ENGLISH 605 (1): Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition
Darin Payne
Wednesdays 6:00-8:30 pm
Description:
The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students from across the concentrations in UHM’s English department to the major theoretical trends and complementary practices that currently dominate college writing instruction in the United States, with particular attention paid to some of the key concerns of our specific geographical location and the dynamics that permeate university and community life here.
Because composition pedagogy has become a wide-ranging set of practices that both inform and grow out of an even wider set of social, linguistic, rhetorical, and political theories, this will not be a course that will teach students simply “how to” teach writing once and for all. Instead it will be a course that asks students to consider the purposes of writing instruction, to explore options (and thus implications) for teaching writing, and to situate specific composition pedagogies rhetorically—that is, within particular conditions of time and place (disciplinary, geographic, economic, cultural, and political) and within an articulated framework of ethical action and student agency.
The course will involve students in an ongoing dialectic between theory and praxis, one that will be played out in discussions, presentations, debates, and scholarly/pedagogical projects. Students will construct frameworks for understanding and interpreting—as well as developing and deploying—specific methodologies and practical activities for writing instruction, particularly those made prominent by cultural studies, feminism, queer theory, globalization, postcolonial studies, and advancements in technologies for writing and for teaching. Individual students will also work to understand in more theoretical, critical, and practical depth at least one specific writing pedagogy of their own choosing, which they will research, write about, and put into practice vis-à-vis a fully elaborated course design, one replete with a course rationale and proposal, a detailed syllabus and set of major assignment sheets, and a fleshed out schedule of work for a semester-long course. These major projects will be shared with others in the class both in process and as final products. The expectation is that these varied projects–informed by different students’ professional interests, social and political commitments, and areas of advanced study–will enable this cohort of graduate students to move into subsequent semesters with varied models of writing instruction in their repertoires and with theoretical and methodological foundations for future iterations of course design and delivery. These variations will inevitably be put into a supportive context alongside the required syllabus and pedagogical activities that new PhD students in our program will be using when first arriving and teaching for us in our FYC program.
Thus in addition to learning disciplinary content, students in this course will also be learning and experiencing pre/professional activities that will serve them within their PhD program and their potential academic careers. These include the development of teaching and administrative materials as described above, as well as differentiated practice in teaching and assessing writing, guidance in proposing conference presentations, and writing for publication.
Assignments:
Reading Responses: On a regular (usually weekly) basis, students will be required to write short (750-1000 words), semi-formal essays that they will post to an online course site. These essays will often be written in response to a question about a reading or discussion, although some will include a teaching philosophy statement, a teacherly assessment of academic writing, a conference presentation proposal, and an abstract for a longer scholarly work.
Pedagogy Activity: Students will each develop a teaching activity that will help the class learn material and will demonstrate/enact a pedagogical moment that can be examined and refined. The material or subject matter can be theoretical, practical, or administrative. In doing this, each student will develop connections to prior readings / discussions / themes / issues tackled in the course up to that point.
Praxis Project: This final project will be a combination of a short critical theoretical essay and a corresponding practical proposal for teaching a writing course. While any number of relevant courses might be chosen depending on student interest and career goals, many will likely exemplify varying iterations of ENG 100 at UHM. Models for this assignment can be found in the hybrid scholarship/praxis “Course Designs” section of the journal Composition Studies.
Student Learning Outcomes:
As a graduate level seminar in the theory and practice of teaching writing in an English Department, this course aims to:
- broaden students’ foundational understandings of the teaching of college-level writing as a form of praxis and as part of the intellectual work of the humanities;
- enrich students’ disciplinary knowledge in C/R specifically and English studies more generally;
- enable students to make connections with other courses in our graduate curriculum relevant to the course’s subtopics; and to
- enable students to see increased possibilities for curriculum development in both college and high school language arts programs; this latter goal is made manifest in the various readings that explicitly address writing pedagogy and in the various assignments that require students to design course materials informed by scholarly conversations in the field of Composition and Rhetoric.
Readings (do NOT purchase any of these in advance, as this list might change after the first day of class)
Journal articles:
There will be a lot of PDF readings available for free online–which will include various articles from mainstream academic journals in writing instruction, including but not limited to College English, Composition Studies, and College Composition and Communication.
Additionally, students will be responsible for finding and compiling a collaborative resource of writings relevant to our shared interests.
Possible books to purchase (do not purchase in advance, as this list is merely one of examples. It will be revised and reduced after an initial consultation with the class on the first day):
• Waite, Stacey: Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing. (2017).
• McCoy, Kate, Tuck, Eve, and Marcia McKenzie, eds. Land Education: Rethinking Pedagogies of Place from Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives (2018)
• Hewitt, Beth L., ed.: Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction (2015)
• Condon, Frankie, and Young, Vershawn Ashanti. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication (Across the Disciplines Books) 1st Edition (2017)