Welcome to ENG 4075/5076! As plans for the Spring semester develop, this page will expand to include information about each aspect of the course.
Course Information
- ENG 4075/5076
- Spring 2025 Meetings:
- Tue 4:30–7:15p
- CAS 310
- Prerequisites:
- undergraduate: ENG 2020 and 3005
- graduate: ENG 5020
- Instructor Details:
- Chris Friend (he/him)
- CAS 325
- Spring 2025 office hours (appointments strongly recommended):
- Tue 4–6:30p
- Wed/Thu 2–3:30p
- Fri 12:30–2p (videoconferencing only)
Description
This course explores contexts and historical traditions of writing instruction and establishes a conceptual framework for understanding the teaching of writing at all levels. Helps future teachers make effective decisions regarding the use and assessment of writing, gives them vocabulary to articulate their pedagogical position, and provides opportunity for publication.
Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course and its assignments, you will be able to:
- apply disciplinary vocabulary used in the scholarship of teaching, learning, and composition to communicate your professional position within those disciplines;
- create multiple drafts of your teaching philosophy statement appropriate for use in a job search in K-12 or post-secondary education;
- differentiate multiple approaches to writing instruction and articulate whether those approaches align with your teaching philosophy; and
- write a compelling argument, suitable for publication in a scholarly journal, encouraging other professionals to adopt your approach to pedagogy.
Details About the Course
Besides this site, the following resources will help you feel connected as you go about the semester:
Our Goal
This class is designed to help you develop, identify, and articulate your pedagogical approach as it specifically relates to teaching writing. We’ll look at the theories and issues that inform and complicate the Rhetoric and Composition (rhet/comp) as a discipline. Among other topics, we will discuss:
- threshold concepts of writing and rhetoric
- national standards for writing instruction
- historical frameworks for composition instruction
- foundational ideological rhetorics
- traditional and progressive pedagogical approaches
Writing Pedagogies is cross-listed for undergraduate and graduate study. If you are enrolled in the undergraduate section, you’ll write a critical position paper with the option to submit it to an online journal. If you’re enrolled in the graduate section, your paper will be journal-length, and you’re expected to submit the article for journal consideration at the end of the semester. Additionally, regardless of enrollment, you will work on refining your teaching philosophy, which is often a required component of job applications in academia.
Our Approach
This class asks you to use writing to learn how to teach writing. Throughout the semester, we’ll examine the history and trajectory of Writing Studies (or Rhetoric and Composition, aka rhet/comp) as an academic discipline. This survey of perspectives will help you define and articulate your own pedagogical approach to the field.
Most of our attention will focus on how people teach ubiquitous, compulsory introductory college-level writing classes. Those classes take various names, most commonly first-year writing (FYW) or first-year composition (FYC). Here at Kean, the relevant course is College Composition, ENG 1030. These introductory college writing courses are central to discussions of writing pedagogy because they set institutional expectations for students and teachers across higher education, and they provide a target for writing instruction in secondary education. Regardless of your intended career path within education, if you teach writing, how you do so is inflected by the juggernaut of first-year courses. Thus, by examining how you and others approach these courses, we will learn about writing more broadly and in its generalized educational context.
This course begins 15 Jan 2025. See you then!