Category: Pedagogy

Posts that deal with ways of teaching

The Pentad Is Not a Checklist

On By guitarsophistIn Modern Rhetoric, Pedagogy1 Comment

I’m doing a session at the ERWC conferences this year. The northern conference is in Sacramento on June 20, 2023. The southern conference is in Pomona on June 26. I’ll be at both of them. This is the 20th anniversary of ERWC. I haven’t been involved for about five years, so it will be exciting to see all the new developments.

My session will be on applying Kenneth Burke’s pentad—Act, Agent, Scene, Agency, Purpose—using the ratios that appear when the terms are combined. Too often, students trying to use the pentad simply label the elements of the rhetorical situation with the five terms. This is only a first step. Burke’s question, however, is “From whence does motivation flow?” What pentadic element motivates the act? When we use the pentad as a checklist we end up with a static picture and we miss the movement of motivation and the rhetorical possibilities.

The most common ratios are scene→act and agent→act. (Burke doesn’t use the arrows–he just uses a hyphen–but I am trying to emphasize the direction of the flow of motivation.)

Nature Versus Nurture

Let’s take the common argument in psychology about “nature” versus “nurture.” Which is the biggest factor in determining a person’s character? “Nature” is about the factors inherent in the inherited genetic makeup of the individual, or perhaps, from a theological perspective, the “soul.” If we believe that nature is the dominant factor, we are buying into an agent→act ratio. The agent acts according to their inherent nature.

On the other hand, the “nurture” perspective argues that the environment and upbringing have a greater impact. This is a scene→act ratio.

Of course, the reality is that both nature and nurture have effects on individual behavior. Both ratios are valid. This is where rhetoric comes in. We can choose which ratio to emphasize when we talk about specific individuals and specific acts. The ratio we choose to emphasize will have an effect on the persuasiveness of our arguments.

Political Narratives

We can find many examples in the ways that politicians present their life stories. A politician who grew up in poor circumstances, overcame many hardships, but had supportive and hardworking parents, may emphasize how this background built strong character and empathy with the poor. That narrative presents a scene-act or a scene→agent ratio.

On the other hand, a politician who grew up in wealth and privilege may want to de-emphasize that background and argue that their own intelligence, drive, and business acumen made them wealthy, creating an agent→act ratio.

The way to counter the first narrative is to do some research and discover whether the narrative of poverty and hardship is true. In the second case, we can argue that money begets money, and that someone who starts out with wealth and privilege doesn’t necessarily need to be a genius to become even richer.

The Presentation

In my presentation, I will discuss many other examples and ratios. There will also be some group discussion of speeches made in the Tennessee State House when the state legislature voted to expel two young Black members for organizing a protest inside the chamber instead of outside. This case has come to be called, “The Tennessee Three.” I hope to see you there!

Here is a link to the speeches on CSpan.

Here is a transcipt I made.

Here is my slide deck for the presentation in .pdf format.

Previous post on using the ratios.

Conceptual Representation for Learning

On By guitarsophistIn Classical Rhetoric, Modern Rhetoric, PedagogyLeave a comment

In a recent post on her blog, Rhetorical Thinking, Jennifer Fetcher raises some important issues about the utility of the rhetorical triangle she says,

These days, I want to know more about human communication than what the rhetorical triangle can tell me. I want to know what’s behind and underneath this one-dimensional model: what relationships and identities underlie a social interaction, what ways of thinking people bring to the exchange, what sources of knowledge they value, and what communication habits shape what is said (or miss-said) and understood (or misunderstood).

My initial response, which I posted as a comment, was this:

Well, Aristotle doesn’t have these terms arranged in a triangle. I think James Kinneavy was the first to do that, in Theory of Discourse. If we see ethos as speaker, pathos as audience, and logos as the world, we have a speaker speaking about the world to an audience, but both audience and world influence what is said and how it is said. And audiences can speak back. And words frame the world in different ways. It is too dynamic to be captured in a triangle or a pyramid, except as a frozen simplification (which can be useful). M. Jimmie Killingsworth makes a similar point in Appeals in Modern Rhetoric. For me the individual appeals can be seen as nodes spinning in a sort of a magical vortex; you can catch one for a moment and look at it, but it won’t give you the whole picture.

However, I felt there was more to these questions than offering a different metaphor would answer. Let’s start out with these assertions:

  • Making a representation or model of a concept is a rhetorical act in itself
  • As a rhetorical act, such a representation has an audience and a purpose
  • All representations are a simplification of the actual phenomenon, though some are simpler than others
  • There is no final, most true representation; the final representation is no representation at all, but the actual living phenomenon.

Aristotle’s Argument with Plato

Much of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a response to Plato’s argument in the Gorgias that rhetoric is not an art, but a kind of artifice that can make the better appear the worse and the worse appear the better. For Plato, rhetoric is a tactic for trickery and deception. Aristotle argues that rhetoric is indeed an art because some speakers are more effective than others and we can systematically analyze why. He acknowledges that rhetoric can deceive, but also argues that rhetoric can defend the truth against lies.

However, there is a problem. Aristotle believes that logic is the best path toward truth, but when analyzing the most effective speakers he finds that people are often more strongly persuaded by the perceived credibility of the speaker or their own emotional reaction to the speech. Many audiences are neither informed enough nor patient enough to follow a long chain of reasoning. He prefers logos, but allows ethos and pathos into his analysis of the art of rhetoric. He also presents the concept of the “enthymeme,” the argument with some of the premises suppressed or assumed. Such hidden premises relieve the audience from the need to follow chains of interlocking arguments, but also can be a tactic for deception.

Those are the basic concepts of Aristotelian rhetoric. They are useful for understanding many aspects of politics, business genres, family arguments and other interpersonal communication. How do we operationalize them for teachers and students?

Conceptual Representation

This is where the idea of what I am calling “conceptual representation” comes in. All models, metaphors, analogies, outlines, descriptions, and definitions have advantages and disadvantages. Simple models are easier to grasp, but hide complexity. Complex models may provide a more sophisticated representation, but may also be confusing. Every model has a purpose and should be designed to fulfill that purpose. As noted above, there is no true model that represents all of the complexity of the actual phenomenon. What Jennifer is noting in her blog post is that the rhetorical triangle is not effectively representing these concepts for her or for her students. It is not serving its purpose. We need something new.

