ECE English Program Overview
What is ECE?
UConn Early College Experience (ECE) is a concurrent enrollment program that allows motivated high school students to take UConn courses at their high schools. Courses are offered in over twenty disciplines and specialize in general education. High school instructors who have been certified through the University of Connecticut teach UConn ECE courses. Approximately 10,000 students in over 180 high schools take advantage of this program. UConn ECE students have an official University transcript that can be sent to the college of their choice. Many colleges and universities across the country accept UConn credits.
For details on ECE Policies and Procedures, click here.
Student Registration
Each high school decides the criteria for admittance into UConn Early College Experience. Participants are typically academically motivated students who have a good chance of success in college courses. UConn ECE hosts an annual Site Representative Conference where student registration forms are distributed to each school and information on the student registration process is available. Incomplete or late registration forms are returned to the high school and are unable to be processed. Students are billed directly for all registered courses at a rate of $50 per credit, which means that most ECE English courses cost a total of $200.
Enrollment Caps In ECE English
UConn's FYW/ECE ENGL 1007 courses are capped at twenty students. This means that the total number of students in any section of ENGL 1007 cannot exceed twenty, including students who are enrolled in the same high school section but not the UConn component. That is, even if a school allows for combined enrollments (ECE students alongside non-ECE students), the total number of students in the course cannot exceed twenty. A certified ECE instructor can teach multiple sections of FYW/ECE within a given semester or academic year. The enrollment cap for FYW/ECE ENGL 1004 is seventeen students.
University Credit
After successful completion of the course, ECE students receive university credit and a grade. This credit and grade is recorded on a University of Connecticut transcript and is available upon request. Upon entering the University, the credit automatically becomes a part of the student’s academic record. If the student matriculates at other institutions, the University will furnish an official transcript of the course work to be submitted for transfer credit. University of Connecticut transfer credits are accepted at many colleges and universities across the country.
Students should request a transcript online at registrar.uconn.edu. For additional details on credit transfer and to view the transfer credit database, visit the UConn ECE website at ece.uconn.edu.
First-Year Writing Program
All UConn undergraduate students must take a first-year writing course as part of their general education requirements. The First-Year Writing Program administers these courses, trains instructors, and develops new teaching methods.
We offer first-year seminars in composition and studio sessions that promote active learning and collaboration. Our courses emphasize the development of writing across disciplines. Students get exposure to different writing styles and platforms, from traditional to new digital media.
Visit UConn's First-Year Writing Program website for more information.
Compared to ENGL 1007, ENGL 1004 allows students more time and instructor support and, in many cases, smaller classes to reach these learning objectives. Activities in ENGL 1004 help students build their confidence in writing at the college level and prepare them for the approaches to writing they will encounter in ENGL 1007. Additionally, students in ENGL 1004 are introduced to the writing habits of practice central to ENGL 1007, and they are given time to practice and reinforce each habit prior to enrolling in ENGL 1007. ENGL 1004 provides flexibility for instructors to focus on particular ENGL 1007 components and habits, and design their teaching according to the needs of their individual students.
Downloadable ENGL 1004 Overview PDF
You can access our ENGL 1004 baseline materials here.
Course Components
ENGL 1004 courses students gain confidence through the following core components:
- Course Inquiry—a central question that drives the intellectual work of the writing/composing.
- Student-Centered Learning—class sessions that focus on students’ own writing through workshopping, conferencing, and composing activities.
- Multimodal Composition—students work in multiple modes (e.g., with combinations of images, sound, text, etc.) across diverse technologies as ways of writing.
- Active Reading—reading practices that center various forms of written engagement and collaborative meaning making.
- Reflective Writing—students write to reflect on their engagement with texts, composing practices, and personal experiences.
- Revision Practices—students compose over multiple drafts and substantially revise their work in response to peer and instructor feedback.
ENGL 1007 introduces students to the work of college writing, which includes posing questions, developing sustained intellectual projects, and generating knowledge that invites engagement with wide and varied audiences. Writing, here, is project-building—a practice of making something, composing—and the courses reflect this attention to purposeful engagement and meaningful contribution. As a prerequisite to many University courses and all Writing Competency courses, First-Year Writing seminars foreground collaborative, student-driven inquiry developed in the context of a shared course investigation. Students work on projects in which they select and define places where they might advance the class conversation across various media.
Downloadable ENGL 1007 Overview PDF
You can access our ENGL 1007 baseline materials here.
