Freshman Composition

"Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." ~Toni Morrison, Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1993

A Foundation for Writing Beliefs Underlying Principles Some Sample Strategies for Writing Class Writing as Process Learning from Others Seeing & Re-seeing Portfolio & Assessment

A. Beliefs

"It is the responsibility of the teachers, and of those who administer the curriculum, to attempt to make the writing class a place where ideas matter more than technique, so that technique can be taught as a means to a significant end rather than an end in itself."  

John Gage, "Why Write?"

The faculty and staff of the School of Arts, Sciences and Education are committed to the idea that the first year composition classes help students: 

• to develop writing behaviors that guide them effectively and efficiently through the writing process
• to assess their behaviors and modify those behaviors for their academic writing, for their career related writing, and for their roles as citizen journalists in the 21st century.
• to practice ways for discovering material for the range of writing they will do in their lives
• to learn how to more effectively interpret their own texts and those of others

Note that the focus here is looking at behaviors that students may take with them into their careers. At that same time, however, the legacy of the first year writing courses has traditionally been to serve as an introduction to college expectations--the "gateway" courses where students begin their work as college students: learning how to investigate sources, to analyze data, and to generate ideas. 

At DCCC, English 111 is the one course every program-placed student must take. Unless a student has been exempted by taking an equivalent course somewhere else, he or she will enroll in expository writing. Thus, the faculty who teach English 111 have an essential job for the College and students have an important responsibility toward their future academic and career goals. Faculty are asked to guide both writing and mental habits that contribute to students' confidence and success in their college careers. Students must take seriously the time required for writing

Teaching of writing has changed dramatically over the last fifty years. The DCCC English faculty acknowledge that practices of writing and theories of learning and literacy necessarily connect and that the more aware we are of how and why writers behave in the ways they do, the better the faculty can be at guiding students to develop effective writing behaviors. Some of the most exciting theoretical work in composition studies now comes directly out of the writing classroom, with studies of writers at work and detailed descriptions of writing scenes.

Students and faculty in first year writing courses must acknowledge the following:

• Every writer has a process, or procedure, in composing.
• Making that process conscious is a way to intervene in it and/or support it.
• Every writer has the potential to produce powerful prose because every writer is a competent language user.
• Writers learn from one another.
• Writing tasks need to have meaning for the writers to be successful.
• Producing a great amount of writing leads to improved writing.
• Writing teachers are writers who can use their practices to improve their teaching.
• Writing classes are context dependent.

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B. Underlying Principles

Besides the above beliefs, the faculty and staff have employed the following principles for the development of the writing curriculum for the freshman year:

• Isolated drills in usage, formal grammar, phonics, and spelling have little value. These skills are best learned in a larger writing context.
• Most students learn to write and read by performing real tasks: writing letters, essays, memos, personal narratives, reports, and so forth.
• Drills may be useful following diagnosis of weakness in a specific area, but not as a substitute for whole writing tasks.
• Students need support during the writing process.
• Sentence building toward a larger context is more productive than analysis or labeling of sentences.
• Students' writing behaviors improve with continuous reinforcement of the tools all writers have: critical thinking, or logos; intentional use of the affective aspect of language, the pathos; and conscious development of the writer's presence within her communication, the ethos.

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C. Strategies and Techniques Used by Faculty and Students

Techniques that faculty use in the classroom and that students begin to master concerning the pre-writing stage include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Clustering. After the teacher writes a word on the board, the students free associate until they have a cluster of words which they use to construct a written passage. [This invention practice is sometimes known as "webbing."]
• Modeling. The students and teachers work in a group to develop a model of the completed writing assignment.
• Brainstorming. Students write all they can on a given topic within a short period of time.
• Controlled writing. Students copy well-written passages and alter them in some significant way, such as from present to past tense, from singular to plural, or from slang to Standard English to help them use spontaneously some of the more basic conventions of the language.
• Free writing. On a regular basis, students write in-class for short periods, emphasizing quantity rather than quality, content rather than form.
• Journal writing. Students keep written record of their thoughts and experiences. Some instructors provide writing assignments to be included in the journal, such as a series of social, consumer, or business letters to be written. Though errors are sometimes pointed out, students are assessed on the basis of the quantity of writing they produce.
• Summaries/abstracts. Students read essays and condense them into brief restatements in their own words.
• "Practices." The teacher provides a subject and a structure for writing assignments based on sequenced series of questions moving from the concrete to the abstract. "Practices" are to be written in one sitting, and treated as rough drafts.
• Practice essay exams. Students learn to write under the conditions they will encounter in other classes.
• Computer-assisted writing. Since every English 111 class meets in a lab, faculty use computers for a variety of instructional purposes, including  drill exercises on particular grammatical issues, helping students reduce the use of repetitious "to-be" constructions, improving spelling skills, reducing the drudgery of repeatedly revising prose, as well as aiding in invention and organization through the use of computer applications such as Inspiration.
• Portfolios. A portfolio is a purposeful, meaningful collection of student work. This collection tells a "story" about the student's development and progress over time. All portfolios, regardless of type and purpose, are based upon the principles of students' collecting, selecting, and reflecting upon their work. All portfolios serve as windows on learning, enabling an audience to see a rich and complex view of student accomplishment, supported by authentic samples of student work. They are effective devices for communicating student achievement  to faculty outside the writing classroom and  to external reviewers such as employers or accrediting agencies.