Of course a simple model poorly used can also cause confusion. This is what happens when the ethos, logos, pathos model is used as a set of pigeonholes in which to categorize specific elements of a text under analysis. In fact, the same element in a text can simultaneously function as part of a logical argument, influence the speaker’s credibility, and create an emotional effect. It is better to ask, “How does this element in the text function to create rhetorical effects.”

Jennifer’s question about how to represent the dynamism of the interaction between these three elements is an important one. I want to discuss it in the context of some recent events in the social media universe.

The Three Appeals on Social Media

I have had a Twitter account for several years, ever since I participated in a CSU English Council workshop on how to use it. I didn’t post or access the account much until I started using it this year to follow the Ukraine war. For a while I was addicted. There was always something new. When I got to the bottom of the feed, there were more tweets at the top of it. There were military experts, mapmakers, soldiers in the field, videos of things blowing up, clips from Russian television, memes (lots of memes), trolls, bots, idiots, the whole range. I learned to sort the real from the false according to my own sensibilities and judgment. I felt like I was always about two days ahead of the mainstream news sources, but I also realized that the journalists were reading the same tweets I was reading.

Deciding who is credible on Twitter is an ethos call, but that call is based on the arguments they make and how they are supported (logos), and on the responses of other people (pathos). The responses of others are also judged according to the same pattern, so pathos leads to logos to ethos in a never-ending spiral.

Argument on Twitter unfolds in a Toulmin-like pattern. A claim is made, say “A Russian Ka-52 helicopter was shot down yesterday.” A video is produced to verify the claim. Someone asks, “Is that really a Ka-52?” Someone with technical knowledge of Russian military aircraft will verify. This is a warrant based on backing in knowledge of helicopter design. “Was that really yesterday? Isn’t it old footage?” The video will be geolocated and people familiar with Ukraine will discuss the weather and even the foliage in the trees. The pattern of claim-evidence-warrant-backing repeats over and over.

Why Do People Post?

I understood why I was reading Twitter, but I felt no desire to post anything. And I wondered, “Why are all these people posting?” Some had clear political purposes, especially the Ukrainians trying to get resources to defend their country. But others seemed to be cheerleading, spectating, or just trying to be witty.

Because of recent changes in the ownership and policy practices of Twitter, many people are exploring other social media possibilities. One of these is Mastodon, an open source non-corporate communications platform. In joining Mastodon, one joins a specific instance, which often has a particular focus, but that instance is part of a “federation” of Mastodon servers, so one is part of a small group that is also part of a much bigger group. I joined an instance called “social.linux.pizza,” for two reasons: 1) the big popular general instances of Mastodon were overwhelmed by Twitter refugees and not accepting new users, and 2) my computer runs Linux.

On Twitter, your feed is governed by who you are following and who they follow, plus some Twitter algorithms, and more recently by whims of the new owner. On Mastodon, you have your home feed of people you follow, plus a local feed of things posted on your particular instance, and a “federated” feed of popular posts from the whole federation, whether you are following them or not. You can choose which feed you want to view at that moment.

Audience and Self

This multiple feed creates audience problems, leading a lot of Twitter refugees to be puzzled by Mastodon. One said, “I don’t know what to post because I don’t know what you folks like.” I felt the same way, but I didn’t know what to post on Twitter either. However, I think this post is interesting because it shows that the poster wants to please the audience, but doesn’t know that audience yet. I might rewrite this to say, “I don’t know who to be because I don’t know who you are.” This is an instance of the audience potentially defining the self, pathos working backwards toward ethos. And indeed, constructing a self seems to be a major impetus to posting.

In Conclusion

In my initial response to Jennifer’s post I suggested ethos-logos-pathos as a magical vortex from which could pluck a particular perspective. That is a nice image, but probably not helpful as a conceptual representation. Perhaps a turning wheel would be better, or three electrodes from which sparks shoot from one pole to another as discourse progresses. I do think, however, that these are useful terms, however we represent them to ourselves and our students.

To finish off this very long post, I would say that we probably make a mistake when we try to get students to analyze op-ed pieces in terms of Aristotelian categories, at least as an introduction to these concepts. It might be better to ask:

  • What social media do you use? What influences your choices?
  • How do you determine who is trustworthy and who is not? (ethos)
  • What feelings do you experience when you read and watch social media? (pathos)
  • Why do you post to social media? What are you trying to do? (purpose)
  • When someone makes a claim that you disagree with, do you respond? How do you support your view? (logos)

Re-Post: The Reading Conundrum

On By guitarsophistIn PedagogyLeave a comment

This was originally posted to my guitarsophist blog in January 2009 before I started this one. We used to hand out copies of Reading Rhetorically in ERWC professional development meetings. The “conundrum” is this: A professor observed that his students “have a limited range of ability, can read textbooks, but not other books.” The rest of the professors in the workshop agreed. Have students become dependent on the reader-friendly, learner-friendly style of presentation developed by textbook publishers?  When instructors create similar scaffolding and support for an ordinary book, are we improving learning while also fostering that dependency? Where do we strike the balance? I thought it might be valuable to revisit this post.

The book for last week’s seminar meeting was Reading Rhetorically by John Bean, Virginia Chappell, and Alice Gillam.  As I noted in another post, this is designed as a freshman text, but I tend to use it as a teacher resource.  It is full of reading strategies for students approaching unfamiliar material.  Students are taught such things as pre-reading, descriptive outlining, reading with and against the grain, rhetorical questioning, and techniques for integrating and citing quoted and paraphrased material.  Fluent academic readers do nearly all of these things by habit and instinct.  However, these strategies are rarely taught overtly because freshman composition courses generally focus on writing, not reading.  Reading is a skill that is pretty much taken for granted after third grade.  If students struggle with reading after third grade, the most common solution is to review phonics and other “learning to read” techniques.

