Plan

Your main writing project for this seminar is to design a set of materials for the English 110 course you plan to teach next year. These materials can take whatever form that you feel will work best for your course and students. You may compose a series of print documents, or post your materials to a learning management system like Canvas or Sakai, or develop a website (like this one) using a platform like WordPress or Tumblr. The choice is yours.

I’ll ask you to put together a first, planning draft of your course materials by Wednesday, June 29. We will meet in person on campus in Newark on Friday, July 1, to workshop these drafts. The next, near-final draft of your materials will be due the next week, on Wednesday, July 6.  We will hold another workshop on campus on Friday, July 8. The final version of your E110 course will then be due on Tuesday, July 12, the day before grades are due. (Summer courses at UD move very quickly!)

Before then, we will spend the first three weeks of the term reading two books that I hope will help you figure out how you want to approach teaching a college-level course in writing. The first book is one that I’ve written, Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts. I offer this book not as some sort of model or template for your course, but simply to give you a sense of where I am coming from as a teacher of writing, of the sorts of things that matter most to me when I teach English 110. The second is an anthology of essays written by twelve leading scholars in composition and rhetoric, First-Year Composition: From Theory to Practice, edited by Deborah Coxwell-Teague and Ronald Lunsford. Each of the writers in this book begins by describing his or her approach to teaching writing and then offers a syllabus showing how this theory might be put into practice.  I hope that considering these essays as a group will help you decide what aspects of writing you most want to emphasize and how you want to structure your course to do so.

The basic rhythm of our work for the first three weeks will be this: I’ll ask you to post two responses to our readings each week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  (Usually I’ll ask you to respond to about 75 pages of reading.) I’ll then also ask you to read and post comments on the responses of your colleagues on Wednesdays and Fridays. I will also contribute to these comments. Response-comment; response-comment. In this way we will start a kind of conversation with one another even if we are not able to meet in person.

And please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have questions about your work or my responses to it. I’ll always be happy to chat via Skype or Facetime, or just to keep in touch by email.

Please click on Schedule for details about what is due when, and on Writing for fuller descriptions of your writing tasks.