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What Are First-Year Writing Courses For?

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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).

Concurrency

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Anon, they fierce encountring both concur’d,
With griesly looks and faces like their fates
But dispar minds and inward moods unlike.
—Thomas Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587)

When I first started to explore the partnerships that my university writing program had with local high schools, one phrase that got my attention was “concurrent enrollment.” It was a foreign-sounding term, with hints of bureaucracy. At first I favored the related term “dual enrollment” to characterize this negotiation of high school and college curricula in one place. Surely dual nicely describes these two things happening at once. And, in emphasizing two elements, one can stress balance as the appropriate skill in managing the work.

It didn’t take me long, however, to see that an instructor of one of these courses faces far more than two elements. Within the same class, an English instructor may have to address a school-wide focus on a specific theme or activity (e.g., a scholarship application or a letter of thanks), a state-wide emphasis on particular texts or articulated skills, a nationally produced exam such as Advanced Placement, the university-driven FYW curriculum, and more. Other forces include parents, school boards, program coordinators offering suggestions, seemingly endless curriculum reform and development, etc. No, “dual” is overly simplifying. And, after a foray into the OED  and some reflection on what it means to “concur” or to be “concurrent,” I warmed to the term concurrent enrollment as having much greater potential for truly capturing the many elements flowing through these courses.

The epigraph above includes one of the earliest uses of the term, “concur,” a meaning which at the time had a much greater element of clashing, contesting forces than today’s almost polite associations with concurring. “I concur” can signify an absence of debate or “dispar minds.” But the earliest definitions of “concur” included: “To run together violently or with a shock” and “To run together in hostility; to rush at each other.” In time, our more placid, cooperative use of the term has become primary, but we should not completely forget or elide the trace of chaos in the “currents” of these relationships. Concurrency, which suggests flows of water, money, or electricity, has a more dynamic quality, a suggestion, too, of power or of burgeoning force.

When I think of what we are trying to do in these courses, I favor a discourse of circulation and extension rather than one of balance or equivalence. Dual enrollment sounds like compromise. We should not look at these partnerships as sites for simply moving college courses to high school sites, as if doing so could happen without consequences. Concurrent enrollment more fully describes the running together of sometimes competing and contesting forces that have the potential to produce something more powerful and more active because of their combination. Balance may be out of the question, and some chaos may be inherent. But concurrency at least marks the attempt to link and enable something that cannot exist without this experimenting.

 

A First Post (Introduction)

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The world does not need another blog, so let’s not call this one.

And, anyway, most blogs lose steam quickly if they are just a one-way communication from a source to an audience. As faculty coordinator of UConn’s Early College Experience English courses, I communicate with teachers through emails, official ECE documents, and at conferences. Why do I (or we) need yet another place to store more commentary?

Well, I wanted to have an informal “meeting place” where conversation might come out of our experience with teaching these courses. Our ECE English program is massive, and I feel like I am still only just beginning to glimpse and appreciate how ECE teachers harmonize the various requirements and suggestions that come from UConn, their home schools, AP, school boards, and more. Part of my work in 2017 includes getting a much closer look at the ECE courses themselves, including student writing. When I see something in a course that seems exciting, fresh, or just insightful in some way, I hope to, with permission, comment on what I see or have that teacher write a word or two about this aspect of the course.

I do also expect to use the site as a place to “say more” about things I have said in more official places. The teaching of FYW courses continues to evolve nationally and at UConn, and I will want to comment on those things. Early posts will likely reflect more of my own thinking. But I want to foreground collaboration and what teachers (and students) are doing in ECE whenever possible.

Things on this site might change as I learn more about what can or cannot work, but, at this point, my goals in setting up this site include providing a forum for:

  1. Ongoing discussion of the teaching of writing in First-Year Writing courses, especially UConn-branded FYW courses. This includes the circulation of ideas and practices that are currently working in our ECE sections (as well as issues and constraints that we face). Ideally, much of the material in this space will come from teachers themselves.
  2. Ongoing discussion of high school teaching as it relates to college-level writing and general education requirements at UConn and elsewhere.
  3. Further articulation and annotation of evolving program-specific policies.

Finally, because the university-provided WordPress sites attract armies of spambots, the comments section of these posts is turned off. Please contact me with any suggestions, comments, or questions. I will be sure to post relevant discussion followup when it comes to my attention. Thanks for reading!