Something is not working because university faculty complain a lot about student reading behaviors.  When I do Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) workshops these days, I usually start out by asking the participants what sorts of problems students have doing the reading for their courses.  Here is a typical list (I posted this previously to the WPA-L discussion listserv):

Students

  • Only read material directly connected to grading
  • Will not read before class
  • Skip difficult material
  • If they don’t see the relevance, they won’t read it
  • Form an incorrect hypothesis of the meaning and misread
  • Decoding problems
  • Unknown vocabulary
  • Expect to read only once
  • Take everything at face value
  • Highlight everything
  • Can’t understand written directions
  • Are egocentric, can’t see another point of view
  • Are unable to reserve judgment until an argument has been completed
  • Lack reading practice
  • Have a limited range of ability, can read textbooks, but not other books
  • Have no background schema to take in learning
  • Can’t understand irony or understatement
  • Believe everything they read

The “Will not read before class” complaint comes up every time.  I finally realized that students were telling us something with that behavior.  They do not like to read difficult material cold.  They don’t know what to attend to until after the discussion.  In my own classes I now give them reading questions and instructions, including things like, “What are the author’s three main points about x?” and “Pay special attention to the paragraph at the bottom of page 47.”  Given some guidance, my students usually read the material before class.

If students habitually practiced the strategies presented in Reading Rhetorically, most of these problems would be solved.  Most students have not had such training, however, so it is up to the instructor to provide guidance, most often in the form of guide questions and pre-reading activities.   In my experience, such measures significantly improve the quality of the discussion and student performance on quizzes and papers.  Instructor evaluations also improve.

However, the observation in the list above that students “can read textbooks, but not other books” is telling.  Textbook publishers are knowledgeable about reading theory and pedagogy.  Textbooks have illustrations, graphs and charts, sidebar guide questions, subheads, summaries, and even CD roms with animations and simulations.  A whole arsenal of reading pedagogies is deployed for every style of learning.  Have students become dependent on this reader-friendly, learner-friendly style of presentation?  And when instructors create similar scaffolding and support for an ordinary book, are we improving learning while also fostering that dependency?

This is the often unasked question at the heart of all “learning-centered” pedagogies.  When does the enabling of the learner become too much?  When does nurturing the student in a learning-centered environment end up disabling the student for learning in the real world?

I am not asking these questions with curmudgeonly intent.  I am not asking “What’s wrong with our students?”  The students are great.  I am also not trying to dodge the work involved in creating guide questions and thinking about why we are reading this and what students should take away from it.  I am asking how we can best serve them in the long run.  I think we have to be careful to design our reading assistance with an eye toward strategies that can be internalized over time, so that the student can begin to approach unfamiliar material with his or her own questions and purposes.  Reading Rhetorically does that well.   Like that book, we need to teach strategies, not do the work for the students.  It’s harder than it sounds.

How Is a Course Like a Song?

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Pedagogy1 Comment

Note: This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

How is a course like a song?

A typical American pop song is usually structured as follows: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, outro. It also has a title, a theme, and often a story, as well as a catchy melody that sticks in your head. It is a structure of repetition and difference that unfolds in time. Each verse advances the theme, while the repetition of the chorus ensures memorability and connection.

I want to argue that a good course has exactly these elements.

It is easy to design a course, especially a composition course, that is a series of issues and texts with no connection between them other than “and now for something completely different.” When students look back on that course they will remember that they discussed a lot of issues and wrote a lot of essays, but they won’t remember concepts and strategies that they can deploy in other contexts. For concepts to be remembered and used later, they need repeated application and foregrounding.

Teaching MLA Style

Several years ago I was teaching a First Year Writing course in which I decided, as a sort of experiment, to focus heavily on using MLA-style documentation. I used both in-text and “Works Cited” documentation in my syllabus and I made MLA documentation a separate row in my grading rubric. I went over MLA on the first day and on several subsequent days. In my assignment sheets, I specifically asked for MLA documentation of sources, including essays in the textbook. For the first two papers, most students ignored the request for citation and got zeros on the rubric in that category. Finally, a student asked, “What is this documentation thing and why do I keep getting a zero?” I explained again. On the more researched papers, the students starting giving me URLs. I noted that this was better than nothing, but still not correct. By the end of ten weeks, most students, most of the time, were giving me something that looked pretty much like MLA documentation. For them to acquire the concept and the habit of doing it, they needed repetition, reinforcement, and consequences. There is no way that you can teach something once and have students retain or practice it.

(Note: A colleague commented that my example here makes it sound like I am recommending that FYC instructors teach Modern Language Association or MLA style. Students in FYC will go on to work in many different disciplines which use many different citation systems. They should know that MLA is only one such style. Others include APA, Chicago, CSE, AIP, and many others. Now there are also Digital Object Identifiers or DOIs. The issue of what citation style or styles to teach is too complex for this post, but whatever style you teach, make sure that students know that their discipline may use a different one.)

The Basic Elements

So, how is a course like a song? A course is about something. It has a title and a theme. In a previous post, I discussed designing learning modules. A learning module is like the verse of a song. Each module is related to the theme of the course, but has a different perspective or approach. The repetition of the theme is the chorus. In a composition course, the theme is probably “audience, purpose, and occasion” because the effectiveness of every rhetorical act is determined by how well it is adapted to these factors. It is good to keep returning to them.

Bob Dylan Songs

My favorite Bob Dylan songs are the ones that tell stories verse by verse with choruses that repeat the same lines, but mean something slightly different with each repetition. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” the verses describe the tragic fall of someone from riches to poverty, each verse describing another aspect of the fall, with the chorus repeatedly asking, “How does it feel to be on your own, no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” In “Memphis Blues Again” verse after verse describes decisions made that land the speaker in the wrong place at the wrong time in different ways, with the chorus repeating, “Oh mama, can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?”

Your course can be a series of experiences that all look back to a set of foundational concepts that form the theme of the course.

The Bridge

What about the bridge? The bridge of a song is a deviation from the pattern established by the verses and choruses. It has a different chord progression. It may even change keys. It takes on the issue from a different perspective. In “No Reply,” a song recorded by the Beatles in 1964 for the album Beatles for Sale, the verses are about a young man complaining that when he knocks on his girlfriend’s door, she doesn’t answer, and when he calls on the telephone, her family says she isn’t home. In the bridge, the speaker says,

If I were you, I’d realize that I
Love you more than any other guy
And I’ll forgive the lies that I
Heard before, when you gave me no reply

Here the speaker tries to imagine the situation from the girl’s point of view, though he ends up projecting his own desires anyway and creating some very tangled up pronoun references. It’s a failed attempt at changing perspective. In effect, it demonstrates how hard it is to truly see from another person’s point of view.

