Freshman English: ENGL 110 and ENGL 111

Statement of Pedagogical Principles and Practices

The University of Connecticut Freshman English requirement is a four-credit, single semester writing seminar. Students with verbal SAT scores of 540 and above may choose either an interdisciplinary, rhetorically based seminar or a literature based seminar. Honors students and students who have scored four or five on the English Advanced Placement Test are exempt from the requirement.

The rhetorically based course is called “English 110: Seminar in Academic Writing,” and it is described in the university course catalog as follows: “Instruction in academic writing through interdisciplinary readings. Assignments emphasize interpretation, argumentation, and reflection. Revision of formal assignments and instruction on grammar, mechanics, and style.” The literature based course is called “English 111: Seminar in Writing through Literature,” and it is described in the university course catalog as follows: “Instruction in academic writing through literary reading. Assignments emphasize interpretation, argumentation, and reflection. Revision of formal assignments and instruction on grammar, mechanics, and style.” English 110 emphasizes the intellectual purposes and discursive formations of academic writing while English 111 emphasizes the intellectual purposes and aesthetic power of literary texts. Both seminars, however, will engage students in the work of academic inquiry through the interpretation of difficult texts, participation in the issues and arguments that animate the texts, and reflection on the significance for academic and general culture and for themselves of the critical work of reading and writing. Assignments in both courses highlight the work that writing does in academic, literary, and general culture, and they are arranged in sequences as a series of intellectual tasks. (For a range of examples, see the Freshman English Handbook.)

In addition to achieving some specific writing goals, such as the ability to write critical essays that demonstrate a thoughtful engagement with complex readings of some length that reflect points of view on material new for the students, the seminars are designed to help students develop, through revision and reflection, an understanding of themselves as writers and thinkers. Consequently, no matter how strong or weak students may be as readers and writers when they begin the seminars, they should all be more powerful and self aware writers, readers, and thinkers by the end of the course.

The Freshman Writing Seminars stress the value of revision as a means of achieving depth of understanding in reading and coherence, clarity, and control in writing. Revision is, so to speak, where the action is in writing for it is through revision that we develop a more nuanced understanding of the texts under consideration and the shared world the texts draw us into. We might think of reading and writing as a kind of conversation between the text and the reader about a world that both text and reader are in the process of understanding. Rather than promoting an adversarial or exclusively evaluative model of writing, with such questions as “What are the weaknesses of the author’s argument?” or “Do you agree or disagree with the author’s position?” (although such questions could certainly be part of a series of questions), the seminars should encourage students to think of themselves as participants–as they, in fact, are–in a collaborative process of questioning and discovery, at times working with and at other times working against the views and voices in the readings and among other students in the class. One goal of the seminars, then, is to provide a context within which students can work with academic texts, texts that constitute the work and the voices of the university. The students’ task is to enter into the conversation. To do this, they must see for themselves that the meaning of a text, no matter the discipline, is not contained exclusively in the words on the page, like peaches in a hermetically sealed container, but that meaning exists only through readers’ active participation. Texts live through the work of readers. In reading anthropology or physics or literary criticism, for instance, students will have to become, as reader response theory would have it, co-authors; they will have to construct a “reading” that makes the text meaningful. And in order to make their reading meaningful to others, they will need to write their own text for others to read, extending the conversation.

TYPICAL ACTIVITIES IN FRESHMAN ENGLISH SEMINARS:

· Discussing assigned readings, either in preparation for a writing assignment, as part of revising drafts, or to illustrate rhetorical principles and generic features

· Discussing student papers for similar purposes

· Writing brief, exploratory in-class essays, for example, a 15-20 minute focused free-write in preparation for discussion of a reading assignment

· Revision, individually and in groups. Localized revision exercises as follow-ups to finished papers

· Writing workshops for drafting

· In-class essay exam practice

· Small group tutorials

· Individual conferences

NOTE: As this list of typical activities and the conference discussion below indicate, student participation on many levels is at the heart of the Freshman English Seminars. Since the official university policy on attendance is more lax than is appropriate for this kind of course, attendance will be linked to participation requirements in determining a final grade. The seminars are largely writing workshops, analogous to science lab courses (also four-credit). Lack of participation, i.e. nonattendance, may lower student grades. Instructors should distribute a course description, which may include a partial syllabus, during the first week of the semester. The course description should include information such as the texts for the course, the instructor’s office hours, amount and type of work required, and grading policies, including an attendance/participation policy.

READING: The Writing Seminars should emphasize reading as a constructive activity, not merely the passive absorption or duplication of “information” from the reading. Reading involves the construction of a text that functions as a record of the interpretive activity of a reader who makes explicit some of the potential meanings embodied in the language of a text. Meaning in this sense is, to paraphrase Bakhtin, half the text’s and half the reader’s. In order to read, we need to consider the implicit assumptions or axioms upon which a text’s point of view is based and the larger discursive field a text locates itself within. We also need to bring out into the open, to evoke Hans-Georg Gadamer’s terms, our own presuppositions about the apparent object/s of the text. In the seminar, we read, read again, and write; then we test what we have written against the interpretations of other readers before reading and writing again, and so on. Through this recursive process of multiple conversations–between individual readers and texts, between teachers and students, and among students in the class–a preliminary interpretation will gradually become more focused, more responsive to the text and a range of other possible responses/objections, and thus more controlled and complex.

