Dear colleagues,  

As the summer comes to an end, and you’re getting ready to begin the new academic year (or have already begun! where did the summer go?!), we wanted to remind you of the pillars of our courses.

Perhaps most importantly, our courses are composition courses. As opposed to content courses, that rely mostly on discussions, composition courses act as active and collaborative spaces where students are encouraged to explore ideas and work through complex thinking via writing. While our courses sometimes engage with literary texts (and practices of literary analysis to an even lesser extent), they are much more broadly project-based writing courses. Therefore, class sessions are built around active, writing-based activities that scaffold towards students’ writing projects. 

Our courses also emphasize the development of writing across disciplines, so we encourage you to assign texts from a wide array of disciplines. Students should also get exposure to different writing styles and platforms, from traditional to new digital media, so while essays an important medium, we also want students to explore more public-facing mediums, and those mediums will heavily depends on how their writing will make a contribution to the ongoing conversations we’re asking them to engage in. 

This is why we encourage you to build your course around an inquiry. More than just a question, a central inquiry informs and guides writing projects as well as course texts. To learn more about inquiry, we recommend reading this blog post by the First-Year Writing team. 

Some sample inquiries that have worked in the past include:  

• “What Does an Education Do?” (course arc and sample assignments outlined in blog post linked above). 

• • Note on texts: in this course, instructors have assigned more “literary” texts such as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but they have also assigned texts from other disciplines, such as critical pedagogy, like Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed or bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress.  

• “Why Do We Have Monsters?” 

• • While it might be tempting, and even encouraged, to assign texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this inquiry allows students to examine cultural attitudes towards monstrosity whether through news clips or articles, social media discourse, or contemporary media like TV Shows and movies. 

These inquiries work because they don’t assume a single answer, nor do they limit student discovery. Instead, they open a set of possibilities for exploration through the different Habits of Practice. We define the Habits of Practice as things writers do when they’re undergoing a writing project. All writers, for example, must collect and curate data or resources and all writers contextualize the concepts they are working with. They also serve as an entry point or a way to move through an inquiry. The Habits of Practice, therefore, also shape the way students move through an inquiry and the questions they might ask.

Take the example of the “Monsters” inquiry above. When collecting and curating, we might consider connections between different representations of monsters in popular media, but in order to do that, we must engage with each representation we examine separately, so the question becomes “what qualities is that piece of composition assigning to monsters?” or “who is represented as a monster in this?” In other words, we ask “what are this text’s methods?” Then, when theorizing, the question shifts to the significance of the different representation and what we make of them, so we ask “what might be the implications of these different representations?”

In this spreadsheet, we have included the different learning objectives for each of the Habits of Practice, as well as task objectives. We sometimes like to use it as a “checklist” or guide when composing writing projects and a course arc.

Other course components can be found in this one-pager. Please note that this one-pager is there to act as a checklist for you and does not need to be included in your syllabus, nor should it act as the syllabus. Some instructors choose to reference some of these components in their syllabi to set expectations for students early on.  

Some additional thoughts on reading and course texts: often, we might position texts as ​archives of information to be mined for facts or repositories of meaning or cultural significance, and while it’s important for students to understand the texts they’re reading, we should also be encouraging them to approach reading as a form of thinking, of working through ideas, and as an invitation to a conversation. Instead of simply repeating the facts of a text, we ask students to engage with texts beyond just agreeing or disagreeing with them. We ask: what are the implications of the concepts presented in the text? How is it presenting its ideas and why does that matter? ​

Linked here are sample materials generously provided by Advisory Board Member Emily Genser.

Emily’s baseline syllabus lists necessary information:  

1. The course inquiry.  
   1. We highly encourage you to write a couple of sentences about how the inquiry informs and guides writing projects as well as course texts.
2. An acknowledgement that this is a UConn General Education (now Common Curriculum) course 
3. Expectations from students in terms of active participation, i.e. this is not a lecture course 
4. Summary of the essential course components 
5. Very brief introduction to the Habits of Practice (or Writing Moves) 
6. Essential course policies (similar to those students encounter in college courses) 

In addition to the elements listed above, we also encourage you to include a brief description of the projects students will be completing throughout the semester. Since this is a project-based course, it’s important to highlight what students will be making or doing within the different contexts of the course inquiry. 

Learn more about Emily’s course arc here: Emily Genser’s Materials