114B Syllabus Rationale
As I sit here gathering together all of my notes, I am struck by how profoundly ironic it is that I have no earthly idea how to write a syllabus rational, because so much of my approach to the 114 classes has been about confronting students with genres which are unfamiliar to them. Now I’m getting a taste of my own medicine, I suppose. That’s fine. I shall gracefully take it in stride.
I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s back up and take a look at the big picture.
I’ve developed an approach to First Year Composition that is centered around a handful of key concepts which I believe to be important and which are also, essentially, of such a practical nature that they can easily be viewed as prescriptive.
- First and foremost, I approach the composition classroom as a writing classroom. Though I have a year of pedagogical training, I’ve also been a creative writer for nearly three decades. I’m at my most effective as an instructor when I can draw on all of my experience and knowledge in service of the students. The creative writing classroom privileges product over process, because the end-reader only ever sees the polished product, but it values process because without it there would be no product. The creative writing class understands that authors develop their own unique processes. My role then, in the First Year Composition classroom, is to shepherd my fledgling writers in the direction of polished final product and along the way, to expose them to as many effective elements of process as I can. This thinking goes hand-in-hand with my second major key concept:
- The metaphor of the toolbox. My students hear about “the toolbox” more than frequently. I believe it is helpful to contextualize writing skills this way. To identify or demonstrate a skill and then - through the process of metaphor - help the students understand that they now have an additional “tool” which they will place into their writing toolbox, for use later. This metaphor is both descriptive and prescriptive. Often we will approach a (generally short) text with the intention of performing a deconstruction of that text, in the manner that good old Jacque Derrida taught us to do; identifying the component parts of a text, attempting to understand their mechanical functions, but also probing them for their ideological prejudices. In this way we can learn from models by disassembling them. I derived this sort of approach by expanding on Douglas Hesse who, in his article “Occassions, Sources, and Strategies” advocates for the importance of understanding components, explaining, “Focusing on how a few theoretical principles are enacted in different writing situations allows students to see how different plausible texts result” (50). I’ve found this to be a wonderfully egalitarian project because it ultimately empowers students when they realize that all writing is the sum of its parts, and not imbued with any magic which is unattainable to them. This realization drives home the point that all writing products are the result of writing process and that the tools students have collected in their toolbox will allow them to build whatever sort of writing they choose.
- It is of value then, to expose students to numerous types of writing. Specifically I have taken (and adapted) a page from Dr. Ian Barnard’s book Upsetting Composition Commonplaces and attempted to expose students to non-traditional genres about which they do not have an existent set of preconceptions. Barnard advocates the teaching of manifestos and zines (small, self-published magazines), he argues that these forms resist the “narrow constructions of argument and college composition (and academic writing) in general” (127), but I feel that any form of writing which represents a brand new genre can facilitate the sort of metacognition that we hope to instill in our students. Exposure to new genres requires students to attempt to contextualize those new genres in, around, or between, genres that they already understand. As Paul Butler explained in his article “Toward a Pedagogy of Writing Immersion: Using Imitation in the Composition Classroom”, students “acquire language by understanding oral and written messages whose linguistic forms and structure are just beyond our current level of competence” (107). This process of exposure to new genres is a way of placing students in a position where they are required to confront writing which is just beyond their level of competence and therefore necessitates a deconstruction during which students examine their toolboxes and identify the mechanisms of genre with which they are already familiar. It is a process of developing genre awareness by the use of binaries. For instance, in the case of an autoethnography, students have to ask, “How is this a biography?” and “How is this not a biography?”, “How is it a research paper?” and “How is it different from a research paper?” This parsing of particulars is literally the act of developing genre awareness at the mechanical level of writing. I have found that it has the additional benefit of allowing students to then invent their own process of writing when tasked with the creation of their own autoethnography. Some students lean more heavily on the research elements, others rely more heavily on deep description. Neither is wrong for an autoethnography, but the choices the students make represent their growth as writers.
- Finally, I make every attempt to treat the composition classroom as a writing laboratory. Gone are the days when the composition teacher is the arbiter of good taste and resident disciplinarian. There is no wrong or right way to write, there is simply that which is most appropriate and most effective for a given project. Our projects are simply experiments in genres, the transfer of skills and knowledge from one genre to another is the ultimate goal. Students always bring their own unique sets of existing knowledge into a classroom, just as they bring their own idiosyncratic relationships with language. My role is that of a facilitator, helping them to synthesize their knowledge and their identities into their own writerly voices and to guide them in the refinement and use of those voices.
This is all quite high-minded of course. I constantly press myself to remember what Kathleen Blake Yancey told us in her article “Attempting the Impossible: Designing a First-Year Composition Course” when she wrote, “what the course needs to accomplish cannot be achieved in the time given to it” (321). Ours is an endeavor of idealism which must be conducted under the most practical of circumstances. Yancey later tells us that our job ultimately is to help students develop “habits of mind” (322) and I believe that those habits are portable and will transfer not just across genres and disciplines, but across all of the years of our students’ lives.
Keeping this goal in mind, I have attempted to design a syllabus which is holistic (or as holistic as is practicably possible in the context of a First Year Comp class at a public university). I have endeavored to design a syllabus which values product in so far as it is the result of effective process. For instance, grades are calculated on a 1,000 point scale. The size of this scale is so large that it discourages students from attempting to conceptualize individual exercises as a way to earn points. Nothing would more quickly assist in the production of lackluster writing as the idea that it can be quantified in terms of points. Conversely however, the final portfolio project constitutes 500 points, or half of all the available points. This emphasizes that the project of writing is a recursive one and guarantees that by the end of the semester students have drafted and revised their writing (as part of the individual projects), but also that they have returned to that writing again as part of their portfolio revision. The goal here is to emphasize that we do not leave our writing by the side of the road when a project is completed, but rather that we can always return to it and view it with fresh eyes and re-envision it with new thinking and skills. In addition to the grading scale, I have also included a verbal section that briefly describes the goals and expectations of each grade. For instance an A paper is one that is “polished” and “insightful, while a B is “solid” and “thoughtful”, and so on. I find that students respond more vigorously to these concepts than they do to the abstractions of points.
The syllabus also contains all of the old chestnuts about plagiarism and attendance and such, but I have also added a section of “Professor’s Advice” which encourages things like taking notes and not procrastinating. I have specifically placed this section at the very end of the syllabus so that a rather dry and pro forma document ends with a touch of humanity, and an indication that the professor is an advocate and guide and the fascinating journey ahead.
Works Cited
Barnard, Ian. Upsetting Composition Commonplaces. Logan: Utah State University Press. 2014. Print.
Butler, Paul. “Toward a Pedagogy of Writing Immersion: Using Imitation in the Composition
Classroom.” Journal of College Writing Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2011. Print.
Hesse, Douglas. “Occasions, Sources, and Strategies.” First-Year Composition: From Theory to
Practice. Ed. Deborah Coxwell-Teague, Ronald F. Lunsford. Parlor Press, 2014. 49-65. Print.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Attempting the Impossible: Designing a First-Year Composition Course.”
First-Year Composition: From Theory to Practice. Ed. Deborah Coxwell-Teague, Ronald F.
Lunsford. Parlor Press, 2014. 321-342. Print.