This course will meet in person/face-to-face in Fall 2021.
Course Description:
One of the primary aims of this course is to prepare graduate students across the concentrations to teach composition at the college level, whether this occurs at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, local community colleges, or at future sites of employment. Thus, we will read research in composition studies that is set in Hawaii, as well as important institutional documents such as UHM’s hallmarks for the general education Writing Foundation, the English Department’s recommendations for teaching composition, and findings from the Department’s various first-year composition assessment projects. Our examination of our particular site of teaching and researching writing will occur, naturally, within the context of current national conversations on the theory and practice of teaching college-level writing; thus in addition to extensive reading in current composition scholarship, we will examine the National Council of Writing Program Administrators’ outcomes statement and guidelines for teaching composition, as well as online conversations on relevant professional listservs. Students will be introduced to the history of composition studies and its emergence as a discipline within English studies, research methodologies in composition studies, leading composition pedagogies and their theoretical underpinnings, primary journals in composition studies and their various theoretical and methodological leanings, as well as composition’s ongoing responses to important theoretical developments in English studies. Readings will be grouped around key pedagogical theories and practices; likely subtopics include: inclusive pedagogies and disability studies, race and writing instruction, critical pedagogies, feminist and queer pedagogies, new media, rhetoric and argumentation, and indigenous pedagogies.
Likely Assignments:
1) Short papers written in response to the readings
2) One formal lesson plan that articulates with an in-class teaching presentation
3) An educational autobiography and teaching philosophy statement
4) A syllabus for a college-level writing class accompanied by three assignment sheets, which include criteria for assessment
5) A researched rationale for the syllabus in the form of a seminar-length paper.
Likely Texts (including selections from):
Inclusive pedagogies and Disability Studies
Dolmage, Jay T. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. U of Michigan P, 2017
Evans, Nancy J., et al., editors. Disability in Higher Education: A Social Justice Approach, John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
Race and Writing Instruction
Lamos, Steve. Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism and University Writing Instruction. 2011.
Kerschbaum, Stephanie L. Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference. CCCC/NCTE, 2014.
Critical:
Giroux, Henry, Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
New Media
Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. Penguin, 2011.
Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale UP, 2017.
Rhetoric and Argumentation:
Brummett, Barry, ed. The Politics of Style and the Style of Politics. Lexington Books, 2011.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Feminist:
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994.
Light, Nicholas, and Bondy. Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education: Critical Theory and Practice. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015.
Queer:
Waite, Stacey. Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017
Indigenous Pedagogies:.
Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowan and Littlefield, 2004.
Goodyear-Ka’opua, Noelani. The Seeds We Planted. U of Minnesota P, 2013.
Student Learning Objectives
As a graduate seminar in composition theory and practice, the course is designed 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. This course will thereby enrich students’ disciplinary knowledge in C/R specifically and English studies more generally. The course should additionally enable students to make connections with other courses in our graduate curriculum relevant to the course’s subtopics. Finally, those graduate students who are aspiring or practicing teachers will also come 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.