Your main writing project for this seminar will be to design a set of materials for the English 110 course you plan to teach in your high school next year. These materials can take whatever form that you feel will work best for your course. 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.
This project will take up the last three weeks of this course.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 Thursday, July 7. The final version of your E110 course will then be due on Tuesday, July 12, the day before grades are due.
However you decide to structure your course materials, I’d ask that they include the following sections:
- About E110: Links to official E110 goals, along with anything else you’d like to tell students about the course
- Plan or Overview: A brief account of the specific work students will be doing with you over the course of the semester or year; this section usually takes the form of a narrative
- Readings: Not necessarily every handout or article, but books students will need to buy and will do a good bit of work with
- Writing Projects: Plan at least one main writing project per marking periosd
- Schedule: Due dates for drafts and revisions of main writing projects
- Grades: Not necessarily for each writing project—but ow will you determine student grades each marking period?
- Course Policies: Links to official E110 policies, along with any other policies specific to your course or school
You’ll notice that these sections roughly correspond with the pages of this website. What goes into them is, for all but the About E110 section, up to you. And you may of course add other sections that you feel will help your students.
My goal is to help you design a course that aligns with our program goals but that lso meets the particular need students and expresses your values as a teacher. I look forward to talking with you about the readings you might assign, the kinds of writing projects you might compose, the sorts of work you can do with students in class with writing, and the pace and rhythm of drafting, revising, and editing that you will want to set for your course. Good luck!
E688: Seminar in Teaching Composition 