Course Components
- Course Inquiry—drives the intellectual work of the writing/composing, linking:
- assigned texts
- field research/documentary elements
- sequenced assignments
- Field Research Component — engagement with people, sites, artifacts
- Studio Pedagogy — at least one quarter of the course happens in a studio mode
- Multimodal Composition — a consequence of prioritizing access and inclusion; develops rhetorical flexibility and metacognition
- Information, Digital, & Media Literacy — a UConn Common Curriculum requirement
- Reflective Writing
Habits of Practice
The FYW habits of practice (once known as writing moves) are collecting and curating, engaging, contextualizing, theorizing, circulating. These moves emphasize transferable, 21st-century skills that lead to contextually sensitive projects and enable students to address diverse audiences across disciplines and contexts. The moves position student work as purposeful contributions within an ecology of other compositions (not merely demonstration of competence or compliance with unexamined “rules” for writing). See UConn’s First-Year Writing site for more information on how these writing moves support our Writing Across Technology (WAT) initiative.
Please reference this step-by-step guide created by UConn FYW for designing your ENGL 1007 course using the writing moves (PLEASE NOTE: You must be logged into your UConn email to access the documents on this page).
To access other supplementary materials regarding the writing moves, see this SharePoint folder.
Studio Pedagogy
Studio sessions are distinct from, although related to, seminar sessions and are heavily reliant on the active learning model. While instructors guide students through structured activities, there is no lecture component to these sessions. In studio, students are encouraged to explore lateral moves with their writing — composing in different modalities and the exploring different technologies to facilitate this, revising their work in different genres, etc. Collaboration is also an important component of studio work, with students frequently working in groups to compose and troubleshoot. One credit of class time should be devoted to studio sessions.
Please see this link for ideas of different activities to bring to your studio sessions.
Click to access PDF with more information on Studio Pedagogy.
Course Philosophy
Academic
ECE English students may have only very limited experience with college or “the academy"; however, ECE English courses imagine all students as academic writers. Students have often been asked to reproduce knowledge they've been taught; they often have had little experience generating truly novel questions, formulating lines of inquiry, and developing projects. Yet, the work of the academy is devoted to making sense of the world and communicating that to others in meaningful ways. Part of the purpose of FYW/ECE courses is to introduce students to the work of the academy and what it means to be a scholar, even as they may continue to finish their secondary education.
FYW/ECE courses are cross-disciplinary spaces; they are not designed to teach students how to become scholars in English or literary studies. Because there is no universal model for the academic writing, we present the courses as places to experiment and practice intellectual work that is common to all fields. This work includes engaging with others' texts, working with and through evidence, and circulating writing to wider audiences. By semester’s end, the class itself functions something like a mini-discipline, with a cohesive, if also disparate, collection of projects developed around a common set of questions and texts.
Seminar
Although we often see higher education depicted as a space where experts deliver knowledge to novices, UConn’s FYW/ECE courses are seminars, which means that they are collaborative and open-ended spaces where the inquiry is driven by the students themselves. The instructor’s role in a seminar is to get the conversation started and to provide contexts (with readings, feedback, central questions, and directed discussion) for this ongoing work. A seminar needs a territory for inquiry, a point of focus for the discussion that follows. The instructor helps to curate and oversee the cycles of writing and reflection that culminate in each graded essay. In turn, students pursue writing projects that enable them to select and define places where they might add to or develop the discussion at hand. The learning in a seminar comes, then, from the experience of making and doing rather than from “lessons” provided by an expert. The seminar setting, with its shared, participatory activity, situates the writing that happens in the course as a communication between seminar members.
ECE English students might not have much experience with this kind of education. Many K-12 educational systems assume that students need to acquire certain kinds of knowledge that meet certain standards. These priorities tend to discourage the spirit of the seminar, which focuses on democratic and learner-directed inquiry. You may need to explicitly address this aspect of the course at its outset and explain how an ECE English course functions differently than other kinds of classes.
Studio Teaching
Studio teaching pedagogy turns the classroom into collaborative workspaces. Unlike a lecture or seminar, studio courses encourage students to learn through hands-on projects.
Studio pedagogy promotes:
- Active Learning: Students engage in activities during the majority of class time.
- Access: Studio pedagogy uses Universal Design for Learning to provide multiple ways for students to engage in learning.
- Collaboration: Class activities often involved sustained group work. Students engage in collaborative writing—a skill that takes practice.
- Workshop: Time is devoted to peer review and workshopping, which gives students feedback that will help them improve their projects. It also allows them to critically analyze each other’s work, which in turn prompts them to be more critical of their own work.
