Responses

I will ask you to post six responses to this site in the first three weeks of this course—the first to the E110 Course Goals and Practices, the second to Rewriting, and the next four to the essays in First-Year Composition. The basic guidelines for all of your responses are the same: Find something in the reading that you find particularly helpful to your teaching, take us to that moment in the text, and briefly explain what it is that find useful or intriguing or provocative.

Aim for a post of about 400 words or so. While you should of course proofread and edit your work before posting it (I recommend composing in Word before uploading to WordPress), the style of your writing may be as informal and personal as you like. Meeting deadlines is important, as all of us will also be reading and commenting on these responses. (See Comments.)

Here are a few more details about each response.

r1: E110 Course Goals and Practices

Please read the E110 Course Goals and Practices closely and carefully. This is the document that defines what makes a course E110. You’ll notice that we do not define the course in terms of numbers (i.e., student will complete a certain amount of papers, pages, drafts, sources) but rather in terms of activities—things we expect students to be doing and learning. We’ve also tried to create a manageable list of only ten coure goals and practices.

As you read through this list, please sort the items into three categories: (1) Okay, got it, not problem, (2) not sure what this might mean exactly, and (3) this could be difficult with my students. Then please write a brief post based on your notes.

Deadline: Tues, 6/07, at 11:59 pm. Use Responses as the category for your post and add three or four distinctive tags to your post. (Tags are usually terms drawn directly from your post that you want to highlight as important, that will help others search for your writing.)

r2: Rewriting Rewriting

In Rewriting I describe four key “moves” in academic writing: coming to terms, forwarding, countering, and taking an approach. In this response, I’d like you to add to my list. Please identify a move that I don’t talk about, or give too little attention to, but that you feel is important for academic writers to learn. Define your move as clearly as you can and, if at all possible, point to an example of a student or professional making this move in their writing.

Deadline: Thurs, 6/09, at 11:59 pm. Use Responses as the category for your post and add three or four distinctive tags.

r3–6: Thinking Through Approaches to First-Year Writing

You’ll notice that the essays in First-Year Composition are simply arranged in alphabetical order by the last name of their authors. So I think we can read this collection as a kind of grab bag of perspectives, reading down the list of essays and making our own connections and contrasts between them.

I suggest that you do one of two things in responding to each batch of four essays: (1) Link two or more of the pieces in order to identify a shared technique or insight you want to use in your own teaching, or (2) identify a distinctive move made by one of the writers that you’d like to adopt in designing or teaching your course.

Deadlines

r3 (Anson, Canagarajah, Hesse, Inoue): Tues, 6/14, 11:59 pm.
r4 (Inoue, Mathieu, Redd, ): Thurs, 6/16, 11:59 pm.
r5 (Reid, Shipka, Tinberg): Tues, 6/21, 11:59 pm.
r6 (Villaneuva, Wardle and Downs, Yancey): Thurs, 6/23, 11:59 pm.

Use Responses as your category, and add three or distinctive tags to each post.

You’ll notice that there are still responses on this site to these same readings from the teachers—Dan Becker, Anne Marie Eanes, Katrina Holloway—who took this course in Summer 2014. Please feel free to draw on or respond to their responses as you formulate your own!

One thought on “Responses”

Even though each of the four authors had his or her own perspective on the structure and function of the ideal writing course, there were some common threads. I was intrigued by the literacy autobiography assignment discussed by both Chris Anson and Suresh Canagarajah. In thinking back on my own memories of how I learned to read and write, I am dismayed to realize that I don’t have very vivid recollections of my early experiences with either form of literacy. I wonder if my inability to recall such important milestones can be attributed to a half a century of time since they would have occurred and whether or not my future senior students would have difficulty with that assignment. One of my favorite activities to do with my four-year-old granddaughter is to read books to her. I also make up original stories for her, and she has just recently started to make up her own stories as well. Hopefully helping Grace to form early literacy memories will make up for my own lack of memories.

Another common idea supported by Chris Anson and Douglas Hess is varying the genres for the topic and/or research based assignments. I agree with Anson’s comment that allowing students to choose the mode and audience for their writing is more likely to give them a larger repertoire of writing skills that will more closely align with real work writing tasks. I often include a variety of genres for creative writing assignments for my students. For example, for a creative response to our study of Macbeth, my students wrote one of the following: an additional scene, two diary entries from the point of view of a character, a letter from one character to another, or a newspaper article which included an interview of one of the characters. However, I have never even considered the possibility of providing multiple genre options for research assignments. This is definitely an idea that I hope to utilize in my own E110 course.

I also hope to consider some of the practices discussed by Asao Inoue. In particular, I was impressed by the author’s practice of having the students aid in the construction of the assessment rubrics. I always use rubrics to assess major writing assignments and I think that having the students play a part in the actual construction of the rubrics would give them a deeper appreciation of the writing process. I also liked the idea of students writing an overall assessment letter to each of their peers in their small writing group. I feel that it is important for students to have authentic audiences and to receive positive, constructive feedback from a variety of sources.

I am looking forward to reading the other articles to gather even more ideas for possible components of my own course.

Anne Marie Eanes says:

06/24/2014 at 10:52 pm

R2

Even though each of the four authors had his or her own perspective on the structure and function of the ideal writing course, there were some common threads. I was intrigued by the literacy autobiography assignment discussed by both Chris Anson and Suresh Canagarajah. In thinking back on my own memories of how I learned to read and write, I am dismayed to realize that I don’t have very vivid recollections of my early experiences with either form of literacy. I wonder if my inability to recall such important milestones can be attributed to a half a century of time since they would have occurred and whether or not my future senior students would have difficulty with that assignment. One of my favorite activities to do with my four-year-old granddaughter is to read books to her. I also make up original stories for her, and she has just recently started to make up her own stories as well. Hopefully helping Grace to form early literacy memories will make up for my own lack of memories.

Another common idea supported by Chris Anson and Douglas Hess is varying the genres for the topic and/or research based assignments. I agree with Anson’s comment that allowing students to choose the mode and audience for their writing is more likely to give them a larger repertoire of writing skills that will more closely align with real work writing tasks. I often include a variety of genres for creative writing assignments for my students. For example, for a creative response to our study of Macbeth, my students wrote one of the following: an additional scene, two diary entries from the point of view of a character, a letter from one character to another, or a newspaper article which included an interview of one of the characters. However, I have never even considered the possibility of providing multiple genre options for research assignments. This is definitely an idea that I hope to utilize in my own E110 course.

I also hope to consider some of the practices discussed by Asao Inoue. In particular, I was impressed by the author’s practice of having the students aid in the construction of the assessment rubrics. I always use rubrics to assess major writing assignments and I think that having the students play a part in the actual construction of the rubrics would give them a deeper appreciation of the writing process. I also liked the idea of students writing an overall assessment letter to each of their peers in their small writing group. I feel that it is important for students to have authentic audiences and to receive positive, constructive feedback from a variety of sources.

I am looking forward to reading the other articles to gather even more ideas for possible components of my own course.