Teaching in the 21st Century

Adapting Writing Pedagogies to the College Curriculum

Alice Robertson, Barbara Smith, Alice W. Robertson, Barbara Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780815331520
• eBook ISBN: 9781135579685
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The essays in this book argue that the active learning strategies that teachers trained in composition use for their literature courses can be exported to other disciplines to enhance both teacher performance and student learning. The book provides and explains examples of those strategies and illustrates how they have been effectively used in other disciplines.

ESSAY 1: Teaching from Within Meshing Interdisciplinary Learning and Writing Pedagogy in a University Seminar Program

STEPHEN TCHUDI
RICHARD O.DAVIES

Seven years ago, the University of Nevada at Reno instituted a university-wide seminar program containing a major writing component. This essay, written in two parts by two professors, describes how this program was introduced, implemented, and developed. The first part explains the implementation of the seminar program under the leadership of English professor Stephen Tchudi and discusses background, course structure, and results. In the second part, Richard Davies, a history professor at the same school, provides a specific, personal view of the effects and results of teaching such a university-wide seminar. The conclusions of both authors end the chapter.

UNIVERSITY SEMINARS: ORIGINS AND PHILOSOPHY

In 1992, the associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Nevada-Reno, invited faculty members to apply for an administrative internship to develop a freshman-year seminar experience. Like such programs on many campuses, this one would place new students with experienced faculty as a way of welcoming freshmen to the university community. Through a process much too long and dreary to be recounted here, I was selected for the internship and developed a program we call the University Seminars. These are sections of the conventional English 102—boringly entitled Composition II—taught by faculty members and administrators from units across campus. In a sense, this structure is the reverse of traditional writing-across-the-curriculum projects:It might be labeled “Writing Across the Curriculum Comes to Freshman English.”

As I write after the fifth year of the program, over fifty faculty members and administrators have participated, offering about ten sections of the course each year, open as an alternative to English 102. Class size is limited to eighteen (regular freshman English classes enroll twenty-two) as a modest perk for faculty teaching writing for the first time. In the fall semester, all sections of the course are taught to honors students, generally first-year students who, because of their writing skill, have waived English 101. The clientele for the spring semesters is quite different: Seminars are open to any student in the university needing the required 102, and this may range from second-semester freshmen who are proceeding through the university on schedule to fifth- and sixth-year seniors who have delayed taking the required 102 as long as possible (or who have taken it previously and failed the course). Ideally, we’d like the model to be attractive to any student in the university, with the course taken as early in the student’s career as possible.

Faculty have been especially imaginative in coming up with topics that reflect their own interests yet will engage the interests and sensibilities of students. Current offerings include such courses as Reading, Thinking, and Writing about Controversies, taught by a journalism professor; South American Women and Gender Issues, by a professor of foreign languages; Culture and Dance, from health and physical recreation; Language and Social Interaction, by a professor of English as a second language; From Gutenberg to Cyberspace, by a professor of education; and Medicine and Science, team-taught by a chemistry professor and a member of the medical school faculty. Our all-time student favorite seminar is Star Trek, Visions of Justice, taught three times by a professor of criminal justice.

The response to these seminars has been gratifying, from both students and faculty. We presently have a backlog of over twenty faculty members who’d like to teach in the program, but who could not be worked in due to limitations of available sections. One of our “regulars” is the coauthor on this paper, Dick Davies from the Department of History, who has thrice taught an extremely popular seminar in Sports in American Society.

In developing these seminars, I was faced with the core problem directly discussed in this volume: how to adapt writing pedagogy to discipline-specific (or in this case, interdiscipline-specific) classrooms. In particular, I wondered how I could encourage faculty members and administrators who might or might not have had much experience teaching writing to do so comfortably. Perhaps predictably, one of the most common reasons offered by faculty who declined to teach was their discomfort with writing: “I struggled with freshman English myself; I’m not all that happy with my professional writing, and now you want me to teach it?!”

