We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. Link here to Perusall. Instructions for joining on the Assignments page.
Honestly, the only thing I can think about is my incredibly enormous deficit in technological literacy. Oh, yeah, I’ve signed up for everything, and then promptly forgotten about it because who needs cloud or drop box or whatever? Ha! Sorry to whomever owned that google doc I accidentally edited while trying to figure out how the hell to get mine inside my folder. I agree with that post about wanting to curl up into a ball. I’m halfway there right now.
Rather than trying to redesign the entire system, why not add a core class in upper division that does focus on writing in the profession? It would be a disservice to students to eliminate freshman composition. It helps set a standard for general education classes. All disciplines have their methods courses, so why not also require an upper division writing in the profession course as part of the degree?
Yes…
“As the current movements toward writing across the curriculum and research and teaching about writing expand, composition studies and institutions of higher education may conclude that GWSI courses should be “transfigured,” as Kitzhaber put it, to teach first-year students about writing without claiming to teach students to write in general.”
And yes…
“we must always remember that students have improved their writing of genres in many other courses across the curriculum that use writing as a tool of teaching and learning”
I am not through the entire reading yet, so it’s possible that my mind will change by page 38. I think that using the ball as an analogous to the process of writing is too simplistic a view, or it needs to be expanded upon more than in this paper. When we’re talking about language, we are talking about using our brains much differently than when we do other things such as playing sports. Nevertheless, I think of this generalized writing task as something that can be compared with language learning itself. For example, there is the second language learning threshold that is heavily influenced by your literacy in your first language. Inevitably, when you are learning a new language, whatever you know about your first language will have an impact on how much you are capable of doing in the second language. I will use my experience as an example. My students in Ukraine were literate in an average of four languages. When I taught them what I knew about English, they already understood concepts like parts of speech, etc. When my friend Sean taught English to students in Africa, they were illiterate. They had no concept of what writing was. They had to be taught everything from how to open a notebook to using pencils, so before they could even get started on learning the fundamentals of English, they had to learn the fundamentals of literacy. And teaching the fundamentals of English were further complicated by the fact that they had no metalinguistic knowledge. While remediation appears to be counterproductive, actual composition can be beneficial in giving students a schemata to work with in future classes regardless of the differences in genre or stylistic preferences. This prior knowledge of the process of writing and doing research is relevant regardless whether it is your first or a second language. Even if a writing class were specialized to a person’s particular field, there is still no guarantee that the student will write well; but composition class will ease the baseline needed for instructors in more specialized fields. Even if people learn exactly how to write for their profession, they may be surprised to find out that they will have to write differently for every place they work and every person they write for; so what needs to be emphasized is the importance of adaptability and paying attention to the criteria that needs to be met in each particular writing situation.