Tue Sep 2: Getting Started
Reading: St. Martin’s Guide, chapters 1 and 2
Theory/History: Kathy Yancey: “Writing in the 21st Century”
Activities: Syllabus review and first day discussion
Tue Sep 9: Assignment Design
Readings: St. Martin’s Guide, Chapter 4
Theory/History: Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, National Writing Project, “Framework for Success”; Patrick Sullivan, “A Lifelong Aversion to Writing”
Activities: Discuss reading; workshop your first assignments (post to “First assignments” folder on course Google Drive site); workshop possible topics for discussion lead (Cheryl and Lisa will provide possible leads for sources; formal proposal, readings, and day’s activities due 9/30 to “Discussion Lead” folder in Google Drive)
Possible topics:
- Students’ Right to Their Own Language (and Identities) [Maggie]
- Labor Issues in the Teaching of Composition and the University
- Writing Across the Curriculum, Communication Across the Curriculum
- Multilingual Writers/Learners [Michael? Jeff]
- Digital Media and Multimodal Composing
- Visual Rhetoric
- The Politics of Access and Remediation [Michael?]
- The History of Open Admissions at CUNY and Mina Shaughnessy [Charlie]
- Critical Pedagogy
- Feminist Pedagogical and Rhetorical Practices
- Using Technology and Course Blogs for Traditional and Hybrid Classrooms
- The Future of English Departments [Marc]
- Relationship Between Creative Writing and Composition Pedagogy [Sara]
Tue Sep 16: Teaching Strategies
Readings/HW: Teaching journal entry due on Blogs@Baruch (short entry on how the course is going so far/questions for discussion)
Activities: Participate in new faculty orientation on teaching strategies (VC 14-267, lunch provided)
Tue Sep 23: Tuesday is a CUNY Friday; no class meeting today
Tue Sep 30: Low Stakes Writing and Daily Activities
Readings/HW: Teaching journal entry on low stakes writing assignments you’ve done so far in class and questions you have about using them; St. Martin’s Guide, Chapter 3; Anson et al on low-stakes writing; examples of LS writing assignments; “Elbow_High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing”
Theory/History: Tobin, “Process Pedagogy,” Tarvers, “Approaching Writing from Literary Studies,” Flower and Hayes, “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”
Benefits of low stakes writing: http://www.wsc.mass.edu/facultycenter/lowstakes-benefits.pdf
Activities: Discuss readings; develop and workshop LS writing assignments; model LS assignment for this class; bring examples; bring details on your plan for discussion lead for us later in the semester
Tue Oct 7: Responding to Writing: Peer Review and Instructor Feedback and Assessment
Readings: Teaching journal entry on questions and responses you have about peer review, commenting on student writing, and writer’s letters; St. Martin’s Guide, Chapter 5 pp 125-160, Bishop (309), and Sommers (333); Walk, “Teaching with Writing”; “Rubrics”; “Writer’s Letters”; “Responding to Other Students’ Writing,” Straub [Lisa asks students to read this before doing the first peer response]
Activities: Discuss peer review; sample peer review handouts; sample writer’s cover letters; workshop a sample student paper together (post 3 student papers to our course Google Drive site in the “Student Papers” folder, A to C range, with names removed, for workshopping)
Tue Oct 14: Working with Sources in Ethical and Sophisticated Ways
Readings: McClure, Googlepedia (http://writingspaces.org/mcclure–googlepedia); more TBD; Ann Bertoff’s Double Entry Notebook
Activities: Teaching journal entry on questions and ideas you have on incorporating sources and using annotated bibs as low stakes writing; Workshop on Research-based Assignments (low and high stakes writing) by Professor Mark McBeth, John Jay College (open to all writing and Great Works faculty)
Tue Oct 21: Style and Grammar: Theoretical and Pedagogical Practice
Readings: BSM Chp 8; Richard Lanham, “Editing for Concision,” Style Imitation Exercise, MIT Style Self-Assessment Semi-colon, colon, m-dash
History/Theory: Millac, “Theories of Style and Their Implications for the Teaching of Composition”; Micchiche, “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar”; Elbow, “The Cultures of Literature and Composition-What Could Each Learn from the Other?”
Activities: Discussion of readings; model and practice style imitation; bring examples of your own writing and/or student writing to discuss
Tue Oct 28: Writing as an Epistemology
Readings: Teaching journal entry on your responses to readings; Bertoff, “Is Teaching Still Possible?”; Bizzell, “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty”
Activities: Discuss your response to readings and these prompts; questions so far from classes
Tue Nov 4: CUNY Open Admissions and Mina Shaughnessy
Discussion lead: Charlie Rowe
Readings: Shaughnessy, “Diving In” and excerpts from Errors & Expectations
Activities: see email from Charlie for questions
Tue Nov 11: Remediation with a special focus on L2 Learners
Discussion lead: Mike Healy, remediationdiscussion11.8.14
Readings: Grego and Thompson, “Repositioning Remediation,” Hull, Rose, Fraser, Castellano, “Remediation as a Social Construct,” and Elbow, “Counterstatement”
Activities: Mike’s great reading choices reference other important articles in the discussion around remediation in the late 20th century. In case anyone wants to see it, here’s a link to “The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum” by David Bartholomae (JBW 12.1 1993) . You might also be interested in checking out “This Wooden Shack Place: The Logic of an Unconventional Reading,” By Hull and Rose (CCC 41.3, Oct. 1990).
Tue Nov 18: Students’ Right to Their Own Language
Discussion lead: Maggie Birrell
Readings:
Activities:
Tue Nov 25: TBD by discussion leader
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Tue Dec 2: TBD by discussion leader
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Tue Dec 9: TBD by discussion leader
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Tue Dec 16: Course Portfolio due; discussion of course portfolios and course itself; wrap up
