Let’s, for a moment, imagine a fairly typical nightmare scenario for a writing instructor: a sudden increase of class size to 50 students. Of course, many instructors already have 50 or more students in total, but I am talking about 50 in a single course. My goal here is not to advocate for such a system (!) but rather to consider how a more sudden quantitative shift might necessitate a significant rethinking of instructor work that might not otherwise happen through the steady drip, drip of small, incremental class size increases.

Our partners in other courses and departments have faced these numbers before, and the “solution” has often been to drastically curtail student productivity to that which can be sorted through standardized forms (like quizzes and tests) or truncated into a few minutes of discussion at the end of a lecture. Although most academics have, at fancy colleges or in graduate school, experienced (and now mourn the loss of) the seminar format, with its student-driven lines of inquiry and its long-form writing projects, the typical college course is still primarily modeled on content mastery that can be demonstrated through testing or in very formatted, conventional writing.

What I want to discuss here, instead, is an experiment with large-scale courses that might still be project-based and student-driven. Accepting that such a course can even be taught is a contentious, even obnoxious claim, perhaps, and, what’s worse, it can seem that I’m flirting with a model of teaching and learning that is complicit with the worst elements of educational corporatism. So, for the record, let me be perfectly clear: I think the ideal class size for writing course remains somewhere between 12 and 15. Within this range, you have enough voices to establish heterogeneity of outlook and experience, but you also have few enough projects to provide detailed feedback over many drafts. And, of course, you get to know students much more readily. A larger or much larger class size strains the capacity of an instructor to provide support for all students, and, in time, usually either necessitates a dismantling of the seminar model or unfairly impinges on the instructor.

But let’s get postprocess here and work within the constraints of our imagined situation. The class size question depends on an understanding that an instructor’s work is finite and that each added student subtracts from this finite sum. And, in terms of direct, one-to-one feedback, this is surely true. The pressure some teachers feel to live up to an often tacit but deeply felt standard of individualized feedback can be enormous. Too often, lengthy written comments on student drafts serve as markers of instructor diligence and time spent (see how much I cared about this one draft?) rather than an effective use of instructor time given the real conditions of many writing courses. So let’s exacerbate those conditions with our experiment with 50 students so that there can be no illusion that a modestly retooled pedagogy will work. What needs to happen, instead, is a remaking of student and faculty expectations for a writing course.

We can ward off that culture of guilt without capitulating to a model of standardized and rigid teaching and learning. But, to do so, we have to acknowledge that the courses themselves must change, and sometimes radically. Some of the things an instructor might need to do in this situation include:

1. Break the expectation of instructor feedback as primary.
2. Put responsibility on students to become readers of each other’s work. Sure, we already share drafts, but much more can be done to foster collaborative invention and response within the class itself.
3. Put responsibility on students to co-author some projects. Consider class-wide composition.
4. Design courses as environments for interconnectivity and creative composition rather than stages for performing a pre-existing repertoire of competencies.
5. Introduce and develop key terms and concepts for reflecting on and learning from the composing that happens in the course.
6. “Solve” the problem of audience by positing the class itself as an engine of both production and consumption. How are you contributing to the class conversation? How can you influence or change the people in the room through your work?
7. Spend far more class time engaging with student work, openly and in detail. What do we have here? What’s possible here? What comes next?
8. Save yourself from seeing a project in 100 versions. What a surprise to read a “final” project that isn’t something you’ve responded to before.
9. Move the modes of communication toward audio or spoken feedback as well as alternative forms of visual feedback (up to, but not including, stickers (heh)).
10. Ask students to become presenters and curators of their work, always situating larger projects alongside blurbs, introductory texts, working bibliographies, and brief presentations that help others see and anticipate these larger works. (Factor this assembling and presenting work into grades.)
11. Use class time to develop and test provisional rubrics or evaluative criteria. What does successful work in this project do or look like?
12. Give feedback that is not on a one-to-one ratio but which uses samples, excerpts, and volunteered student work.
13. Use digital tools and spaces to more efficiently constellate and circulate student work.
14. Use office hours or conference time for students who seek more individual feedback. (And lament the loss of more time per student.)
15. Recognize that other colleagues who teach the other courses that students take have responsibility, too, for helping students become informed, generous, self-aware, and capable writers and communicators.
16. Take note of what gets lost (and it is a LOT) in large courses, and advocate, when you can, for improvements and support.