The approach that I developed grows from my own teaching of college writing in a variety of settings and from my allegiance to what I call an “experiential” approach to learning writing. I believe that writing is better learned than taught: learned through the experience of writing (with plenty of coaching and mentoring), and with human experience as the fuel that drives the writing engine.¹

In reassuring instructors, I ask them to forget about trying to be “English professors,” with all that implies. Rather, I argue that the instructors’ knowledge of their own field(s), whether medicine, chemistry, criminal justice, Asian-American studies, political science, or nursing is precisely the sort of rich experience they should share with their students. “Your job,” I tell them, “is not to teach rhetoric or grammar or spelling, but to help students engage with the material, to think about it, and to share their ideas and thoughts with others.” I also argue that, although we are necessarily concerned with surface correctness, a great many of students’ surface problems come, not from lack of language skill, but from lack of experience handling complex ideas. Moreover, the university has a writing center that can offer proofreading as well as revision guidance. From a theoretical standpoint, then, the University Seminar approach to writing (and oral language) sees language development as an outgrowth of experience rather than a formula or restrictive container for it.

I also decided early in the project that formal in-service training in writing was probably not appropriate for the University Seminar instructors. In the first place, it was pragmatically impossible to get these folks together for as much as a half day of workshopping. More important, I wanted to stress that what I was saying about the teaching of writing applied to the learning of the teaching of writing as well; that is, we could coherently discuss writing not through formal workshops but through informal sessions where we dealt with problems as they arose. We thus developed a collegial system of sharing pedagogical wisdom, where instructors for upcoming seminars are invited to sit in on a series of informal “syllabus swaps” and brown-bag lunches with those currently teaching in the program. Perhaps not surprisingly, virtually any topic I could propose for a formal workshop comes up in our brown-bag discussions: How do we encourage reluctant writers? What about students who have great ideas but no fluency? What do I do about spelling and grammar? Is there a right way to respond to student papers?

It’s important to note that all these questions are discussed in the context of the instructor’s (inter)disciplinary course, in the context of struggling with a paper about justice in the Star Trek series, or issues in sports ethics, or narratives as a form of academic writing, or using the internet as a research tool. In that way, I am able to keep the discussions focused through the central premise of the program, that the instructor’s knowledge of the discipline and his or her concern for young people’s ideas are what make a “teacher of writing.”

Over the five years, in fact, a considerable body of composition-teaching wisdom has grown up in the UNR seminars and is passed along from one teaching generation to the next, by me, by second- and thirdtime instructors, by osmosis and word of mouth at the brown bags. I should add that I have taught the seminars myself, once with the university president, a political scientist, on the theme Current Issues and Enduring Concerns, once with the associate vice president for academic affairs, a physicist and car restoring hobbyist, on The Automobile in American Life. Obviously such experience gives me the opportunity to raise issues in the brown-bag seminars. Perhaps not surprisingly, my questions as a teacher of content/writing are not very different from those of the other faculty.

Typically a University Seminar opens with a period of exploration of the main topic with most of the input provided by the instructor. Whether we’re studying automobiles or sports issues, the professor supplies readings, engages the students in discussion, and encourages response. To put everyone at ease—faculty and students—we encourage informal writing for the first third of the course: We call these “commentaries,” and they are rather like a public journal in form and focus. The students articulate their reactions to the ideas floating in the seminar. In the middle third of the course, the professors ask the students themselves to find material on the topic through library and internet searches, through interviews, through film and video archives. Students collect and share information; they continue to write commentaries, but they are increasingly engaged in noting, summarizing, synthesizing, and evaluating documents they have discovered for themselves. In the final third of the course, each student chooses a topic related to the course theme and develops a research paper on it. But this is not the typical college research paper of footnotes and passive voice; we encourage the instructors and students to fill these papers with voice, energy, commitment, passion, and style, reflecting our belief (to reiterate) that the best writing emerges when people are richly engaged in their study.

Some instructors use this part of the course as an occasion to introduce real-world writing in their own fields or disciplines, say, the form of the environmental impact statement for a course on Range and Wildlife Management or a public policy statement in a course on Voices of South African Women. Other instructors encourage students to seek out a form of presentation that will allow them to best express their ideas, so we have had students create film scripts, videos, photo essays, feature articles, and letters to the editor. In addition, each student in the seminar does a poster display summarizing his/her research, and these posters are shown at a mass meeting of all seminars, a closing event where 100–150 students set up displays with posters and papers, respond to one another’s work (using Post-its provided by the management), and award gold seals to projects they think are particularly well done. In addition, within each seminar section, the students themselves select two papers they think are particularly well done for publication in a University Seminar journal, I² or Eye-Squared, which reinforces the notion that what students see and think (the Eye and the I) is multiplied in power when put in writing.