Designing a module in your course that radically changes the perspective can serve to reinforce the design of the more conventional modules that surround it. For example, asking students to write in a different genre for a very different audience and purpose can actually help them see the decisions they are making in the other modules. Or you might turn your normal process around backwards and have them write first and then read. Or you might have them do a rhetorical analysis of another student’s paper. Anything you do to change things up can actually reinforce the pattern you have been establishing.

Intros and Outros

Finally, we all naturally provide an intro to the course, but what about the outro? And the end of a course, students should reflect on what they have read, written and learned. It is the time to consolidate the learning and connect it all together. It is good to design an activity for that.

A course is actually more complicated than most pop songs, with Bob Dylan as a possible exception. However, thinking about your course in this way may help you remember the power of repetition and difference and help your students come away from the course with concepts they can remember and transfer to other contexts.

Crafting a Syllabus

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, PedagogyLeave a comment

Note: Much of the advice here is specific to new Graduate Teaching Associates using Canvas at Cal Poly Pomona. However, there are aspects that apply to any new instructor who is going to teach First Year Composition. This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

Cal Poly Pomona’s Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFE) offers a Syllabus Template that works as a fill-in-the-blank starting point for creating an effective syllabus. I’ll go through the basic elements. I think it is a good idea to create a document with all of this information in it that you can send to students who have added, but don’t yet have access to the course on Canvas. You can then paste the text from this document into the Canvas syllabus page. (Here is my syllabus for English 3151 “Writing In the Professions” as a sample.)

Welcome!

The prompt says “Add a friendly welcome-to-the-course.” Here you put a description of the course from your point of view including what it covers, how it fits into the context of the university, and what students will learn to do. The paragraph or two you put here will set the tone for the rest of the syllabus and the course itself. It is a bit paradoxical. You want to engage students, calm their fears, but also prepare them for challenges. You want to create excitement, but also make them feel that there is difficult work that is worth doing that they are capable of doing. You also begin building your ethos as an instructor here.

Your Instructor

Here you put the name you would prefer to be called, your email address, your office hours, and perhaps a picture of yourself. You may also want to write a short paragraph about yourself. You do not have to reveal that you are a TA or a new instructor, but you may want to talk about why you wanted to be a composition teacher, your philosophy of teaching, and other information that might help your students feel comfortable learning from you.

What students will call you is a complicated question. Technically, you are a Graduate Teaching Associate or GTA, but they don’t need to know that. Most of the faculty teaching FYC are lecturers, not “tenure-track” or tenured faculty. Among tenure-track faculty, there are specific ranks. New faculty are Assistant Professors. After six years of excellent evaluations of teaching, scholarly work, and university service, an Assistant Professor can apply for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. After four more years of excellent work, an Associate Professor can apply to be promoted to the rank of Professor. Thus the rank of “Professor” is actually the highest rank, earned over a period of ten years of teaching, scholarship, and service to the department and the university. (As I am semi-retired at this point, I am “Professor Emeritus.”)

However, the general public thinks that all people who teach at a university are professors who hold doctoral degrees. It is probably simplest if your students call you “Professor Your Last Name.” That is what they will probably do naturally.

Course Information

Here you put basic course information such as department, course number, section, class number, the name of the course. You can get this information from the campus website.

Course Format

This has gotten complicated recently because of the pandemic and the shift to various kinds of online instruction. The full list of instruction modes recognized by Cal Poly Pomona can be found at Online or Hybrid Course Definitions. “Asynchronous” means instruction is online to be done “at time/location of students’ choice.” “Synchronous” means instruction is online, but delivered at specific times through Zoom or another platform. Looking through these definitions, I realize that my courses have been “web-assisted” for more than 20 years. My current courses are listed as “Hybrid with Synchronous Component,” but really should be listed as “Hybrid with Asynchronous Component.” Oh well. I think that most of the TA sections of FYC will be either “Fully Synchronous” or “Hybrid with Synchronous Component.”

You should also put the days and times of your face-to-face and/or synchronous meetings here.

Course Description and Learning Outcomes

The template says “Give the catalog description and your learning outcomes.” The catalog description for ENG 1100 – Stretch Composition I is “Writing fluency, basic essay structure and rhetorical principles, critical reading, and online research. Frequent practice writing essays.” For ENG 1103 – First Year Composition (3) it is “Principal concepts of rhetoric, argumentation, and research. Frequent practice writing essays, letters, and other genres commonly used in academic writing.”

The full 15 outcomes might be a little intimidating for students at the very beginning of the course, so in your syllabus, you might use this collapsed version. You can use the more detailed ones for individual assignments:

  • Pre-writing and Drafting–Generate ideas using appropriate pre-writing strategies; develop those ideas into readable drafts
  • Rhetorical Analysis and Argumentation–Explain and respond to the rhetoric and arguments of others
  • Critical Reading–Read difficult, research-based texts with critical understanding
  • Researching, Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Documenting Sources–Design academic inquiries and develop strategies for finding, evaluating, and integrating information purposefully in a given context
  • Style, Genre Conventions, and Disciplinary Knowledge–Craft a style appropriate to the genre, audience, and purpose of the text
  • Revision–Revise his or her own texts considering genre and rhetorical situation
    Proofreading–Improve correctness and clarity of his or her own texts

Required Materials

List the required books and other resources in MLA format. You might follow this with a narrative description of the texts and how you plan to use them. Students in FYC are sometimes surprised when they find out that they have to buy the books because books in high school are loaned to them for free.

Prerequisites, Co-requisites, and Necessary Skills

ENG 1100 has no prerequisites. ENG 1103 says “CO Category II,” but under Directed Self-Placement, this is pretty meaningless, so you could leave this category out of your syllabus.

Communication

Here you should describe how you will communicate with students and how they should contact you if they have questions. I usually send announcements twice a week, once on Sunday to remind students of what is due and to preview the coming week, and another later in the week with a class meeting agenda. These appear on the Canvas site and are also emailed to the students (if it works on Canvas the way it works on Blackboard). The best way for students to contact me is through email. However, there are more up-to-date modes of communication which you may use. I would avoid giving them your cell phone number, however.

