Calendars

In this class, you will engage a variety of scholars and their philosophies regarding how students should learn writing. While you process these diverse perspectives, you will identify, clarify, and perhaps challenge your own beliefs about the best way(s) to teach. The calendar below outlines the concepts we’ll discuss and the main readings we’ll draw from. Because this is a survey course, the reading and writing load is substantial. Thus, for every text, you’ll need to practice your skills with what Christina Haas and Linda Flower call “rhetorical reading strategies.” To help, we’ll start class with an overview of those strategies.

Overall, this semester’s pacing is front-loaded, with the majority of readings appearing in the first few weeks. This approach means the class will expect you to digest a lot of new ideas early on—be ready for the challenge. First, front-loading the readings also means the end of the semester can be dedicated to your major projects. Also, you’ll continue to process course concepts as the term progresses. You’ll become increasingly adept at managing the material as you continue working with it.

The Scope of Our Class

This class is a cross-listed graduate and upper-division undergraduate survey course designed for students in—or with aspirations to join—the teaching profession, specifically to teach writing. The discipline of rhetoric and composition (rhet/comp) has a history of only about 150 years. As such, it’s possible to trace the evolution of disciplinary thinking literally from the beginning of the field until today. Additionally, educators in the 1970s and 1980s started questioning the relationship between students and teachers. As a result, this thinking generated some radically new pedagogies in the past 50 years. Consequently, many of those pedagogical approaches have direct application in the writing classroom.

Overall, our goal this semester will be to develop facility with a range of composition ideologies and pedagogical approaches. Our intense pace should help you build a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the complexities inherent in teaching writing. Below are simplified calendars of weekly reading assignments and broad project goals by unit. Additionally, a complete course calendar including all readings and detailed weekly project goals is also available externally.

Readings Calendar

Topic	Week	Author & Text
Disciplinary Origins	1	John C. Brereton’s “The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College” [see Canvas > Files] Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp’s “Perspectives on the Study of Rhetoric” [see Canvas > Files] Robert J. Connors’ “Shaping Tools: Textbooks and the Development of Composition-Rhetoric” [see Canvas > Files] David R. Russell’s “American Origins of the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Movement” [see Canvas > Files]
Threshold Concepts	2	Dylan B. Dryer’s “Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words” John Duffy’s “Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices” Collin Brooke and Jeffrey T. Grabill’s “Writing is a Technology through Which Writers Create and Recreate Meaning” Michael Carter’s “The Idea of Expertise: An Exploration of Cognitive and Social Dimensions of Writing”
	3	Bill Hart-Davidson’s “Genres are Enacted by Writers and Readers” Neal Lerner’s “Writing is a Way of Enacting Disciplinarity” Kevin Roozen’s “Texts Get Their Meaning from Other Texts” Amy J. Devitt’s “Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept”
	4	Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Writers’ Histories, Processes, and Identities Vary” Andrea A. Lunsford’s “Writing is Informed by Prior Experience” Victor Villanueva’s “Writing Provides a Representation of Ideologies and Identities Ann M. Penrose and Cheryl Geisler’s “Reading and Writing without Authority”
	5	Collin Brooke and Allison Carr’s “Failure Can Be an Important Part of Writing Development” Doug Downs’ “Revision is Central to Developing Writing” Charles Bazerman and Howard Tinberg’s “Writing is an Expression of Embodied Cognition” Nancy Sommers’ “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”
National Standards	6	NCTE Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing  CCCC Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing CWPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition
Historical Approaches	7	Richard Fulkerson’s “Four Philosophies of Composition” Fulkerson’s “Composition Theory in the Eighties: Axiological Consensus and Paradigmatic Diversity” Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century“ James Berlin’s “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”
	8	Doug Downs & Elizabeth Wardle’s, “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)envisioning First-Year Composition as Introduction to Writing Studies.” Wardle’s “Intractable Writing Program Problems, Kairos, and Writing about Writing: A Profile of the University of Central Florida’s First-Year Composition Program”
	9	Anne Beaufort’s “From Research to Practice: Some Ideas for Writing Instruction” Beaufort’s “College Writing and Beyond: Five Years Later”
Progressive Pedagogies	10	Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed Chapter 2 bell hooks’ “Engaged Pedagogy” Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel’s “Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition”
	11	Sean Michael Morris’s “Technology is Not Pedagogy” (text or audio) Jesse Stommel’s “How To Build an Ethical Online Course” Martha Fay Burtis’s “Messy and Chaotic Learning” (text or audio)Audrey Watters’ “The Web We Need to Give Students”
	12	Cate Denial’s “A Pedagogy of Kindness” Marisol Brito, et al’s “Love in the Time of Peer Review” Cheryl E. Ball’s “Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre Studies Approach” Asao B. Inoue’s “Assessing so That People Stop Killing Each Other” (text or audio)

Project Calendars

Unit	Textbook Chapter	Course Design	Journal Article
Threshold Concepts	Chapter Topic Proposal	Course & Subject Proposal	Article Topic & Venue Proposal
National Standards	Full Chapter Outline	Weekly Calendar	Source List
Historical Approaches	Initial Rough Draft	Assignment Sheets	Annotated Bib
Progressive Pedagogies	Complete Draft	Full Syllabus	Lit Review
Finals Week	Finalized Chapter	Reflective Essay	Argumentative Article