First Class
Course Expectations/Outcomes

Activity: Questioning the Syllabus

Activity: Literacy Roadmap

For our next class,

read

• Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

• Write down the 3 most important ideas / tips / concepts that stick out to you from Bain’s book. For each one, write at least 2-3 sentences that explain why those things caught your attention. We’ll use these to steer class discussion.

• By Friday, August 23 at noon, complete the online MBTI and email Dr. Banks your results. Remember, when doing the MBTI, you should answer as quickly as possible based on optimal conditions. In other words, don’t think of different situations in which you might respond in different ways; rather, answer each question as though you were in an ideal or “perfect” place. E.g., if the question is, “When the phone rings, you (a) rush to answer it before any one else, or (b) listen to it ring and hope someone else will pick it up or the caller will give up?” — don’t say, “well, if I were waiting for a job offer, I’d pick it up immediately, but if …” If you were not expecting a call and it rang, are you the sort of person to jump at the chance to speak on the phone or would rather the person texted you or got in touch with you another way? The goal here isn’t to pretend you’re someone you’re not; just answer as authentically as you can. 

Discussion: What Makes for Effective Teaching?

Quick Write 1: Successful/Unsuccessful Teacher Experience

Quick Write 2: Successful/Unsuccessful Learning Experience

Activity: Think-Pair-Share with Responses to Bain & Teacher-Quick-Write

Activity: Post Writing Responses to Course Site (Reading Response #1)

For our next class on epistemologies and values,

read

• Knoblauch, C. H. 1988. “Rhetorical Constructions: Dialogue and Commitment.” College English 50 (2): 125-140.
• Freire, Paolo. 2001. “The Banking Concept of Education” (PDF)
• Jensen, George, &  John DiTiberio. 1998. Excerpts from Personality and the Teaching of Composition (PDF)
• English 1100 Common Syllabus (ECU, MSWord Doc)
• University Writing Outcomes (ECU)
• Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (CWPA)
• Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (NCTE, CWPA, NWP)

• As you’re reading, create a chart in which you list the four epistemologies that Knoblauch outlines and what characterizes each; try to grapple with the complexities and develop some concepts/examples that will help you understand what Knoblauch is trying to do with this taxonomy. Bring your charts/visuals to class.

• Draw a picture of your dream classroom. If the laws of physics were bendable, if money were no object, and you could create the perfect learning environment, what would be there? How would it be arranged? Desks, chairs, tables, beanbags, tree stumps, swings? Large windows to let in sun? A basketball hoop in the corner for exercise when writer’s block hits? What, to you, would be a beautiful, wonderful, exciting place to learn and teach? Bring your drawings to class.
• Bring a copy of your MBTI results to class.

Discussion: How do our epistemologies/values effect our teaching practices and disposition? What are the values that are central to our departmental, programmatic, and professional work? How do we reflect that in shared syllabi and position statements?

Activity: Mapping Values (4 Groups)

Quick Write 3: MBTI, Good/Bad Teachers, and Dream Classrooms

Activity: MBTI, Preferences, and Teaching

• Ball State: MBTI & Careers/Majors

For our next class on composition histories,

read

• Connors, Robert J. 1997. “Introduction” to Composition-Rhetoric (PDF)
• Crowley, Sharon. 1998. “The Invention of Freshman English” (PDF)
• Crowley, Sharon. 1990. Excerpts from Methodical Memory (PDF)

• What can we learn from our histories? What’s the same? What’s changed about writing and the teaching of writing?
• How does Connors redefine “current-traditional” rhetoric? Why?
• What are the various “tenets” that Connors and others highlight as being central to composition-rhetoric?
• Crowley focuses a great deal on concepts like taste, character, and discipline. How do those terms/concepts function in the composition-rhetoric period? Do they continue to be important in our thoughts about teaching writing at the university today?
• Why does Crowley focus so much on social class? How is that concept connected to “protecting pure English” and examinations?
• Why might both Crowley and Connors attribute the major change from rhetoric to “English” in large part to the importation of the “German model” of higher education?  How much do you think this model has remained with us and how much do you think has changed? What does this mean for students coming from high school to college?

• Response #2: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.

Quick Write:  What was the experience like doing the different types of reading responses? What were your challenges or your “a-ha” moments? What did  you notice different in your “reading” (viewing, listening to) the other genres?