Instructor Responsibilities

This is an interesting category. I would not have thought of this before I saw it in the template our eLearning people created for teaching online in Blackboard. I usually put something like the following:

  • I have taught this course many times before, but this is the first time I have taught a hybrid semi-online version in Canvas, so there may be glitches. I will do everything I can to resolve them as soon as possible.
  • I generally begin grading and responding to work soon after it is submitted and complete the responses within three days. For papers I make in-text comments in Canvas and use a rubric specially designed for the assignment to give a score. I usually make a summary comment at the bottom of the rubric, so be sure to look there.
  • I will respond to emailed questions as quickly as I can. I will also email you if I have questions about your work or if I cannot open the file you have uploaded.
  • I try to make my assignments as clear as possible, but if you have questions, please email me or ask in my in-person or Zoom office hours.

Student Responsibilities

I usually put something like the following:

  • Read all emails and announcements from me about the course
  • Read texts and other materials in the week assigned for them
  • Participate in discussion boards and writing groups
  • Avoid angry messages, flaming, trolling, offensive or profane language.
  • Be sensitive to those with different cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds, as well as different political and religious beliefs.
  • Upload work to Canvas by the due date in a format I can read (I can read most common file formats, such as .doc, .docx, .pdf, .odt, and .rtf, though Apple formats such as Pages files are more difficult. The most common problem is when students post links to Google Doc files instead of the actual files.)
  • If you email me with a question, please include your name and the course you are in.
  • If you email a paper to me, please name the document file something like this: LastNameFirstName-Assignment-Course.doc (I get lots of papers called “mypaper.doc” and it is easy to lose track of who submitted it.)
  • Perhaps most important of all, be engaged in the course! I have designed it to be a learning experience, not a series of busy work assignments to get a grade.

Grades

Explain your grading system. Lately, I have been using a 500-point system. I include a chart which shows how many points a student needs to get specific letter grades. The chart is based on the percentage of the total points the student has. Using a points system in this way means that all of the assignments have to be designated from the beginning and each assigned a point value consistent with the time, effort, and skills put into accomplishing it. The other disadvantage of this system is that if you decide to omit a planned assignment for whatever reason, you have to re-balance the points. I often have to do a bit of re-balancing near the end of the semester. Here is my chart:

GradeChart-500points-color-cropped

Another popular system is to have categories such as Homework, Quizzes, Discussions, Exams, and Research Paper and assign a percentage to each category. The gradebook in Blackboard allowed you to categorize assignments in this way, though I never used this feature. I assume Canvas will also do this. The advantage of this system is that you can add or subtract assignments in a category without changing the weight of that category. There is a pretty good explanation of this system on this Lansing Community College site.

Whatever system you choose, make sure that it is clearly understood by your students.

Make-Up and Late Work Policies

Most new TAs want to have very strict policies about attendance and late work. They might say something like “No more than three unexcused absences and no late papers.” In my experience, with such strict policies, you will find yourself at times wanting to circumvent your own policy for good reasons, especially during the pandemic. Students have lives and responsibilities beyond the classroom. Last semester, I was doing breakout groups on Zoom, and one student did not immediately join her group. I asked her why and she didn’t respond at first. Finally she said, “Sorry, I’m at work and I am hiding my phone in my apron.” I appreciated her honesty, and I find that the more honest they are with me, the easier it is to work with them.

One way to give yourself some flexibility is to be generous in the way you define “excused.” I generally consider an absence excused if the student emails me before or shortly after the meeting with a reasonable excuse. I want the students to stay in contact with me. I also generally give them the benefit of the doubt, even if the excuse sounds fishy. I never ask for doctor’s excuses or mechanic’s invoices.

Last semester I used Blackboard’s attendance tool, which keeps track of attendance as a percentage. I allotted 40 points to attendance and gave them whatever percentage of the points they had earned. That worked well. (It turns out that Canvas has a similar attendance tool, but you have to go to to “Settings” then “Navigation” and then drag the Attendance tool into the upper menu and then click “Save.”)

On late work, during the pandemic I became very flexible. I said that a paper would get full credit if submitted by the due date, but would be docked 15% no matter how late it was submitted, up to the end of week 15. Last semester, I had only five F’s out of about 50 students, and some of the late work was of very high quality. This liberal policy saved about 10 students from failing. A couple of students put off too much work so that they were too far behind to catch up. That is the disadvantage of such a liberal policy. Deadlines serve both the instructor and the student by keeping a pace and distributing the workload over time. A more normal policy would be to dock points for each day it was late until it would be fruitless to turn it in.

The Rest

The rest of the syllabus is about university policies. The template includes a lot of very useful links that you can leave in there for students.

Next up: The reading schedule, which is a week by week articulation of the readings, the activities, and the writing assignments. I work this all out in a single document, but in Canvas, I will use the “Modules” feature to lay everything out. As you plan your course, it is best to think in terms of modules, then weeks, then days.

Creating and Using Rubrics

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Pedagogy1 Comment

Note: This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

A well-designed grading rubric does two important things: It helps students understand how they will be evaluated and it helps teachers grade consistently and fairly. When used in an online learning management system, the rubric can also speed up grading quite a bit.

Rubrics are easy to create and edit in Blackboard. I have only created one rubric in Canvas, but my first impression is that this is one area where Blackboard is easier to use than Canvas. However, once you have created a few different types of rubrics in Canvas, they should be easy to modify for different assignments. It is only the initial creation that is a bit troublesome.

A Sample Rubric

Some rubrics look like outlines with bullet-point descriptions of each score level. The most common format, however, is a grid with assignment criteria down the left hand column and levels of performance across the top. Here is a sample rubric from my Professional Writing course. It is a group assignment in which a team has to design a flyer for a fictitious event.

FlyerRubric-color-grid-1-cropped
This is a multi-modal assignment that includes design principles (alignment, repetition, proximity, and contrast), images, information, rhetorical appeals, and text. I ask the group to assign the following roles to the group members:

  • Coordinator—Sets up meetings, reminds members of dates and tasks, keeps things going. Coordinates discussions. Uploads the final product.
  • Image Sleuth—Once the group has decided on an event and a theme, this person searches the web for possible images.
  • Designer—Integrates images and text into an appealing design. Should be familiar with design and image editing software.
  • Copywriter—Writes the text for the flyer. Chooses appropriate language and sentence structure. Deploys rhetorical strategies.

The criteria you choose should reflect the learning outcomes for the course and your own goals for the assignment. In the example above, my overall goal is for students to see that all of the elements combine together to create a rhetorical effect. I also want them to learn to work together as a team to produce a satisfactory product.