TEACHING A UNIVERSITY SEMINAR

During seventeen midcareer years devoted to the responsibilities of academic dean, vice president for academic affairs, and interim president, I had many opportunities to address the importance of undergraduate writing. From my lofty administrative perches, I endorsed, without in-depth reflection, the concept of Writing Across the Curriculum, and I publicly stated upon several occasions that I considered freshman composition to be one of the most important courses in the curriculum because it provides the foundation upon which a college education is built.

When actually presented with the opportunity to teach writing in the University Seminars program at the University of Nevada-Reno, I had serious doubts. However, given my previous comments as well as a curiosity about teaching in a field other than American History, I could scarcely decline. The seminar concept was appealing to me—putting senior faculty into a freshman writing class. The assumption of the program is that faculty will draw on their own writing experiences and have the freedom to devote the entire seminar to a major theme. It was, however, with substantial unease that I accepted the invitation. Although I have published extensively in my field of modern American history, have written far more academic planning documents and curriculum reports for governing boards and legislative committees than I care to recall, and have contributed scores of articles to mainstream journals and newspapers, the prospect of standing in front of a group of freshmen and suggesting that I could teach them how to write effectively was daunting. Far removed from my safe academic haven of history, lacking any formal training in composition theory and practice, and with my knowledge of the rules and nomenclature of grammar seriously eroded, I experienced apprehension reminiscent of my early days as an inexperienced teaching assistant at the University of Missouri four decades ago.

Fortunately, the University Seminars program is well structured, with the care and feeding of neophyte composition instructors such as myself given a high priority. The instructor’s manual provided me with clear course objectives and practical suggestions for course organization. Syllabi of prior seminars were available. The various workshops and brown bags provided opportunities to discuss goals and teaching strategies with the program director as well as with other faculty.

One of the most appealing aspects of the program for students and faculty alike is that the faculty member is expected to focus upon a topic or theme drawn from his or her own research and/or teaching. While my fellow faculty pursued such intriguing subjects as the murder mystery, medical ethics, gender issues, natural resource management, research in cyberspace, and the current incarnations of The Seven Deadly Sins, I elected to examine the unique place of sports within modern American life. My choice of a seminar theme grew out of a lifetime of experiences, including an undistinguished high school athletic career, a brief stint as a sports journalist, a longtime avocation as a high school and college basketball referee, extensive faculty committee work on athletic governance and coach search committees, oversight of intercollegiate athletic programs as an academic administrator, a lifetime of daily reading two or three newspaper sports sections as well as Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, and more recently the creation and offering of an upper-division course, History of Sports in America, and publication of an interpretative history.

I initially offered the Sports and Society seminar in the fall of 1995, and made repeat appearances in 1996 and 1997. Enrollment was restricted to eighteen students who had earned admission to the Honors Program (again, the fall semester seminars are open to honors students, the spring seminars to all students). Although I had the privilege of working with bright and highly motivated students, I am persuaded that the concept of the seminars is equally applicable to a more normal distribution of freshmen, as indeed the program has demonstrated on several occasions.

Each Sports and American Society seminar was organized to accomplish the following goals:

• To introduce the students to an appreciation of how sports have reflected and even influenced larger issues.

I confronted students with issues drawn from the rapidly expanding body of American sports history literature as well as the pages of current newspapers and magazines. These subjects included racism and racial discrimination; the influence of money; the impact of print and electronic media; the ongoing ethical and educational dilemmas posed by intercollegiate athletics; sexual discrimination and the struggle for equal opportunity by female athletes; the shadowy specter of the $90 billion annual sports gambling (mostly illegal) industry; the impact of the Olympics and other forms of international sports competition upon American foreign policy and American values; and the benefits and liabilities of the heavy emphasis placed upon youth programs, such as Little League, gymnastics competitions, and interscholastic sports programs. I never conceived of the seminar as merely providing opportunities to improve writing skills, and from the beginning fully intended that each student complete the seminar with a substantially enhanced appreciation of the complexities of the world of American sports.

• To expose my students to the processes of critical thinking.

