After reading the College Writing articles by Beaufort, I still believe there is no “one/right” way to teaching an introductory course for college writing. As I was reading the first article, College Writing and Beyond, I like the ideas she was proposing that teacher taught in an introductory course. I liked the idea of teaching the topic of discourse communities; I think this is an important topic because before students begin to write, they need to know who they are addressing, in other words who is their audience. Depending on the discourse community students will differentiate between the lexicon, references, claims, etc. I also liked the step of teaching students the practice of mindfulness, or meta-cognition, to facilitate positive transfer of learning. Which is the process of reflection students will do after they have completed a writing assignment. I like this step because students can evaluate their work and themselves as writer and not solely depend on the feedback a professor provides. It also helps students take a step back and absorb everything they have learned.
In the second article, I was surprised I had some of Beaufort’s idea in my “no” list. The first article seemed very well put together and she sounded as if she was certain her plan would work, however I did come across some points she made in the second article. Firstly, I did not notice that her first article does not mention each writer’s learning goal. Similarly to the discourse communities, knowing a student’s learning goal is crucial because then as an educator you will know to assign and what to teach, if you obliviate that then you will just be teaching and the student will most likely not retain any information. Another point Beaufort changed in her second article was that she would remove the assignments of auto and ethno biographies because this will seem repetitive and/or useless for some students because they seem like repetitive genres or do not pertain to their major. Beaufort suggested that these genres would be changed to rhetorical analysis and a literature review, I agree with this because they do seem like similar genres and the overall goal a writing teacher should have it to shape students to be able to adapt to a numerous number of genres, not just a couple.
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