Weighting the Criteria

In this case, I have weighted each of the five criteria equally, at 20%. You may want to assign heavier weight to criteria you deem of the most importance and reduce the weight of others. My performance criteria–poor, marginal, adequate, good, excellent–roughly correspond to letter grades, but note that a submission could be “excellent” on one criteria, but lacking in another. Also note that I am giving 25% even for the poor ranking. I am giving them some credit for turning something in. You don’t have to do that.

Revising the Rubric

The first time you use an assignment, you may find that your initial ideas for the rubric don’t fit. In most learning management systems, you cannot modify a rubric after you have used it to grade one paper. Although it is a good idea to give the students access to the rubric before they begin the assignment, this is not always possible for an assignment you haven’t tried before. You may want to read some of the papers and see what is going wrong and what is going right before you commit to a rubric for that assignment. You may want to change some of the descriptors for different levels of performance, the weighting, or even add a new criterion.

It is usually a good idea to create a specific rubric for each assignment because your focus and the learning outcomes may be different for different assignments. However, you might have a generic rubric that remains pretty much the same throughout the course with variations for different topics and genres.

It’s Worth the Time

It may seem like a lot of work to create a rubric in Canvas to grade papers. One of the truths about using technology is that the first time you do something in software, it takes three times as long as it would take to do it by hand. However, the next time, it takes about the same amount of time as by hand, and after that, you start to reap the benefits and many things are automated. Once you start using automated rubrics to grade papers, it will save you a lot of time. It will also make you a more consistent grader.

My sample rubric above is probably quite different from your early assignments in First-Year Composition. Here is a rubric from my “Advanced Expository Writing” course that is probably closer to what you are assigning. It may give you some ideas you can adapt to your own assignments.

Designing Reading/Writing Assignments

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Pedagogy1 Comment

Note: This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

In designing assignments, you can begin in a number of places. You might have a text to teach that you think would be interesting to your students. Where does it fit in your course? How will they use it? You might have a need to focus on a particular learning outcome. What writing assignment would be appropriate? What texts and activities might support it? Or you might have a topic or theme you want your students to explore. What texts would help students learn about this topic?

An Assignment Template

Whatever motivates your assignment, you should probably end up with a pattern similar to this:

  • Prereading: What can students do to prepare to read this text?
  • Reading: What should students be looking for as they read the text?
  • Postreading: What should students do to analyze and assimilate what they have read?
  • Prewriting: How will the students connect the text to the writing assignment?
  • Writing: What will students write? What audience and purpose will it serve?
  • Revision: What criteria will you use to evaluate the student responses? How can students use this criteria to revise their texts?

This is a very simplified version of the template used by the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC). The handout in this link provides a much more detailed version of this template.

The TILT Framework

The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project recommends an even simpler “Transparent Assignment Template.” They say that students should know:

  • The Purpose of the assignment: what skills are practiced and what knowledge is gained.
  • The Task: What to do and how to do it.
  • The Criteria: a checklist or rubric for self-evaluation and annotated examples of excellent examples of the assignment.

These two templates are not mutually exclusive. The TILT framework could be used to frame the more detailed reading/writing sequence in the ERWC-inspired template.

Looking at the Learning Outcomes

Let’s say that it is early in the course and we want to address the following learning outcomes:

  • B: Explain in clearly written English the rhetoric of others.
  • C: Develop written arguments in response to others’ arguments.
  • D: Write reasonably lucid, well-organized essays that address purpose, audience, and situation—in response to timed-exam prompts.

However, right now we are not interested in “timed exam prompts.”

Finding a Topic

I did a quick search on “Should Americans be required to do public service?” I thought this might be a good issue because I think most students will say no, we are already too busy with school and work, but some may say yes for idealistic reasons or because they are not sure what they want to do in the future and an opportunity for service might give them some experience and direction. There should be enough difference for a good discussion in class. It is best to choose an issue that has some connection with students’ lives and that has a least two different positions, ideally more, that can be supported by reasonable people.

I found an op-ed by David Brooks: “We Need National Service. Now.”

Brooks is a good writer and is supposed to be a conservative, though he has drifted to the left in recent years.

Our Tasks

Our first task in designing this assignment is to devise a prereading activity: What can students do to prepare to read this text? In this case, I think it could be pretty simple. We could ask students to write down an answer to this question: Should Americans be required to do public service? Why or why not? They can put their response aside for now.

What should they be thinking about while reading? We can ask, “Does David Brooks persuade you that the U.S. needs to invest more in public service programs? Do his arguments confirm or refute your previous response?”

Because Outcome B asks students to be able to explain “the rhetoric of others,” we can ask students to apply the Aristotelian appeals, ethos, logos and pathos, to the essay by Brooks. We can also ask them to revisit their original response to see if Brooks has changed their views.

Brooks also asks a number of rhetorical questions, such as

What would it mean to the future social cohesion of this country if a large part of the rising generation had a common experience of shared sacrifice?

What would it mean to our future politics if young people from Berkeley spent a year working side by side with young people from Boise, Birmingham and Baton Rouge?

Has any nation prospered that did not encourage in each new generation the habits of work, the taste for adventure, a sense of duty and a call to be of use to neighbors and the world?

Students could try to answer these questions, or talk about the rhetorical effect on the reader of asking them. All of these postreading activities could be done individually in writing, or in group discussions.

The Writing Assignment

Now for the writing assignment. There are a number of possibilities, depending on what we what to accomplish. If we were attending to Outcome L: “Design their own academic inquiries and develop strategies for finding, evaluating, and integrating information purposefully in a given context,” we could have them research what programs like AmeriCorps do, or what other public service programs exist. They might also research public service in other countries and find that in South Korea, every male must engage in two years of military service, or that in Israel, every citizen, male or female, is required to participate in the military. However, we are focusing on the earlier outcomes. We might ask them to focus on a specific point made by Brooks that they strongly agree or disagree with and write a letter to the editor type of response, giving them some examples of the genre to look at first. Because we have already asked them to do some rhetorical analysis, we could ask them to write a rhetorical analysis paper. See “Writing a Rhetorical Analysis” for some instructions.

It is common for instructors to ask students to agree or disagree with the author and explain why. A problem with this sort of assignment is that the paper that is in agreement ends up largely being a restatement of the author’s arguments, with little original thinking.

