The following articles on composition are authored by WSU English faculty and graduate assistants. Some describe teaching in specific WSU classrooms.
Jane Carducci and Gary Eddy, "Discourse
Community Service: An Advanced
Composition Course." Teaching/Writing in the Late Age of Print. Eds.
Jeff Galin, J Paul Johnson, and Carol Haviland. Creskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002.
Format: Word | Acrobat.
Our service-learning approach to a sophomore-level English class asks students to create documents in collaboration with local groups. One group of Women’s Studies students, whose work we present in detail, constructed a program for social awareness and used the available media as a platform for their community service. In their self-evaluations, students often report new-found awareness that their writing matters; they also report both academic and intellectual development. But the greatest reward of the project, for the students and ourselves, is the pride taken in a project they’ve designed and accomplished. The instructor who takes a service-learning approach to composition must anticipate the ethics, responsibilities, and consequences of the work. In response to these concerns, we speak to our experience at a medium-sized institution in a smallish community, and we provide cautions and suggestions for those interested in adopting a service-learning approach to their writing classrooms. The risks are worthwhile: such work can help inspire meaningful change for students, teachers, institutions, and communities.
J Paul Johnson, "Writing around the Text: A Network of Contexts, Opportunities, and Responses." Teaching/Writing in the Late Age of Print. Eds. Jeff Galin, J Paul Johnson, and Carol Haviland. Creskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002. Format: Word | Acrobat
First-year students evidence a wide range of reading and writing abilities, so our program’s goals require that students “read challenging texts that reflect important cultural themes and demand critical thinking” and use that reading to improve and inform their writing. As an example of how students might accomplish those goals, Sara Clendening’s “Suffering in Silence” is presented in full: for the project, she read five books, posting numerous comments on each in our online forums. As the semester progressed, her posts focused increasingly on the ways boys and girls are acculturated to develop discrete, unequal sets of beliefs and values, and, more particularly, how specific behaviors are rewarded for males and females. Posting regularly helped her rework her ideas into a successful, coherent analysis that works well within the constraints of a recognizable genre. Sara’s work serves as a reminder that the experience of composing benefits greatly from critical reading and that it takes place in a rich network of textual transactions (whether the classroom itself includes computers or not). What a writing classroom can do best, in the “late age of print,” is to provide students with what Chris Anson calls “the key roles” of composition: “opportunities and contexts for students who write” and “expert, principled response to that writing.”
J Paul Johnson, "Critical Reading and Response: Experimenting with Anonymity in Draft Workshops." Practice in Context. Eds. Cynthia Moore and Peggy O'Neill. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002. Format: Word | Acrobat
Students often see their introductory college composition course as a place to hone skills and meet friends—and not as a site of contested ideologies, and certainly not as a workshop for conducting critical readings of their colleagues’ writing. Using the condition of anonymity can serve as one means of encouraging accuracy and minimizing the social risks of workshop responses. Indeed, avoiding the distractions of interpersonal relationships and irrelevant commentary; having a record of what was said; being able to follow-up on questions or concerns; providing practice in writing; and focusing student work on the logic and rhetoric of writing—and in a complex and purposeful rhetorical situation at that—goes a long way to helping students learn the kinds of critical reading strategies we envision when we design our courses and curricula.
J Paul Johnson, "Writing Spaces: Technoprovocateurs and OWLs in the Late Age of Print." Kairos 1.1(Winter 1996). <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.1/3.html>
A review of online writing labs (OWLs), published in the inaugural issue of the internet journal Kairos.