writing, the writer, the audience, and the general social context in which the writing occurs.
Critical/Radical/Antiracist Pedagogy: Over the last 60-70 years there have been various movements that identified and challenged implicit and explicit bias in education. Each movement rooted their critique in some progressive social theory ranging from Marxism to anti-racism to feminism and so on. We will spend several weeks exploring these.
Translingual and Multimodal Pedagogy: While this could be grouped with the previous unit, the previous unit is largely about criticizing rather than making recommendations on how to teach. These movements follow the various progressive, critical movements and are informed by them, but they offer us ways to reconsider writing.
Summary
By the end of the term, you'll be familiar with my version of the story of Writing Studies. You'll also have engaged with various pedagogical paradigms, and you'll be prepared to begin to articulate what you believe as a teacher. You'll also be able to design and build courses and course materials for your own teaching in the future.
Grading
I have problems with grades.
First, since they carry so much weight in the university, they become a main focus and motivating force for students. Grades as we understand them are a measure of correctness, and so the focus becomes being correct rather than learning. Learning requires us to move into territory where we're incorrect and make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.
Second, grades are used to rank students and to keep students out of majors. For instance, many competitive majors here require a GPA of more than 3.8 to get into the major. This means that only students who are good at getting good grades get into the major. Since there is competition built into most grading systems (ie. grading on curves and so on), grades hinder collaboration and mutual support.
Third, grades attempt to quantify students in a way that is unfair and unreasonable. For instance, a class that uses tests to quantify student performance will privilege students who are good at taking tests, which we know is not necessarily a good indicator of intelligence or academic potential. This is particularly true if the tests are poorly designed instruments. In classes like writing classes where tests are inappropriate, grades are often based on either a rubric or the subjective tastes of the instructor. Rubrics are designed by program administrators, who have their own biases on what the characteristics of "good" writing are. Likewise, instructors have languages with which they are more or less familiar. Students who grew up with language practices that fit the rubric or the instructor's tastes will have an advantage.
Finally, grades apply unnatural pressure on the learning context. I believe students do the most interesting work when they have some freedom to find their own place in the course material.
All of this said, there are two things that make me give you grades:
- The university requires it. If I don't give you a grade at the end of the term, I will get in trouble.
- Grades can serve as effective motivators to make sure that you complete the work that I feel is necessary to reach the outcomes.
Possible Solutions
There are numerous solutions to the grade problem I described above ranging from complicated rubrics that account for possible institutional bias to ungrading systems that use grades conventionally but fewer of them to labor based grading systems that attempt to shift the focus of grades away from the quality of the work and onto the quantity of the labor. In the past, I've used labor based contracts, and I like them a lot, but they are a bit confusing and remain biased (students who have to work, for example, will have less time to put in extra labor for my class and therefore get lower grades).
While I have problems with grades, they do provide some motivation, particularly when we're busy and would rather be playing video games. For motivation, they can be used in two ways: as sticks or as carrots. To use a grade as a stick means that you set the default grade quite high and penalize students for missing things. To use the grade as a carrot means you set the default grade quite low and provide students with extra work they could do to get to the maximum grade.
What we're doing
If you complete all parts of each assignment, you will earn a 4.0 in this class. I anticipate that this will be quite easy, so as long as you're doing the work, your grade should be quite high. If you miss work, I'll be making deductions based on how significant I believe the work is for you to achieve the course outcomes.
There will be three types of work:
Minor Assignments: These will include any quizzes, short responses, reflections or other work that I assign you with as we go through the course. You can miss two of these before you start receiving deductions and you will receive a 0.05 GPA deduction for each missing one. Everyone misses work sometimes, and missing out on a few of these will not hinder your ability to achieve the outcomes.
Major Assignments: These will include larger tasks like leading discussion, teaching artifacts, and other assignments. You cannot miss any of these and will receive a 0.25 GPA deduction for each one missed. If you miss these, you've missed a significant learning opportunity and a major element of the outcomes.
Projects: There will be two projects this quarter: a teaching portfolio and a presentation. These are demonstrations that you have accomplished the outcomes. You will receive a 2.0 GPA deduction for each one of these that you miss. If you miss one of these, I feel like you have not fulfilled the requirements to earn credit for this class.
Due Dates
You'll see that I'm not the most punctual person in the world, but I'm trying very hard to be. As a result, I don't feel like it's fair if I hold you to stricter deadlines than I do myself. I don't close assignments; however, I can see when you submitted them. If you are more than 24 hours late, you'll need to touch base with me before you turn it, and I'll mark that we spoke. If you're more than a week late and we haven't spoken, then you won't be able to submit the assignment. Of course, I will be flexible if you have a serious issue come up in life.