Activity: Share Tactile Responses

Discussion: Bain writes in What the Best College Teachers Do that the best teachers “have an unusually keen sense of the histories of their disciplines, including the controversies that have swirled within them, and that understanding seems to help them reflect deeply on the nature of thinking in their fields” (25, emphasis added). In our discussion of Crowley and Connors, what might their histories help us to know about the nature of thinking in composition and/or rhetoric?

For our next class on writing processes,

read

• Murray, Donald A. 1972. “Teaching Writing as a Process” (PDF)
• Emig, Janet. 1977. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” CCC 28 (2): 122-28.
• Rule, Hannah. 2019. “Writing Moves — Theorizing/Picturing Situated Processes.” (PDF)
• Berthoff, Ann E. 1984. “Is Teaching Still Possible?” College English 46 (8): 743-55.
• Vygotsky, Lev. 1978. “Interaction between Learning and Development” (PDF)
• Gardner, Traci. 2008. “Designing Writing Assignments” (PDF)

If you are interested, the full text of Garner’s book, Designing Writing Assignments, is available at the WAC Clearinghouse: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/ncte/gardner/

• What does it mean to write? to learn to write? and who decides? How do we approach assignment designs based on what we know about writing processes?
• Murray’s essay is a sort of free-form injunction against then-current practice. What is he reacting to? (Remember last week’s readings from history.) What is he suggesting we do instead? And ultimately, what’s “right” and “wrong” (and both) with his suggestions? For whom do they work and for whom might they not work?
• Emig and Gardner seem to be influenced by the psychological theories of Lev Vygotsky. How does attention to cognitive processes/procedures affect our thinking about writing as a process? learning as a process? And what role does the teacher play in such process-oriented pedagogy?
• How are Gardner’s ideas of effective assignment design driven by the theories of writing and learning process you have read so far this semester?

• Response #3: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.
• Literacy Autobiography: Look back at the maps you drew that reflect your literacy experiences. Think, as well, about other key moments in your development as a reader/writer. Sketch out a discovery draft in which you remember-in-words some of those moments: what happened? what made it memorable? Bring this draft to class to share with classmates.

Activity: Peer Review Literacy Autobiography discovery drafts.

Activity: Share Tactile Responses

Discussion: What does it mean to teach writing as a process, or set of processes? How does our understanding of “process” reflect/disrupt larger cultural values?

read

• Covino William, & David Jolliffe. 1995. “What Is Rhetoric?” (PDF)
• Ede, Lisa & Andrea A. Lunsford. 1984. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” CCC 35 (2): 155-71.
• Selzer, Jack. 2004. “Rhetorical Analysis” (PDF)
• Kopelson, Karen. 2003. “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; or, the Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered as a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance.” CCC 55 (1): 115 – 146.

• What is rhetoric and how does it affect composition? What can rhetoric offer to the writing AND reading processes in a composition class?
• What is the “content” of a composition course? What should it be? Writing? Reading? Rhetoric? Revision? Peer Review? Themes? Academic Discourse?
• Ede & Lunsford’s essay on audience suggests that the writer is often conflicted about audience (as a concept, as people) in very important ways. How do the concepts of an “invoked” and “addressed” audience differ? What impact might this have on how we teach audience awareness to students? Does it? What does it mean for “reading” and for “revision”?
• Kopelson turns her attention to the rhetorical notion of mêtis (cunning) and asks teachers to consider their own rhetorical positions in the classroom, to understand the rhetorical space of their embodied performances. What might it mean to imagine teaching as a rhetorical practice?

• Response #4: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.
• Continue to work on your Literacy Autobiographies. Based on the feedback you got last week, how have your thoughts about the project changed? have they changed? What story do you think has the most potential as a story readers would want to read? Why? This week’s readings focus on rhetoric and audience, on how writers craft their words to impact specific audiences in specific contexts. How would you go about figuring out an audience for your literacy autobiography?