This kind of interpretive reading requires that we spend more time than most students are used to in reading and re-reading the assignments. To make that reading/re-reading productive, we should work with texts that give readers work to do, texts that pose problems, that resist easy and facile summation, and that open up as many questions as they answer. (Readings found in texts such as Ways of Reading and A World of Ideas -- both published by Bedford Books – serve as fine examples of reading appropriate to English 110 while the range of texts available in any of the major literature and composition or introduction to literature anthologies can be worked with in similar depth in English 111.) Both courses emphasize care and richness of reading not coverage of a selection of types of reading. In English 110 a class might read four or five essays in one term while in English 111 a class might read one novel, a few short stories, selections of poetry, and a couple of plays. The readings in either course might be productively supplemented by various forms of visual texts as well.

WRITING: The Writing Seminar should teach students how texts can support, challenge, extend, and/or complicate their own thinking. Rather than merely writing about texts, they should explore the ways in which texts provide other ways to think about and understand a shared world. In that effort, they will find themselves sometimes writing with, sometimes writing against, and sometimes writing to extend work initiated by a text. The writing should be focused on intellectual tasks, and the assignments should be sequenced to encourage extended and sustained inquiry. For example, one might begin by asking students to interpret a single reading for the purpose of raising questions that would be explored in the next reading and writing assignments. (Ways of Reading has many examples of the kind of sequencing alluded to here. See also the Freshman English Handbook for more examples.) The emphasis in all writing assignments should be on the intellectual work to be done in the assignment, not a pre-determined form (e.g. comparison/contrast) for the writing. That is not to say that the student essays will be formless. It is to say that the forms that students end up writing will be the result of the intellectual work of the assignment. The forms will emerge from the thinking done through writing rather than the thinking having to be fitted to a pre-determined form. After reading, drafting, re-reading, revising, workshopping, and so on, students will amass by the end of the semester thirty (30) pages of revised, edited, and proofread formal prose (a university requirement). In addition to the university’s thirty page requirement, instructors may also require a range of informal assignments, such as in-class free-writing, brief reading response papers, and journal writing. They may also require other formal assignments, such as small research projects and oral reports in the service of reading. Thus students will write more than the required thirty pages, but not all writing need be graded or evaluated (e.g. journals and free-writing). All the formal, finished essays that count toward the university requirement should be academic in nature, although the occasional “creative” assignment, for example, a narrative followed by analysis, a formal argument followed by self-reflection, and other mixed genre efforts, can serve to extend the purposes of academic inquiry. A mid-term exam is not required, but we encourage instructors to work on strategies for in-class essay examination writing because a final in-class, essay exam is required. Instructors design their own exam (see the Freshman English Handbook for examples), and the exam must be given at the official time designated by the University.

As an aid in showing students how to work actively on their reading through their writing, the seminars will familiarize students through practice with the conventions of citation, quotation, paraphrase, and so on, and help them see that these conventions are not simply arbitrary. To evoke the conversation metaphor, such conventions provide the part of the textual conversation the students respond to in their writing. Without those conventional practices of citation, student papers would read like the overheard words of one partner in a telephone conversation. Citation in one form or another enables textual conversation, a precondition for thoughtful exploration and testing of ideas. Such exploration and testing implies, of course, a bit of risk; as we write, we may find ourselves moving in unanticipated directions. But that surprise of discovery is, after all, one of the real values of writing.

REVISION: Early in the term, we should not emphasize closure, symmetry, and clarity at the expense of exploration and risk. In the second half of the term, however, when students have developed a sense of how revision sustains the movement from open-ended exploration to clarity of point of view and sustained complex coherence, the seminars should devote progressively greater attention to student papers as discrete works, as public presentations of what each writer has learned in the process of reading and writing. Open reflection and committed, persuasive argument are complementary aspects of a single process. Without the former (open questioning and exploration of texts in their relation to a shared world), the writer learns nothing; without the latter (a clearly expressed, richly developed, and accurately documented essay), the reader learns nothing. The seminars, then, have a double emphasis: to teach students how to develop a point of view through reading and writing within disciplines and on matters about which they have not previously given much thought, and to enable students to produce a rhetorically effective document of their thinking. The completed, revised essays written in each Writing Seminar should have a central idea/purpose that requires detailed argument and development, they should be carefully contextualized and developed in light of the readings that stimulate the assignment and the central idea that grounds the student essay, and they should be properly documented, typed, formatted, edited, and proofread.