- Experimentation, Creativity, Play: Students are encouraged to take risks within the studio pedagogy. Instructors encourage students to try new things and figure things out on their own through experimentation without always receiving precise instructions.
- Digital Literacy and Design: The studio pedagogy gives students space to work with different technologies and pay attention to rhetorical design choices across media.
- Support: Instructors give students individual feedback on projects while everyone works. Students also get the opportunity to support each other as they work collaboratively on projects.
Writing
There are three main areas of "content" in FYW/ECE courses:
- The area of inquiry, provided by the assigned readings and whatever materials students assemble through research
- The rhetorical terms, or the shared meta-language about writing, that the class develops (with the instructor’s help), including concepts like genre, audience, writing process, rhetorical situation, and so forth
- The students’ writing itself, which should serve as a primary text for the work of the course and feature prominently in most class sessions; this is most vital content of the course, and the bridge between the first two
The core activities of the FYW/ECE seminars are writing and reflection on writing. In producing student-directed writing projects, a student gains experience in the local, specific contingencies and pressures of academic writing. In reflecting on and working with other students’ writing, a student has opportunities to consider more widely the problems and possibilities inherent in the choices writers make to communicate their ideas.
Other Important Terms
Literature
Neither ENGL 1004 or ENGL 1007 is a traditional literature course or an introduction to literary analysis. Whereas writing about literature makes the literary text the object of study, in 1004 and 1007, the literary texts (and the work of coming to terms with them) foster an outwardly directed energy. Writing through literature or writing with literature means making use of literary texts to generate and support projects that extend beyond the occasion of this particular literary text. In a 1004 or 1007 course, it is never enough to merely demonstrate productive reading of literary texts (although close, careful reading and exploration of texts is essential). Student essays should be directed toward a more specific contribution to a problem or question set up by the course readings. You can learn more about how the UConn FYW courses makes use of literary texts here.
Diversity
We might describe the work of academic writing as a commitment to making meaning within diversity—making connections between disparate entities. Academic writing, in this sense, is an offering to a reader of a particular insight or material that will complicate or extend that reader’s understanding of a topic. Diversity is an essential, constituting component of the course, something that is always active when one writer thoughtfully engages with other writers. In preparing the courses, we might ask how readings, including the work of all the students in the class, can serve as informing but not prescriptive resources for the ongoing work of each class member. How might writing be understood and used less as a mechanism for “solving” or controlling a topic than one that can enable better connections and deeper understandings? Our approach focuses on thoughtfulness, exploration, learning, and transformation—all the qualities (and methods) of a writer who understands the diversity of human experience.
Research
The University of Connecticut is a research site, and in this spirit we encourage instructors to experiment and try out various ways to enact the principles described here. In building the courses around inquiry, we ask students to pursue questions that do not have ready-made answers. Research in FYW courses is particularly important for helping students fulfill the University of Connecticut's information literacy competency, which is designed to make students more critical consumers and users of information.
Technology
We live in a world where it is increasingly common to encounter and produce writing that is multimodal and mediated by diverse technologies. It is important for teachers of writing to help students strategize and think critically about the synergy that is created when they compose through multiple modes as well as the technologies they use to compose. Technology need not mean digital necessarily. All writing, even alphabetic writing with a pencil and paper, is still a technology, one that has diverse applications and relies on multiple modes. Instructors should ask students to consider the rhetorical implications of composing with a variety of other technologies as well: video, audio recording, photographs, body language, captioning, hypertext, interactive interfaces, graphics, etc. Multimodal composition technologies have always affected the ways we write, the way we read, and the way we access texts. It is important for students to become aware of these changes through the practice of composing.
Reflection
To become stronger writers, students need to be able to reflect on the writing that they do. Reflective writing should ask students to consider what their writing does rhetorically, describing and examining the choices they made and the effects these choices have in their writing. Students should also be invited to reflect on the process of writing. Reflection can (and should) be related to the course inquiry and the ideas and questions that drive that work and can be done in the context of the other course readings. Ultimately, one of the main purposes of reflective writing is to help students develop metacognition, which the WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing defines as “the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes and systems used to structure knowledge.” Metacognition allows students to become self-aware of the processes and resources they use to compose, which can help them confront unfamiliar writing situations more flexibly in the future.
Course Materials Upload 2024–2025
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
- Spring ECE Workshop on Developing Your Course Inquiry
March 11, 4:00–5:00 p.m.