Discussion: What are the connections between rhetoric and composition? Can rhetoric be both a content and a practice?

read

• ELI Review, “Designing Effective Reviews“
• Chisholm, Richard. 1991. “Introducing Students to Peer Review of Writing” (PDF)
• Sommers, Nancy. 1982. “Responding to Student Writing.” CCC 33 (2): 148-156.
• Haswell, Richard H. 2006. “The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing” (PDF)
• Baker, Kimberly. 2016. “Peer Review as a Strategy for Improving Students’ Writing Process.” Active Learning in Higher Education 17 (3): 179-192.
• OPTIONAL: Paton, Fiona. 2002. “Approaches to Productive Peer Review” (PDF)

• Most of us have been asked to read another person’s paper and offer feedback of various kinds: spelling, grammar, punctuation, “flow,” etc. What’s the purpose of peer review in a writing classroom? What can peers do different from what teachers can do? And why should we engage students in reading each other’s works-in-progress?
• How might peer review support/be part of ongoing instruction in reading? If reading academic genres or other nonfiction genres requires different practices than reading poetical texts (fiction/poetry) does, how do we teach these practices?
• Haswell sketches out several response roles in his article that have arisen in writing scholarship as methods for how teachers offer feedback to students/on student works-in-progress. Imagine sharing those roles with students and asking them what sort of feedback they want from readers, what role(s) they want their peers to play during peer review? What if we had students tell us as teachers what sort of response role they want us to play? 
• Return to the English 1100 common syllabus and consider the assignments there: where does peer review fit into the work? what sort of reviews could you create to help students help each other to write and communicate more effectively? how often would you do peer review over a 2-3 week period as students work on one major assignment?

• Response #5: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.
• For next week, to prepare for your Curation/Inquiry Project, spend some time thinking about some of the issues that have some up regarding teaching first-year writing. What are some things you are most concerned about when it comes to teaching first-year writing? Or what are some things we’ve talked about that you think you’d like to learn more about in relationship to first-year writing/academic writing? What are some elements of writing academic prose that you’re uncertain about yourself still as a writer, that you feel like you may need to learn more about in in order to teach students these things? Make a list of these issues that interest you along with a brief statement about why, and bring the list to class next week.
• Here’s an example that a former student did on the then-current topic of the “flipped classroom”: Rex’s Flipped Classroom

Discussion: One of the key issues in higher education is reading ability, and often, students’ struggles as writers are directly a result of their struggles as readers of complex texts. How might we imagine peer review as reading instruction just as much as it’s part of writing instruction? What are the real goals of peer review for learners?

Activity: Exploring Curation (Inquiry) Project Topics.

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• Since we have no assigned reading this week, please use time before and during our regularly scheduled class to read and respond to your peers’ Curation Project Proposals. Responses should all be posted by Wednesday, October 16.

• Create a proposal for the Curation (Inquiry) Project that you want to complete this semester. Your proposal should address the following questions: 1) what issue/problem with teaching first-year composition are you interested in learning more about? 2) why does this issue/problem interest you? 3) what sort of resources are you planning to curate for other new teachers of composition? 4) why do you think these resources would be useful to that audience (and yourself, of course)? and 5) what scholarly resources have you already found that you might lean on for help with understanding the nuances and complexities of the issue/problem and how to address it as a teacher?
• Remember to post these as “Curation Projects” on our course site and check the category “CP-Proposal” when you do. Please do not upload Word or other files, but copy and paste your text directly into the WordPress composing box/screen. Completed proposals will show up under “Curation Projects” on the main menu of the course site.

Activity: Respond to each other’s Curation Projects on the course site between Monday, October 14 @ 5:00 pm and Wednesday, October 16 @ 8:00 am.

The goal of this response is to help the writer to 1) imagine how this project might be useful to themselves or other teachers of first-year writing classes like English 1100; 2) consider issues that might be connected to the one they’re writing about and to understand why they might need to either broaden or narrow their project in order to be useful; and  3) ultimately, to clarify their focus of inquiry and the materials they might create out of that inquiry in order to help themselves and other FYC teachers.

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• Bartholomae, David. 1985. “Inventing the University” (PDF)
• Bartholomae, David & John Schilb. 2011. “‘Inventing the University at 25: An Interview with David Bartholomae.” College English 73 (3): 260-82.
• Rose, Mike. 1980. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block.” CCC 31 (4): 389-401.
• Banks, William P. 2003. “Written Through the Body: Disruptions and ‘Personal’ Writing.” College English 66 (1): 21-40.
• Rounsaville, Angela. 2012. “Selecting Genres for Transfer: The Role of Uptake in Students’ Antecedent Genre Knowledge.” Composition Forum 26.

