Tag: FYC

Mini-Module: Exploring Disciplinary Discourse

On By guitarsophistIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

First Year Composition programs often appear to exist in a discourse universe of their own. They focus on the so-called “college essay,” a genre that most students will not write again in their other courses or in their careers unless they become public intellectuals writing op-eds for newspapers and magazines. Most students in an FYC course are not English majors or future journalists. The purpose of the course is to develop rhetorical skills and practices that will be useful in writing other genres and addressing other discourse communities. Writing essays can help develop these skills, but for students to see the relevance of these skills to new situations, we have to make some connections to other disciplines and their associated workplaces.

A complicating factor is that most FYC instructors are English majors with some training in writing about literature. The elegant style of literary criticism is unfortunately quite the opposite of what is considered good style in engineering or business. But how can we teach all the different genres and styles of all of the disciplines that our students will be going into?

The answer is that we can’t. However, using concepts such as audience and purpose, we can help students explore the discourse of their chosen discipline using web searches. This mini-module, Exploring Disciplinary Discourse, is designed to help students do this. The final project is a version of an I-Search paper, as originally developed by Ken Macrorie in his book Searching Writing. In this I-Search paper, the student investigates the discourse of their chosen major and then writes a paper describing what they investigated, how they went about conducting the investigation, and what they found. The audience for this paper is other students who may be considering majoring in this field.

Learning Outcomes

Students will be able to:

  • Use different search terms to discover the genres and styles of their major field
  • Make decisions as they design and conduct their own inquiries
  • Describe their experience of the research process and their findings from beginning to end in a paper addressed to other students who may be considering the same major
  • Make connections between concepts and strategies taught in their composition class and writing in their majors

A Mini-Proposal

The first step in the module is a mini-proposal. The student submits answers to the following questions:

  • What is your intended major? (If you have not yet chosen a major, explore one that you are considering.)
  • What do you already know (or think you know) about writing in this field? (Note: Some students choose a major such as engineering because they think there will not be much writing. However, engineers write a lot and the ones who write well are the ones most likely to get promoted.)
  • What do you want to find out about the work people do in this field?
  • What search terms will you use in your initial investigation? (A starting point might be “writing in MY MAJOR” or “How to write like an engineer, scientist, CEO, etc.”)

Some Sample Searches and Results

Here are two search strings that resulted in useful links for learning about writing in engineering:

  • What do engineers write?
  • Write like an engineer

Students in other disciplines could substitute “scientist,” “anthropologist,” “manager” or other profession for “engineer” in these searches.

A search on “engineering genres” led to a link at the University of Illinois about “Writing Across Engineering and Science: Genres and Genre Systems.” It presents an interesting word cloud that represents a survey of instructors about what writing genres were taught in courses and what genres students would be expected to write after graduation when they were working as engineers. There is quite a difference.

A search on “engineering sample documents” resulted in useful links to documents that could be used in rhetorical analysis assignments. One of these was a report on “Document Types and Naming Conventions” for the CERN Large Hadron Collider project in Geneva, Switzerland. That is an interesting document, but the student would have to decide if it was relevant to their project, which will evolve as they find things. They will have to decide which paths to follow and when they have gone too far down a rabbit hole. However, these decisions are all part of the description of the research process they will include in the I-Search paper.

A Progress Report

After they have done some searches, the module asks them to submit a progress report to the instructor. This will give the instructor a chance to offer suggestions to students whose searches have been unproductive, or who have gone down too many rabbit holes.

An Academic Extension

The module also includes an optional academic journal component that is appropriate for college-level courses. This section asks them to find a relevant article in an academic database, perhaps after engaging in some online chat with a research librarian, and doing some rudimentary analysis.

Writing the Paper

The module asks the student to look back at the mini-proposal to remember where they were when they started. This is used to establish a sense of audience for the paper–a student interested in this field but uninformed about the discourse community. Then it gives them step-by-step instructions for writing the paper.

Peer Review

The final element is a peer review session in which they trade papers with a student who investigated a different major and answer some questions.

Final Outcomes

One of the questions asked in the writing section is “What connections did you find between the concepts and strategies you learned in your English course and the writing in the discipline of your choice?” This is perhaps the most important purpose of this module. We want students to see that the rhetorical concepts they get from FYC connect to their work in other classes and finally to their careers.