You may have noticed that not much here is entirely new. What I’ve described is driven by a consideration of efficiencies, perhaps, but not all innovation must come from economic considerations. Critical pedagogy, for one example, has long advocated for the distribution of responsibility to all class members on democratic principles. Ecological composition asks us to design courses that make use of the affordances of place and technology. And multimodal composition reminds us that even academic communication need not always be lengthy prose paragraphs. Also, a lot of what is proposed here depends not only on instructors and students but on programs. If the goal of these innovations is to help writing teachers build what Byron Hawk calls “smarter environments,” the teachers themselves need to be working in a smarter environment, a site where implementing these changes is developed, modeled, and supported.

Nightmare scenario or vision of the future—tumultuous assembly or artmachine? What we know of the large class is that it is transformative. Now can the teaching we’ve been doing (and the programs we’ve been building) help us anticipate and engage with this transformation?

In late June, we had our first ECE English Summer Institute, a kind of 3-day seminar with a wonderful group of about 20 teachers of FYW courses. Our theme was “Composing Environments for Teaching and Writing,” which meant, in part, a focus on interrelationships between writing and our interaction with specific, local environments. We read a lot about assemblage and assemblage theory (two different things, really), and we thought about how our writing courses might make more use of our interactions with the non-human world and the understanding we gain by collecting, sorting, and assembling objects.

Because I had just a day earlier moved into my very first house, I made a lot of comments about “stuff” and its impact on my current mindset—“Do we really need all these books?” or “Does that pipe in the basement look right?” And, drawing on Jody Shipka’s words about the importance of cultivating a collector’s mindset, Anne (my wife) joked that she’s not a hoarder, she’s “enchanted by the world.” And, yes, if setting up a home is itself a kind of composition, a bringing together of already existing elements into a new space, we have—in bags and boxes in the attic, garage, and basement—resources.

In teaching composition, we sometimes overvalue clean, finite order or the “clarity of thought” that is clear because it is so abstract, so theoretical. Especially early in a writing course, and especially early in a student’s college career, it seems worthwhile to foster creativity, spontaneity, and a sense of the inexhaustible qualities of composition by asking students to be collectors and gatherers, to interact with their environment in exploratory ways and in ways that do not resolve to the simplification of “finding evidence.” Asking students to engage in what Shipka calls “rigorous-productive play” means valuing the work of writing down, photographing, recording, transcribing, interviewing, and juxtaposing.

At our new campus in downtown Hartford, we are experimenting with our new site as a resource for writing. We’ve borrowed some ideas about place-based learning from our neighbor, Capital Community College, and we’re encouraging students to consider the areas just beyond the campus, which include city streets, public buildings, historic structures, parks, cemeteries, a very complex mix of human beings, and so much more. If we want to be on the nose, we can even walk across the street to the Wadsworth Atheneum (free to students and UConn faculty) and gaze directly at a Joseph Cornell box. Enchanted, indeed.

If the individual writers in our courses gather materials from their wanderings, we can, from there, collaborate and invent through writing and composition that engages with this collection. That is, it might be wise to forestall exact matching of purpose (what’s your thesis?) with the work/play of discovery. To me, the FYW seminar shouldn’t be a course in how to write, which poses the real work of writing as a technical matter. It should rather be a course in helping students learn to have something to say, an investigation into writing as relationship, negotiation. When we place value on the collecting and gathering of materials for conversation and writing, we put students in a position to show us something and begin the process of dialogue through writing.