A more personal take might be to ask students, if given the choice, what kind of public service they would want to engage in, why they would make that choice, and what effect they think it might have on their lives.

Framing the Assignment

Whatever writing assignment you decide on, think about the TILT framework described above. Tell the students the purpose of the assignment, perhaps referencing the learning outcomes, how to do the assignment, and the criteria for evaluating their response, perhaps in a rubric. Designing a rubric will be discussed in a subsequent post.

Of course, the assignment I have created here could be taught, though it might not be appropriate for your students or your course. My intent, however, was to demonstrate the kind of thinking and planning that goes into designing a short integrated assignment sequence, which in ERWC we called a “mini-module.” A well-planned assignment sequence is a joy to teach (though things can always go wrong) and if the work seems well-structured to the students, they are more likely to engage with it.

One last comment about the TILT framework. When I first starting reading about some of the applications and studies on their Examples and Resources page, I was a bit put off by the emphasis on explicitly telling students exactly how to do the tasks. It seemed like too much spoon feeding. However, in one of the introductory PowerPoints (Using a Transparent Framework to Remove Barriers to College Students’ Success (15-min research update and project overview), they note that some instructors wanted the students to spend the bulk of their work time figuring out how to address the problem or question. For these instructors, they recommended the following statement: “The purpose of this assignment is for you to struggle and feel confused while you invent your own approach to addressing the problem or question.”

I like that. Sometimes the purpose is to create difficult problems for students to solve. The trick is in knowing when they are ready for that. If your assignment causes confusion, confusion should be part of the design, not an accidental result.

Genre, Research, and Disciplinary Outcomes

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Pedagogy1 Comment

Note: This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

In previous posts I have discussed the “Fluency Outcomes” and “Cultural Studies” outcomes in Cal Poly Pomona’s stretch composition program. In this post, I will discuss the outcomes related to Genre, Research, and Disciplinary writing. Then in the final post in this series about outcomes I will discuss outcome O, the outcome that deals with grammar and “correctness,” which is what outsiders think composition is all about.

Here’s the list of the Genre, Research, and Interdisciplinary outcomes:

StretchComp-GenreOutcomes-color-cropped-1

Outcomes I and J are about learning to read and write in genres other than the essay. High school students are usually taught the 5-paragraph essay and many only know how to write in that formulaic way. Some have been taught to write in even more formulaic systems such as the Jane Schaffer essay, in which each paragraph must have a topic sentence and a specific number of “concrete details” and “commentaries.” I recently read an article, “Difficulty Paper (Dis)Connections: Understanding the Threads Students Weave between Their Reading and Writing,” in which the authors noted that students routinely identified as elements of difficulty the fact that the assigned text did not conform to the rules they had been taught for writing essays. They wanted Malcolm Gladwell, for example, to have a thesis statement in his first paragraph, transitions between between topics, no seemingly irrelevant examples, and a conclusion. They thought this noted stylist was a bad and confusing writer because he did not have these things. The disjunction between what is taught in school and what professional writers actually do is puzzling and disturbing to students.

Redefining the Essay

The first step toward comfort in writing other genres is probably to loosen up the students’ ideas of what defines an essay. I like to offer the Roman six-part speech as an alternative format that is defined by rhetorical purposes rather than the number of sentences or paragraphs. You can find more about that format in my post “The Classical Pattern of Persuasion.” For some suggestions about how to wean students off the 5-paragraph essay, look at “What about the Five-Paragraph Essay?”

Business letters and emails are useful alternative genres for students to practice. More can be found in this post: “Business Letters and Formal Emails.”

Reading Complex Texts

Outcome K is about learning to read complex texts without the glossaries, sidebar commentaries, pre-reading questions, chapter summaries, and other apparatus that textbooks normally provide. Students need to develop their own strategies for resolving difficulties. We can help them by telling them why they are reading a particular text and what they should attend to in it. We can provide some scaffolding, but it is best to gradually withdraw it so that students are left more and more to their own devices.

Conducting Research

Outcome J is about conducting research in library databases and on the internet. Today, it is easier than ever before to gather information. In fact, the problem is that there is too much information, often of doubtful quality. Students need to learn to find and evaluate sources, integrate material from sources into their own writing, and document it properly, both in-text and in the Works Cited page. Students also need to learn not to cherry pick research that supports their thesis while ignoring inconvenient facts. Politicians may do that, but scholars should not.

I was teaching a class at USC once when a student asked, “What should I do if I cannot find any sources that support my thesis?” I waited a beat and before I could respond the student next to him said, “Change your thesis!”

Strategies for Revision

Outcome M, though it begins with “critique their own ideas,” is really about seeing opportunities for revision. Though students usually proofread for errors, they often do no substantial revision. Closely related to the concept of revision is a sense of audience and purpose. The writer needs to understand who they are writing for and what they are trying to accomplish before they can evaluate the effectivness of their text and see ways to improve it.

Writing for their Majors

Finally, Outcome N is about writing for other discourse communities in the university. Most of the students in an FYC class are not English majors. They need to learn how to write in the style and genres of their majors. We in English cannot teach them everything they need to know about writing in engineering or the sciences, but we can help them understand that different disciplines have different conventions and expectations. One way to do this is to have them do some searches such as “Writing in Engineering” or “Writing in Biology,” find examples of typical texts in their discipline and apply some of the rhetorical concepts you have taught them. With this preparation, they probably won’t try to turn their first lab report into a 5-paragraph essay, something science teachers often complain about.

Works Cited

Sweeney, Meghan A.and Maureen McBride.”Difficulty Paper (Dis)Connections: Understanding the Threads Students Weave between Their Reading and Writing.”College Composition and Communication, vol. 66, no. 4, 2015,
pp. 591-614.

Cultural Studies Outcomes

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Pedagogy1 Comment

Note: This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

There are many different ways to organize a composition course. Outcomes A-F, discussed in the previous post, imply an applied rhetoric course, a course designed to prepare students to participate effectively in a variety of rhetorical contexts through concepts from classical and modern rhetoric. In the recent past, many courses were focused on formal characteristics of writing including grammatical correctness, idiomatic consistency, organizational formulas, topic sentences and transitions. This approach came to be known by the paradoxical name of “Current Traditional Rhetoric” or CTR. When I was first learning to be a composition instructor, the CTR approach was being challenged by the “process” approach, with the slogan “Teach process, not product!”