The full mini-module can be downloaded here.

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.

So You’re Going to Teach Composition

On By guitarsophistIn Courses at Cal Poly Pomona, Pedagogy4 Comments

I wrote this originally for the composition TAs I am supervising, but the questions are relevant to anyone designing a university-level reading/writing course. In subsequent posts, I will expand on many of these ideas. These posts will be listed on the page, “Teaching First-Year Composition.” When I taught my first composition course, more than 30 years ago, I was given a book and told to teach from it. I ordered the instructor’s manual and did exactly what it said. Fortunately, it was a good instructor’s manual. These days, most grad students and new instructors have considerably more background in composition theory and practice than I did. However, no matter how much background you have, the first time you face a roomful of live students where you are in charge of making things happen is a daunting prospect. This series of posts is designed to help a new instructor make the transition from theory to effective practice.

Students

Who are your students? What are their needs? Are they native speakers of English? Are they ethnically and linguistically diverse? Do they have books in the home? Are they new to the institution? Do they have jobs? What goals do they have? (You may want to do a survey.)

Learning Goals

What are your learning goals? What will students be able to do at the end of the course that they were unable to do at the beginning? What skills and abilities will they be able to improve? (You may need to consult program guidelines.)

Connecting Reading to Writing

What will the students read? (Hint: It is usually a mistake to assign your favorite story/poem/article because your students are unlikely to love it the way you do and you will be disappointed. Also, articles that you find hilariously witty will probably be puzzling at best to a diverse student audience.) Will you have a theme? How will these materials help develop your reading and writing goals? How will they connect to the writing assignments? How will you prepare students to do the reading? What kinds of pre-reading activities will help them understand why they are reading and what they are looking for? How will they use the materials? Will the texts serve as models, discussion fodder, argumentative foils, sources of information to support arguments, or in some other way? What policies will you deploy to encourage students to do the reading?

Concepts and Strategies

What rhetorical concepts and strategies will you teach? How will students use them? How will you work to ensure that they transfer to settings beyond the course?

The “Arc” of the course?

What is the arc of the course? How will the beginning be different from the middle or the end? Will students have a sense of progress, that they are going somewhere? Will strategies and concepts introduced early in the course be practiced and mastered later? How will you sequence the reading and writing assignments?

Genres beyond the Essay

What written genres will you teach and why? What genres do students know that you can build on? (Hint: Texting and social media posts.) What writing process will you encourage? Will you respond to rough drafts? Will you have portfolios with multiple drafts? How will you respond to the writing? Will you have a rubric or other scoring system? Will you have a point system or percentages?

Using Sources

Will students do research? How will they learn research techniques? How will you address matters of quoting, paraphrasing, and documenting sources?

Course Policies

What policies will you enforce about attendance, tardiness, and late papers? How will you deal with plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty? (Include a link to the institutions policies on such matters.)

Class Sessions

What will you actually do in class? Having a reading for the day is not enough. Will you lecture? (Don’t do this too much, but sometimes it is the best way.) Will you have a class discussion? (Have some questions ready.) Will you have a quickwrite to get things started? Will you have in-class writing? (Often a good idea at the beginning, middle, and end of a course.) Will you have a quiz on the reading? (Sometime the threat of a quiz is enough. Another strategy is to ask, “What was your main takeaway from the reading?)

Grammar and “Mechanics”

How will you deal with grammatical, mechanical, and idiomatic problems? Will you have mini-lessons? Will you do “minimal marking”? Will you attempt “consciousness-raising” by focusing on a limited number of problems to facilitate language acquisition?

Your Teaching Persona

Finally, what sort of ethos do you want to project in your class? Do you want to be the student’s best buddy? (Probably not.) The authoritarian taskmaster? (Probably not.) The approachable coach? (Possibly.) Don’t be too self-deprecating. You were offered this course because you have certain accomplishments. Also, resist the temptation to be a despot in the small fiefdom that is your course.

More

You may also want to look at these additional posts: “What Do Writing Courses Do?,” “Writing Matrix Extension” and “Writing Matrix Extension 2.”