• Bartholomae’s “Inventing the  University” is a modern classic of composition theory and pedagogy, a text that helped shift how writing teachers see the work of writing in a first-year course. How does the idea that student writers must “invent the university” when they write impact how we understand their texts and the rhetorical situations in which they write? How many different “universities” are students inventing during any given semester?
• Where Bartolomae took a rhetorical approach to understanding some of the barriers/blocks that students experience as they learn academic discourse conventions, Rose took a more cognitivist approach, asking how students self-censor and self-sabbotage in their writing processes and practices. What’s different between the “rules” and “plans”? Have you as writers experienced either or both of these types of “blocking”? Are there other causes to your writing blocks that might not fit into these categories?
• Banks and Rounsaville both look at genre conventions as spaces/concepts that we need to reconsider as we imagine our assignments. Banks plays with the genre conventions of a scholarly article while also challenging the idea that “personal” or “narrative” writing is easier or less complex that other genres or modes, while Rounsaville asks questions about how genre knowledge can “transfer” across writing contexts. How do these writers understand “genre” (outside of perhaps more well-known literary genres)? How might talking about academic texts as representative of different genres and sub-/micro-genres help students develop writing awareness that moves across writing contexts?
• Return to the English 1100 common syllabus and consider the assignments there: how do they connect (or not) to genre? how do the projects attempt to teach students “academic discourse”? what are the discourse conventions built into those projects?

• Response #6: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.
• After Wednesday, Oct 16, review the feedback that you got on your Curation Project, synthesize the feedback, and write a revision plan memo to Dr. Banks, due Monday, Oct 21, which highlights the feedback that was most useful for you (and who provided it) and also which feedback you are (at least at this stage) not planning to use — for both types of feedback, explain why you plan to use or not use the feedback: why do you think the effective feedback will be helpful? what changes to your project or research does that feedback help you to do? in rejecting feedback, why doesn’t that feedback help you based on your current goals?

Discussion: How do academic discourses and genres/micro-genres control what writing looks like and does in higher education? How might genre awareness help student writers both in course-based writing contexts but also in out-of-school writing contexts? How might discourse/genre knowledge “transfer” across different writiting contexts more effectively than the traditional “rules” of writing?

Given this week’s readings, how would we define the “writing construct” of our first year writing course? What does it mean to be a good/effective writer? What does good/effective writing look like?

read

• Brandt, Deborah, and Katie Clinton. 2002. “Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice.” Journal of Literacy Research 34 (3): 337-356.
• Dudley-Marling, Curt. 2007. “Return of the Deficit.” Journal of Educational Controversy 2 (1): Article 5. (PDF)
• Turner, Kristen Hawley, and Troy Hicks. 2011-2012. “‘That’s Not Writing’: Exploring the Intersection of Digital Writing, Community Literacy, and Social Justice.” Community Literacy Journal 6 (1): 55-78. (PDF)
• Guerra, Juan C. 2004. “Putting Literacy in Its Place: Nomadic Consciousness and the Practice of Transcultural Repositioning.” (PDF)
• Brooke, Robert. 1987. “Underlife and Writing Instruction.” CCC 38 (2): 141-153.

• How do Brandt and Clinton disrupt traditional notions of literacy as “simply” reading and writing? What new ways do they offer for thinking about literacy? How do more recent concepts of literacy like those that Turner and Hicks explore impact our thinking about what counts as literate behaviors and practices?
• One of the ways we continually talk about literacy is by talking about “illiteracy,” building notions of language and understanding around deficits rather than what Moll et al call “funds of knowledge.” How does Dudley-Marling encourage us to disrupt “deficit thinking” about literacy and learning? What other models might we embrace instead?
• A key element to literacy is the idea that certain constrained notion of reading and writing, once attained, are fundamentally “liberatory,” that they enact a type of consciousness that is fundamentally better than other ways of being in the world. How do both Guerra and Brooke pull at that idea/value differently?
• Return to the English 1100 common syllabus and consider the assignments there: what literacies do the assignments focus on/promote? Based on the readings this week, what other literacies might also fit into those spaces? How might the common assignments be inflected with digital and/or multimodal literacies?