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D. Writing Is A Process

Writing goes through several easily identifiable stages.  Even though more and more of today's students have been exposed to this "process fact" about writing, very few of our students are likely to understand 

• their own process of writing
• why they delay beginning a task
• how much they read as they write
• when to ask for help and why they don't
• how to decide what to edit out and what to expand. 

Part of the work of the College's writing classes is to clarify both the general and the very individual process for each writer so that the writer can understand and master unique, individual elements of process. To understand how a particular text gets made, a writer must understand the "metacognitive" processes that go into the writing process.

Techniques for Making the Process Conscious [and producing more powerful writers]

• Ask students to describe the process(es) of writing assignments
• Ask students to use metaphor to describe writing experience(s).
• Ask students to discuss which parts of writing are most difficult and why.
• Ask students to consider what they've been taught about how to write in earlier educational experiences.
• Ask students to talk with writers about how, what and why they write and report to a group.

These activities might serve as prompts for short writing assignments or longer essays, as journal assignments, or as group activities. Any of these writing or discussion tasks will provoke realizations of what writers actually do when they compose.  Discussion of process in these real terms will encourage students to recognize a kind of expertise or authority as they speak of themselves--often for the first time--as writers. If our students can be guided to the realization of their roles as writers, the writing program and the College have realized a huge success.

Faculty are also encouraged to keep in the forefront of their classes their own processes of composing:  how dependent their writing is on its purpose, what decisions need to be made in terms of time management, why there is a need to either delay or inititate the revision stage,  what is involved in the writer's selection process, from picking vocabulary items to employing source material. Faculty's use of their own writing in class as examples of "process at work" creates a link between them and students and reinforces the relevance of writing for any professional life.

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E. Writers Learning From One Another

As the student population continues to change and bring new values into the classroom, faculty are learning that most effective learning comes by way of indirection—socially or anecdotally— and because students perceive a need for practical work. Plato said that learning acquired under compulsion "has no hold upon the mind." School learning in general, and the teaching of writing (e.g. grammar skill & drill) in particular, often validates Plato's assertion. Faculty compel learning from the front of the room with deadlines, assignments, syllabi, grading criteria. Yet what faculty and students alike are striving for is more real learning. Teachers must grapple with the tension that Plato's statement underscores--between how people learn and how faculty teach.

If faculty find ways to make room for the kind of social, anecdotal, informal, and practical learning that forms the basis of  knowledge, then faculty have taken an important step. Here are some suggested activities to foster social and "anecdotal" learning:

• Establish group work as an integral part of the work of the class.
• Use a journal, scrapbook, or letters as a way to encourage experimentation in form, style and content.
• Devise strategies to make collaboration in discussion and writing become important elements in instruction. For example, create scenarios where students work to arrive at solutions to problems.
• Encourage students to role play in small groups where they both teach and learn; talk and listen.
• Have students keep a portfolio.
• Encourage students to write reflectively about their own processes of writing, reading and thinking. For example, they may use a double-entry journal (students keep notes from readings and lectures on one page of their notebooks and, on the facing page, respond to and analyze those notes; or they may simply divide the journal page and keep note on one half of the page and reflections on the other).
• Implement paraphrase into classroom practices, especially if the content is challenging.

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F. Writers Improve With Practice in Seeing and Re-seeing

Another tragedy visited upon many writing students today is the absence of clarity between revision and editing. Due to the heavy emphasis on skill and drill, many students believe that "revision" is simply correcting errors marked by the teacher, often with the absence of understanding why these changes need to be made.  Students must take time in their writing behaviors to "re-see" or revise their drafts and think as critically about them as they do about the reading they are asked to do in any content course.