A hefty required-reading list provided seminar continuity and the basis for classroom discussions. Two books (including, modestly, my own America’s Obsession, along with A Brief History of American Sports by Elliott Gorn and Warren Goldstein) were assigned to provide a historical perspective, and one anthology was selected to present conflicting readings on six major contemporary issues. Students were expected to approach each reading assignment carefully and analytically. We spent considerable classroom time identifying an author’s point of view and probing the assumptions upon which an article or book was based. By the end of the seminar, students had become so familiar with the process that they were not only instinctively identifying an author’s central thesis, but also comparing and contrasting it to other articles or books they had read. The use and misuse of evidence provided a common discussion topic. We used newspapers and popular magazines to supplement the texts, with the unstated assumption being that intelligent readers should exercise the tools of critical thinking not only when reading academic materials, but while reading the daily newspaper, a news magazine, or even listening to a radio sports-talk show.

Each student was assigned individually two books that explored a major topic (e.g., George Will’s Men at Work; Robert Higgs’s God in the Stadium; J.D.Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights; Randy Roberts’s Papa Jack; Robin Lester’s The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago; Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment; and Michael Oriard’s Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle). The student presented each member of the seminar a tightly written two-page summary of the book, the purpose being to identify and critically examine the author’s point of view, central thesis, frame of reference, use of evidence, and contribution to knowledge. The student was expected to expand orally upon his/her written summary and critical analysis, and I attempted to draw other students into the dialogue by relating the book in question to previously discussed books and articles or to concurrently assigned textual material. Frequently, a book’s central theme would be related to current issues on the front pages of the sports section. Students brought their examination of their particular book to a conclusion by submitting a formal review essay.

• To provide each student with a series of writing experiences that would enable her/him to develop the skills necessary to present ideas in effective written form.

With this goal in mind, I organized the seminar to provide students with opportunities to write several papers of four to seven pages in length. In order to emphasize the processes of conceptualization, research, organization, drafting, revision, editing, and ultimately producing a finished product, I implemented several stages where preliminary drafts were exposed to critical analysis by their peers. Students not only had the opportunity to rewrite their own papers in response to criticisms received, but to learn the responsibilities of a critic by reviewing the drafts presented by several classmates. During my second and third seminars, I gave peer review much greater attention than in the first. It was one of the most important revisions I made based upon my evaluation of my first seminar. I found that this provided each student with an appreciation of the several draft stages through which good writing must be taken and helped each to learn to accept valid criticism, as well as how to provide it in a nonthreatening, positive fashion.

After I had read and commented upon their papers, students were given an opportunity to rewrite their papers if substantial problems remained. For most students the process of taking an essay through several drafts was a new experience, and in my judgment, it created an environment that contributed to marked improvement in writing skills. If students were dissatisfied with the grade assigned, they could always rewrite. Because I was blessed with honors students, there were few problems with the fundamentals of usage. Cons...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Essay 1: Teaching from Within: Meshing Interdisciplinary Learning and Writing Pedagogy in a University Seminar Program
• Essay 2: It Came from Aristotle: Teaching Film with Rhetoric
• Essay 3: Why Lecture? Using Alternatives to Teach College Mathematics
• Essay 4: Experiences with Writing Assignments in Upper-Division Computer Science Courses
• Essay 5: Informing Our Values and Sexual Behavior through the Use of Writing Communities
• Essay 6: Students Writing the Ghetto into Short Fiction: An Experiment in Teaching (Literary) Analysis
• Essay 7: Teaching Literature As/Is a Process
• Essay 8: Role-playing in the Interdisciplinary Classroom
• Essay 9: Performing Politics: Poetry in a Writing Classroom
• Essay 10: A Pedagogy of Community and Collaboration: A Beginning
• Essay 11: Authority, Collaboration, and Ownership: Sources for Critical Writing and Portfolio Assessment
• Essay 12: Interpretive Communities: Making Use of Readings and Misreadings in the Literature Classroom and Elsewhere
• Essay 13: Read, Write, and Learn: Improving Literacy Instruction Across the Disciplines
• Essay 14: Emerging Meaning: Reading as a Process
• Essay 15: Critical Theory: A Jump Start and Road Map for Student Writers
• Essay 16: Teaching, Writing, Changes: Disciplines, Genres, and the Errors of Professional Belief
• Essay 17: The Tie that Binds: Toward an Understanding of Ideology in the Composition and Literature Classrooms (and Beyond)
• Essay 18: Blurring Boundaries: Rhetoric in Literature and Other Classrooms
• Essay 19: The Composition-ing of Culture and Anarchy: Recovering a Cultural Conflict in Arnold’s Serene Text
• Essay 20: Case Studies in the Writing Classroom: Theory and Practice
• Author Biographies