• Response #7: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.
• Now that you’ve been working on your “literacy autobiography” for several weeks, it’s time to produce a draft that calls for engaged response, response that can help you answer some important questions about your project and where it might go in terms of genre conventions and audience, as well as how it imagine what literacy is. Prepare a draft of your project for instructor and peer feedback. Post your most recent draft as LA-Draft on the Literacy Autobiography by Wednesday, October 30 at 5:00 pm. To introduce your draft, include a Writer’s Memo that tells readers the following: 1) What has been your biggest struggle so far in writing about your own literacy experience(s)? 2) What “breakthroughs” have you had about your literacy experiences and how do these connect with any of the readings we’ve done this semester? and 3) What sort of feedback would you like from readers? What questions can we answer about your draft to help you with revision?
• After posting your own draft, choose two drafts to respond to by Friday, November 1 at 5:00 pm. Pay careful attention to the feedback the author asks for and limit your response to those questions. We want to respect the writer and their desires for help/feedback.

Discussion: What does it mean to be “literate” in the first-year writing classroom? What literacies do young adults bring with them to college from home and previous school words, and how might those literacy both help and inhibit their work a course like English 1100?

How do the readings unpack the writing construct for first-year writing? What composing options might students have based on this week’s readings?

Activity:

read

• Sommers, Nancy. 1980. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” CCC 31 (4): 378-88.
• Caswell, Nicole I. 2018. “Affective Tensions in Response.” Journal of Response to Writing 4 (2): 69-98.
• Smith, Summer. 1997. “The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Response to Student Writing.” CCC 48 (2): 249-68.
• Royster, Jacqueline J. 1996. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” CCC 47 (1): 29-40.

• Questions
• Return to the English 1100 common syllabus and consider the assignments there. For one of the projects, imagine how you would organize 2-3 weeks of classwork to help students get from the assignment itself to a text of some sort: where does revision fit into the unit/sequence? how much revision can/should/would you teach? how many drafts would students create? how would you/they track the development of those drafts? how might you hold students accountable for revision?

• Response #8: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.
• Now that you have feedback from your peers on your Literacy Autobiographies, begin working on your revision. Imagine what you want this piece to look like, what you want it to accomplish. Is it a long history of your literacy experiences, or a focused piece that engage with one key moment in your reading/writing history? What might readers take from this experience? How might you shape your experience for a particular context or purpose (e.g., a reading at the local library in support of an important cause, an example for a first-year writing course of reflective writing, an editorial for the local paper that connects your own literacy experiences to a bigger issue that the community needs to address)? Your finished-for-now draft and Writer’s Memo will be due November 13.

Discussion: Readings for this week highlight how important it is for teachers (and peers) to imagine response as a relationship between the writer and reader. This framework moves us away from the “autopsy” metaphor that we explored at the start of the semester and toward a way of seeing writing as a conversation between a writer and their readers. What strategies can help us as teachers, and help our students in peer review, to establish this sort of response relationship?

Activity:

read

• Hartwell, Patrick. 1985. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English 47 (2): 1051-127.
• Lunsford, Andrea A. & Karen J. Lunsford. 2008. “‘Mistakes Are a Fact of Life’: A National Comparative Study.” CCC 59 (4): 781-806.
• Smitherman, Geneva. 1999. “Meditations on Language” (PDF)
• Kynard, Carmen. 2006. “‘Y’all Are Killin’ Me Up in Here’: Response Theory from a Newjack Composition Instructor/SistahGurl Meeting Her Students on the Page.” TETYC 33.4: 361-87.
• Lindblom, Kenneth, & Patricia A. Dunn. 2006. “Analyzing Grammar Rants: An Alternative to Traditional Grammar Instruction.” English Journal 95 (5): 71-77.
• Class Activity Example: Susan Spangler’s “Analyzing Grammar Pet Peeves” from ReadWriteThink.Org

• How do determine which of the many grammars (definitions of grammar) are important in our teaching of a composition course? How might students benefit from knowing Hartwell’s different types of grammar?
• If student writers make no more “errors” or “mistakes” in their writing now then they did 30 years ago (Lunsford & Lunsford), or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, why do our discussions of literacy (last week) and student writing always seem to be about decline and failure? How can we interrupt this deficit mindset around student writers?
• What does it mean to teach “grammar” in a composition course? Must it only be worksheets and direct instruction, or how might Lindlbom & Dunn’s idea of teaching grammar rants and Spangler’s activity around grammar pet peeves provide a space for students in writing classes to unpack the complexities around different grammars?
• How might we value all the languages and grammars that students have, rather than suggest that any one is inherently better than another? How might a rhetorical framework help us to mediate students (and our own) understandings of grammar/language — and prejudice?
• Return to the English 1100 common syllabus and consider the assignments there: what types of language and which grammars might students make use of for these different projects? how would you talk about language diversity and grammatical diversity with students when teaching these projects?