WORKING WITH STUDENT WRITING: Students’ papers should be given the same respect and attention as the assigned published reading. That means a substantial formal part of the plan of the course should involve direct discussion of student writing. There are a number of ways to organize and focus such discussion. For example, before asking students to work in peer groups on rough drafts, teachers might have a student or two submit drafts early for duplication. Then a class could be devoted to a thorough discussion of the example drafts to illustrate the kinds of questions to ask and suggestions to make when working on drafts for revision, not proofreading. Once final drafts are done, the teacher might catalog the writing issues that emerged in her/his reading, duplicate selected parts of the final papers, and do pretty narrowly focused revision work, on, for instance, appropriate contextualization of and extrapolation from quotations. Such work could also be done in small tutorial groups. The general point is to demonstrate as concretely as possible how the critical reading skills one brings to the published readings can inform the way one reads one’s own and one’s peers’ writing. Thus throughout the term students should be required, either in groups or individually, to respond critically to their own work and the work of other students, especially in regard to conceptual significance, interpretive accuracy, organizational effectiveness, and general clarity, including mechanics.

CONFERENCES/TUTORIALS: In many ways conference/tutorial work is at the heart of the Freshman English Seminars. With a student/teacher ratio of 20:1 and a full TA work requirement set by the university at twenty hours per week, there is ample time to structure small group tutorials and individual conferences throughout the term, not just at mid-term. The seminars are designed to encourage as much student/teacher contact as possible, centering teacher responses to student writing on conversations with students. While some teachers prefer individual conferences to small group tutorials, and others prefer small group tutorials to individual conferences, both structures are valuable and workable. Some teachers have required individual conferences every other week (usually when papers were due), or they set a fixed number of required conferences for the term (for example, five). Other teachers organized group tutorials to meet twice a month while a few teachers scheduled both, alternating between individual conferences and group tutorials each week. However one chooses to structure this work, one should be sure that students have to prepare for the conference/tutorial and that there are specific tasks/goals for each session. For example, I structure small group tutorials as follows: (1) students organize themselves into groups of four (I assist when necessary) with the intent to work together as a writing support group throughout the term; (2) I assign tasks related to the reading to each group; (3) when rough drafts are due, each member of the group gives a copy of the draft to me and to other members at least one day before the scheduled tutorial session; (4) the group and I read the drafts before the session and list the areas (strong parts and problematic parts) of the draft we would like to discuss; the group discusses the draft while the writer simply listens; (5) during the tutorial, we schedule twenty minutes for each draft, and I begin by putting my list of concerns on the table and other members of the group supplement the list; (6) after we discuss each paper, the writer responds to the discussion and summarizes the areas that she/he will work on in revision. We do similar work on “finished” papers as well. In planning conferences and tutorials, think about how you might use time that would normally have been devoted to writing commentary on a student paper for conversation with that student on the paper. The conferences/tutorials should provide the main venue for teachers to maintain contact with students for discussion and assessment of writing. Inevitably the conversations from the conference/tutorials spill over into the class discussions of readings, enriching the whole class dynamics and deepening the content of the course. (For much more on this see the Freshman English TA Handbook.)

LEARNING GOALS FOR THE SEMINARS: In order to contextualize and coordinate the goals of our Freshman English seminars with the goals of first year writing programs across the country, we have organized those goals according to the four broad categories established by the Council of Writing Program Administrators in 1999 and disseminated widely in College English (63.3, January 2001) under the heading “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition.” We have, however, eliminated some of the redundancy in the WPA list, emphasized particular aspects of those general goals for our specific purposes, and added some other specific goals of our own. Here is our revision of the four categories: (1) Critical Literacy, (2) Rhetorical Knowledge, (3) Logic and Use of Academic Writing Conventions, and (4) Writing and Reading Processes that Work for the Student. What follows, organized under each of the four categories, is a specific list of official English Department goals for learning outcomes in the Freshman English Program at the University of Connecticut.

Critical Literacy

* understands that academic writing is grounded in inquiry

* the ability to distinguish one’s own ideas from the ideas in readings

* the ability to integrate one’s own ideas with ideas from readings

* understands how academic argument works

* works with writing assignments as a series of intellectual tasks

Rhetorical Knowledge

* understands the power dynamics in particular writing situations

* understands reader expectations

* negotiates the demands of reader expectation and writing purpose

* responds appropriately to assignments

Logic and Use of Academic Writing Conventions (as reflected in finished papers)

* a central idea or controlling purpose (a thesis) that requires detailed argument and development

* careful contextualization of the thesis in light of the readings that ground the assignment

* paragraphs that develop the thesis in any number of ways, from offering examples with explanations, to citing authorities, to critically examining a claim from the reading, to comparing/contrasting, to offering a logical chain of reasoning, to defining and redefining terms, and so on

* paragraphs that relate to each other in an intellectually coherent and logically competent way

* sentences that move fluently and fluidly in sequence

* sources that are properly documented and quotations that are properly punctuated

* typed prose edited for expression and proofread for correctness

Writing and Reading Processes that Work for the Student (or what students should understand about writing and themselves as writers)

* their characteristic strengths and weaknesses as writers

* writing processes or strategies that work for them

* the possibilities and limitations of collaboration in reading and writing

* the connection between writing and academic inquiry

* the need to continue to work on their writing throughout their academic careers

Thomas Recchio, Director of Freshman English
(revised February 2001)