The interest in the writing process originated in work done by Janet Emig, especially in her 1971 monograph, The Composing Processes of 12th Graders. Initially, researchers imagined a four-stage process: pre-writing, composing, revising, proofreading. This four-stage model eventually became more and more complicated until it became less and less useful in teaching, but the original insight is still important: A student who is trying to do all four tasks at once is likely to struggle with writing.

The process approach was also associated with what has been called the “expressivist” or “vitalist” approach championed by Peter Elbow. This kind of course is focused on the personal essay and on helping students express their own views. For a period of time, the rhetorically-oriented teachers clashed with the expressivists.

Cultural Studies

This all changed in the 1980’s with the advent of postmodernism and French theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault. Thus, outcomes G and H:

StretchComp-ideologyOutcomes-color-cropped-1

Postmodernism brought about the practice called “cultural studies.” In a nutshell, cultural studies considers the world to be a text, subject to interpretation. In composition, perhaps the best expression of this approach can be found in James Berlin’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Cultures, which in a previous post I called, “an exposition of an unabashedly Marxist cultural studies pedagogy aimed at teaching students to recognize the insidious influence of a capitalist/consumerist ideology and to resist hegemonic discourses.” In that same post I discuss Thomas Rickert’s Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject. Here is a passage from my post, beginning with a quote from Rickert:

“Sometime deep in the sixth inning of the 1990s, teaching my latest version of a cultural studies-oriented composition class, it struck me that something was awry. In retrospect, my unit on advertising seems particularly suspect. My students were becoming adept at picking apart ads and identifying their most pernicious features: the inducement to buy unnecessary, expensive items; the achievement of identity and modes of being through products; the reification of unjust class, race and gender roles; and so forth” (1). He reports that he faced little resistance from his students, and that they wrote competent, even excellent papers. Beyond that, there was little change other than growing cynicism, and they still bought the $75 jeans. He asks why “training students to be attentive critics of texts, culture, and ideology so seldom induces real transformation in their lives?” (3).

Rickert’s solution is to develop a Lacanian pedagogy of desire. If you are interested in that, you might want to read the rest of the post linked above.

Should You Teach Cultural Studies?

Because Rickert’s experience with a cultural studies pedagogy resonates with my own, when I teach my seminar in teaching writing, I tend to downplay cultural studies and recommend other approaches. However, I find that most grad students who begin teaching want to implement a cultural studies design. Why is that?

I think there are a number of reasons:

  • Cultural studies is readily applicable to the issues that students and teachers are passionate about.
  • Cultural studies is an “unmasking” process. It goes beyond the arguments, facts, and rhetorical appeals to an inspection of the ideology behind them. We like thinking that we know what is really going on.
  • Social hierarchies such as structural racism and gender norms are enacted and perpetuated through cultural formations that include everything from terministic screens to architecture. Cultural studies is an ideal tool for addressing them.

There are also disadvantages:

  • Cultural studies is inherently political and probably progressive in that it challenges the established order. There is no way to step out of ideology altogether and remain in a neutral unbiased state. Conservative students will certainly challenge you, or tune you out.
  • The “unmasking” process can challenge the core beliefs of the students. They can become unmoored.
  • The above can result in the cynicism that Rickert notices. We probably don’t want our courses to take passionate believers and turn them into apathetic cynics.

Having said all this, I want to note that outcomes G and H are only two of the 15 outcomes in the program. Including a module in the course that explores the ideology embodied in a set of terms or cultural artifacts will probably do more good than harm. As Aristotle said, “Moderation in all things.”

Stretch Learning Outcomes

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Pedagogy2 Comments

Note: This post is part of a series on “Teaching First Year Composition.”

I started working on a stretch model redesign of our composition program in 2010. The Chancellor’s Office wanted to eliminate so-called “remedial” courses, but the “Early Start” plan they were introducing actually created more mandated “remediation.” Stretch courses were a way of offering more time for struggling writers to improve their skills while still offering them a university-level course. In the cover letter introducing the plan I wrote:

The attached plan for redesigning the EFL composition program as a “stretch” program draws on program designs at CSU Channel Islands and CSU San Bernardino. The original concept for the stretch design came from Greg Glau at Arizona State University. In a stretch program, the assignments and outcomes for the one-term freshman composition course are rigorously defined, and then this curriculum is “stretched” into multi-term implementations that offer more scaffolding and more time to meet the needs of students who are not outstanding writers when they are admitted. The “stretched” versions of the course meet the same outcomes as the one-term version. There are no “remedial” courses in this design.

The plan had 15 learning outcomes, which I quickly came to believe were too many. I made an attempt to combine them in 2013, but this only caused confusion, and the long list remained. Originally, when we were on quarters, we had one-quarter, two-quarter, and three-quarter versions of the course. In the three-quarter version, the outcomes fell neatly into three sets: fluency, intertextuality, and interdisciplinarity. In other words, the first quarter was about developing basic writing skills, the second about researching, quoting, paraphrasing, and documenting sources, and the third about exploring other genres, including the discourse of the student’s major. Somewhere along the way the outcomes were reorganized so that they no longer fell neatly into these sets, but these concepts remain active in the list.

In the remainder of this post, I will discuss the “fluency” outcomes. In subsequent posts, I will discuss the other sets of outcomes. Here are what I consider the fluency outcomes, with annotations to help instructors think about how to implement them:

StretchComp-fluencyOutcomes-color-cropped

When the list of outcomes was first introduced to the instructors, many of them were unused to working with learning outcomes. Some believed that every assignment had to address every outcome! Others felt that the outcomes were an imposition on their academic freedom. Eventually, however, the instructors saw the list as a way of bringing some uniformity and consistency to the program.

Outcomes A-F in the list above are the nuts and bolts of most writing programs. The early part of a single semester course or the first semester of a two-semester stretch course should probably focus on these things. The most difficult aspects here are probably rhetorical analysis and argumentation. For more insight about rhetorical analysis, you might look at these additional posts on this blog: “Three Ways to Persuade” and “Writing a Rhetorical Analysis.” For more on argumentation, “Teaching Toulmin Argumentation” and a post on Aristotle’s concept of the enthymeme.

Here is a .pdf of the complete list of annotated outcomes.