• Response #9: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.
• Your finished-for-now draft of your Literacy Autobiography project is due Wednesday, November 13 by 5:00pm. You should post it to the course site as LA-Final on the Literacy Autobiography section. Before you post it, have you scheduled an appointment in the University Writing Center for feedback from a trained writing consultant? If not, you should consider doing that to get additional feedback on your work. When you post your final-for-now draft, include a Writer’s Memo that reflects on the following questions: 1) What did this project do to help you think (differently) about what literacy is/isn’t? 2) How did this project develop? What major revisions did you make over time, based on readings, your peers’ and instructors feedback, the Writing Center feedback? 3) What might you do in a next draft if you had more time? Why do you think that would be useful to the project given your goals? 4) Whom do you envision as your audience for this piece? Why? What do hope your primary audience will get out of reading/view your project? and 5) What  feedback would you like on this project? What questions do you have for the instructor as a reader to help your piece connect to you audience/purpose?

Discussion: What role does language study/grammar study have in a composition courses? Which languages and grammars do we value?

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• Shipka, Toward a Composition Made Whole

• Questions: Create Your Own!

• Response #10: Reading Response groups should complete their responses to readings and post them to the course website by Monday at 5:00.

Discussion: How does multimodality impact the work of a composition classroom? What role should multimodality play in our designing and responding to student projects?

Activity: Re-mediating English 1100

Activity: Practice Responding to Student Text

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• Elbow, Peter. 1993. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English 55 (2): 187-206.
• Haswell, Richard H. 1983. “Minimal Marking.” College English 45 (6): 600-604.
• Ball, Arnetha. 1997. “Expanding the Dialogue on Culture as a Critical Component When Assessing Writing.” Assessing Writing 4 (2): 169-202.
• Cunningham, Jennifer. 2019. “Composition Students’ Opinions of and Attention to Instructor Feedback.” Journal of Response to Writing 5 (1): 4-38.
• Inoue, Asao. 2019. “What Labor-Based Contracts Look Like.” In Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, Perspectives on Writing. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado. (PDF)

• How does our thinking about assessment change if we understanding Elbow’s “three forms of judgment”? How do grades reflect those different forms differentially?
• What is the composition teacher’s role in responding to a text? Is all our “marking” about justifying a grade, or can it be merely suggestive? Must students respond to all comments/corrections, or can they make choices?
• How might we get away from traditional notions of grades as only vaulations of quality? Could Inoue’s notion of a grading contract provide options for helping students to rethink/reimagine grades and grading?
• Does everything a student writes in a class need to have a grade on it for students to take it seriously?
• If grades do so much harm in the world, how can we imagine a classroom that represents a better world for students, even if only for a few weeks? For students who are accustomed to making high grades, how might a different framework threaten them? Why might they resist?

• Writing Assessments: Respond to/evaluate the packet of student projects you have been given access to. Instructions are on the assignment page.

Discussion: What is the role of grades/grading in the first year writing classroom? How can we reimagine what grades are and what they do so as to have a more just and ethical classroom?

Activity: SSOI Forms

Activity:Grading and Responding to Student Writing

Activity: Building a Rubric

Quick Write: Reflecting on Assessment Practices

For our next class, we will work in groups to share and respond to each other’s Curation Projects in draft format. This will give you the opportunity to get quality feedback on the different genres and pieces you create. You can bring in printed versions or use the computers and monitors in the room to share digital versions of you work for feedback.  

create

• Draft of Curation Project for Feedback and Review

Discussion: Final Portfolio for English 6625

Activity: Share and Respond to Curation Project Drafts

For next week, you should have finished all of your projects for the semester.  You will turn these  in digitally as part of an online “portfolio” of materials linked from your Analytical Cover Letter, which will be posted to our course site. (Instructions to follow)

Final Portfolio Due: December 10 by 5:00 pm