This task of revision is, of course, based on being able to observe effectively and coolly; therefore, exercises in observation help students understand the dimensions of writing situations as well as aid them in learning how to revise for audience and purpose. Some suggestions for helping students observe well:

• Give students an object, or make them find one, and ask them to keep journals observing, describing and commenting on their writing about it. Writing about their writing is best done in a double entry format.
• Ask students to find their favorite part of an assigned essay or story, comment on it, and then discuss their choices in their group.
• Share with students ethnographic approaches to watching people, places, language, as well as the routines and rituals of sub-cultures. Then ask them to transfer that approach to their or their partners' learning.
• Ask students to paraphrase an editorial or do a rhetorical analysis of a lead paragraph of a speech, explicate a short poem, or write a stylistic analysis of a dialogue.
• Save five minutes at the end of class and ask students to write about what they observed in the previous forty-five. Faculty write as well.
• Have students work in small groups and compose directions for simple tasks. Ask groups to exchange directions, then to following what is written--without depending upon previous experience.  Have groups discuss their observations from the activity.

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G. Student Portfolios

Portfolios are an integral part of the freshman composition evaluation process and can be used in a myriad of ways beyond assessing an individual's attainment of the course competencies.  Portfolio evaluation gets at the heart of what the College's writing program is working toward: writing as process, reflective learning, and development of "real world" writing behaviors.

Students will need to adjust to holistic scoring and may find it easier to think of their writing portfolios as a collection of "artifacts": of reading and writing texts that represent who they are as first year college students. These portfolio artifacts may include journal entries, in-class free writing, rough drafts, peer critiques, conference notes, outlines as well as polished final papers. The portfolio may even include papers written in high school or in other college's courses or poetry and songs that show different sides of themselves as writers, readers, and thinkers. When students are asked to collect these artifacts, they may ask, "What is this for?" :

1. Portfolios are for students themselves as visible records of what they have read, written and thought about in a composition course. Most students welcome the portfolio as an opportunity to rethink their semester's work as a whole rather than in a series of what may seem to them as unrelated assignments.
2. Portfolios are for teachers as a way of assessing what students have accomplished in the writing course. The portfolio allows teachers to determine how far each student has progressed as well as what kinds of connections they are able to make among the various assignments completed. From the work of Vygotsky we know that skill development often lags behind learning; it is reassuring when students can articulate what they've learned about reading and writing, even when their actual skills will probably need more development.
3. Portfolios are for the College as a way to assure graduates are competent in writing.  The College's accreditation says students must have competency in reading and writing, math, and computing.  Portfolios help the College show accrediting agencies that these competencies are mastered.
4. Portfolios are for potential employers. Students moving into the workforce today must be able to show a competitive edge, and an impressive writing portfolio is one tool that will sharpen that edge.  Employers want to see what candidates can do, and the portfolio does just that.

In order for portfolios to be effective, students must have some kind of choice about what to put in and leave out. There can always be a core of material that everyone submits (15-20 pages of polished writing) but the options are what make the portfolios interesting to assemble and exciting to read. Here are some possible portfolio artifacts that students might include:

• rough drafts of final papers (15-20 pages mentioned above)
• journal or daybook entries
• peer group feedback (both from others and from what the student has written)
• brainstorming, mapping, outlines/notes
• papers from other classes with assignment details
• writing done outside of school, perhaps on the job
• other artifacts that would be indicative of their work.  These choices could be as divergent as dance programs to computer programs
• writing for the self, letters, poetry or song lyrics
• reflective journaling where students look back at what they have done and where they are looking to go

Portfolios that encourage reflective thinking belong in a learning environment where students are active participants in setting criteria for their own writing and reading goals. Such environments are collaborative and include a great deal of conversation and sharing of artifacts. These environments provide time, practice and experimentation in thinking about reading and writing. Portfolios, then, cannot be inserted into traditional curriculum and still achieve non-traditional outcomes. Reflective portfolios grow out of a culture that encourages flexible habits of mind and innovative assessment.

Reflection does not happen unless practice in thinking and talking reflectively is part of the entire writing course and also happens at the end. It's always a good idea to share portfolios at mid-term as preparation for the final submission. There are many good questions that encourage portfolio keepers toward reflective analysis. Here are some reflective prompts that might be used both as part of a mid-term commentary:

• What do you know now about your reading and writing that you didn't know when you entered this course? Illustrate this.  
• What class activities (revision, collaboration, conferences, journal writing, etc.) helped you most in compiling this portfolio? Show how and why.  
• Arrange your portfolio in terms of levels of difficulty in writing each piece. Explain what you were trying to accomplish in each one even if you didn't achieve it.  
• What do you want readers to learn about you and your literacy by reading your portfolio? Show how they would learn this by quoting from specific sections of your work.  
• After looking over all your literacy artifacts, what is missing? What is the area you feel or believe you need to continue to develop? What is your strongest area and why?

Since these kinds of questions encourage active thought, they make literacy personal and significant. Thus we have returned to the beginning--how to make learning, especially the learning of writing, relevant and significant to today's students? The students must have time and encouragement to engage with, acknowledge, analyze and challenge what it means to be a literate person in a quickly changing and complex world and the extent to which we all must daily address that challenge. 

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