Work Cited

Shipka, Jody. “To Gather, Assemble, and Display: Composition as [Re]Collection.” Assembling

Composition, edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey and Stephen J. McElroy, NCTE, 2017, pp. 143-160.

I’ve been teaching literature again lately. It sounds, I know, like the admission of a vice (e.g., “I’ve been gambling on horses again.”) But, after so much time dedicated to First-Year Writing and writing-intensive courses, I am teaching my very first UConn undergraduate course without a “W” somewhere in its name. That doesn’t mean that writing isn’t important in this class, but it does mean that, for a change, I must prioritize content coverage and literary analysis. And yet I find that my many years of swimming upstream in promoting the 1011 mindset, writing through not just about literature, have greatly influenced my teaching of literature. I find myself teaching 1011-style even in upper-level courses. In honor of the recent passing of Charlie Murphy, I will describe myself, in this way, as a “habitual line stepper.”

Although it can seem that your performance in an English course hinges on what you can say about something you’ve read, consider inverting this relationship. What can a literary text help you say about something else? That is, how does the literature crystallize complex forces in ways that become useful and illuminating to you? You might review the texts we’ve read in this course. Notice how each serves as a resource for things we still think about today. Each offers expressions and demonstrations of complex social phenomena, and, as time passes, each sheds light on historical processes and transformations, sometimes unwittingly. The goal in writing with literary texts, then, is not merely to offer a “reading” of the text (although interpretation is important). The goal is more purposeful and urgent: how can you make use of this text as an instrument for engaging with the world?

I like to kick the tires of the FYW courses, looking for places that might need reinforcement or further thought. One soft spot I am always noticing in my own courses is my delivery on the promise that the writing we do in the class is not just a performance of competence or a simulacrum of engagement that effectively goes nowhere, what I refer to as “writing for the teacher.” I do act on this promise. Each new iteration of my FYW courses pushes further toward more circulation of student work, more collaboration, and more focus on student-driven commentary. I see the FYW courses as essentially environments designed to feature and support communication by students to students. The writing seminar is most of all a place for students to see their writing, perhaps for the first time, as something purposeful and context-specific, designed for others’ use. As we explore—verbally and through drafts—our various interactive encounters with texts and ideas of others, we all learn from the discourse that begins to flow out of the course itself. And supplementing this work with a range of supporting articulations such as presentations, abstracts or introductory statements, and responses to other projects allows for further recognition that the learning in a writing seminar happens in this open exchange. For the most part, I am delighted by this evolution toward exchange that makes the other courses I teach (often content-driven literature courses) feel a little old-fashioned, wooden, unidirectional.

And yet, in my FYW classes, the final drafts of formal projects are usually delivered to and read only by me. The individuating work of assigning grades to essays, a task with a value that seems less clear to me than it once did, effectively closes the conversation. I don’t want to overstate the case here. Most students feel that they do learn, more or less, what other students are up to. But, unless we decide to have students share or present final essays to each other, the last wave of revision and writing remains a private exchange between student and teacher.

I’ll admit that I’ve never liked writing contests for FYW courses. Stripped of their contexts, student essays “compete” in ways that, to me, run counter to the values of the courses. Is the goal to demonstrate a kind of mastery over a generalized form? Is it to give pleasure to readers? Contests do provide opportunities for students to see their writing beyond the course context, and this is important. But I’d like to imagine ways to do so in ways that might retain the more purposeful goals of the academic writing students produce in FYW courses.

At UConn’s Hartford campus, we’ve begun to think about an idea that could offer an example for something like this. Because our campus is moving next year to downtown Hartford, we will all be adjusting to and learning about the city. I’ve floated the idea of having FYW sections broadly address themes that might relate to this transition. Texts and assignments might take up questions related to cities, Hartford itself, public space, museums or libraries (we’re next door to the Wadsworth and the HPL), and so much more. Many teachers already teach courses with content that easily folds into these topics, and no one would be obligated to participate. But an end-of-year event related to this transition that features student work happening within and beyond the FYW courses might create a forum that would invite students to see their work as potentially meaningful in a greater context. The event would be more recognizable as an academic conversation, an inquiry into an ongoing set of questions, than merely a contest. It’s not an entirely new idea, and it is only in an embryonic form. But I’m hopeful it can become a sustainable site for FYW work.

What ideas do you have for how we might get past the hushed finality of “final draft submission”? I’ve tried to unlock the comments for posts feature. Let me know if you have trouble responding.

*Image: Miyagi Gengyo, Picture of a Balloon (1860)

It’s an impossible, multivalent question, but it’s a question we should continue to ask as our teaching—sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes by design—develops and changes over time. Surely FYW courses are primarily writing courses, and it is writing that most explicitly defines the work we do in them. Defending the required college writing seminar means arguing that students learn something about writing by the course’s end. And yet I have always been resistant to and even a little alarmed by a course that would merely present writing as set of techniques or tools to be acquired and perhaps mastered. If a writing seminar is just shop class for words, count me out.

In recent years, I’ve given increasing attention to the general education context of the First-Year Writing courses. I started to include the “Habits of Mind” from NCTE’s “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” because they speak to values that reach beyond the instrumental skill of writing. Writing, here, is described as emerging from and contributing to activity that prioritizes openness, engagement, creativity, curiosity, and the like. And this year, I even added to my syllabus some of the exact phrases of UConn’s General Education Guidelines, which emphasize “critical judgment,” “moral sensitivity,” “awareness,” and “consciousness of the diversity of human cultures and experience.” In the narrowest, most technical sense, FYW courses serve as introductions to students’ writing requirements at the university and to the information literacy competency that all students are expected to achieve. Greater literacy and more writing (especially writing within shared, collaborative contexts) undoubtedly implicitly supports the development and practice of critical judgment and moral sensitivity. But, at a time when very little about the goals of education can be assumed, it helps to make explicit the close connection between inclusive, ongoing, evidence-driven inquiry and the broader practices of informed citizenship.

Theodor Adorno is probably the writer I turn to most often to both support and challenge my teaching. Many of his essays explore the interface between large, standardizing entities (like universities, government offices, etc.) and the malleable individual, who desires to be legible and connected to larger systems but who is also subject to the distorting and sometimes even cruel elements inherent in such systems. Adorno, who witnessed Germany’s fall into fascism, remained allergic to mass movements or standardization of any sort, but he saw a clear role for teachers: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again” (191). I’ve triggered Godwin’s Law just mentioning this, so I will move away from any hastily drawn historical comparisons. Still, Adorno’s plain declaration is directed at any technologically advanced society that exerts pressure on the individual:

One can speak of the claustrophobia of humanity in the administered world, of a feeling of being incarcerated in a thoroughly societalized, closely woven, netlike environment. The denser the weave, the more one wants to escape it, whereas it is precisely this close weave that prevents any escape. This intensifies the fury against civilization. (193)

Adorno poses education as a process of historical inquiry, self-reflection, and confrontation with fear. Although he speaks out against the hardness and coldness that can come from educational models too focused on training and discipline, he dialectically rejects the premise that love could be ”summoned in professionally mediated relations like that of teacher and student” (202). Rather, he asks us to engage with one another in manner that combats isolation without superimposing a unifying order. Education provides a site for community building and interaction, but it also offers students the prospect of some autonomy, of exercising “the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating” (195).

When I think about what an introductory writing seminar should be, I think of it as a site for staging this activity, this dance of connection and differentiation, through writing itself (and through the subsequent circulation of this writing). Although Adorno’s contexts are grim and we hope quite distinct from our own, we should perhaps heed his warning about a model of learning that is too certain of its goals and methods, too quick to privilege reproduction of the system over engagement with its members.

*All quotes from Theodor Adorno’s “Education After Auschwitz” in Critical Models (Columbia UP, 2005).