RSVP here
- Conference on the Teaching of Writing: Joy to You and Me: Making Space for Joy in the Writing Classroom
April 24 & 25, 2025
FYW information page
Requirements to maintain certification
To maintain certification, an instructor must:
- submit up-to-date course materials in a timely fashion October 7, 2025 (2025–2026 AY) and
- attend at least one UConn ECE English Conference every two years.
Site Visits
As part of the UConn Early College Experience, the faculty coordinator and assistant coordinators, conduct site visits. Visits are offered for mutual enrichment purposes and not as a means to evaluate the certified instructor’s performance, although they are required for maintaining certification.
If you are interested in setting up a site visit or have received an email request for a site visit, please follow the link to set this up.
Where do I start? The Course Components
Every ECE English course includes the following components:
- Course Inquiry—drives the intellectual work of the writing/composing, linking:
• assigned texts
• field research/documentary elements
• sequenced assignments - Multimodal CompositionInformation, Digital, & Media Literacy—a UConn Common Curriculum requirement (formerly Information Literacy)
- Reflective Writing—students write to reflect on their engagement with texts, composing practices, and personal experiences.
Other course-specific components (1004 or 1007) vary. To review the components specific to each course you can visit our ENGL 1004 Overview PDF and our ENGL 1007 Overview PDF.
And the following practices:
- Assignments, projects, and in-class work built around habits of practice (writing moves)
- Readings and assigned texts that foster engagement and model inquiry
- Substantial amounts of revised writing and composing in various modes and genres (3 or more major projects)
- Additional short and informal writing and composing (both in and out of class)
- Cycles of feedback, circulation, and revision with each project (including various forms of conferencing and workshopping); attention on audience, rhetorical context
Course Inquiry
A course inquiry includes questions that frame readings and assignments; it also provides enough specificity or focus to enable academic and perhaps public contributions to the questions, not just open-ended consideration or writing “about” topics. A course inquiry is cross-disciplinary—the readings and assignments invite inquiry and work that reflects concerns, approaches, and vocabulary from disciplines beyond just English. Course inquiries can have subtopics and digressions. There’s room for experiment and play.
For a step-by-step explanation of how to design a course inquiry, see this slideshow (PLEASE NOTE: You must be logged in under your UConn email to access all links on this page).
We’ve also created this template for you to work out your course inquiry, readings, and assignments. To access other supplementary materials regarding the course inquiry, see this SharePoint folder.
Becoming Certified
All incoming ECE English instructors are granted provisional status; successful completion of the following steps is required for full status.
For more information on requirements and deadlines, please visit the UConn Early College Experience website.
Certification Timeline
Summer 2025
Orientation
Attend an ECE orientation and meet with English faculty coordinator, Scott Campbell.
Summer Prep
The UConn FYW/ECE courses have specific requirements which reflect the philosophy and practices of the program. We ask that you engage with these requirements as you prepare your course materials for the upcoming year.
Upload Materials
By August, use the guidelines on the ECE website to upload course materials.
Academic Year 2025–2026
Conferences
Attend either the fall or spring conferences at the Storrs or Harftord campuses.
And/or: Attend at least two virtual workshops.
[You are required to attend at least one conference every two years.]
Site Visit
Arrange with our office to have a representative come to your class at some point—in your first year, if possible. Site visits can also be virtual, allowing for a deeper discussion of curriculum.
Feedback and Review
Feedback
At any point, contact us with questions, ideas or request for feedback (eceenglish@uconn.edu). The ECE English Program is an open system built out of an ongoing and mutual exchange. As with out courses, sharing of work feedback, and revisions are essential.
Review
Once these steps are competed, the faculty coordinator will review the instructor's portfolio, provide additional feedback if needed, and move the teacher out of provisional status.
Application materials are accepted on a rolling basis with due dates on January 31st for the following academic year.
How do I become an ECE Instructor or Site Rep?
Degree Requirements
The preferred preparation for teaching Early College Experience English courses is a Master’s of Arts degree in English with at least some coursework in rhetoric and composition (especially courses directly related to the teaching of writing). The minimum degree requirement for teachers wishing to teach Early College Experience English courses is usually a Master’s of Arts degree in English; however, a candidate with Master’s in Education and at least two graduate level English classes (one of which is in rhetoric and composition) may be considered.
Certification
All incoming ECE English instructors are granted provisional status; successful completion of the following steps is required for full status.
ECE Policy on AP English
- UConn’s English 1010/1011 writing seminars and Advanced Placement courses have some common ground but can vary significantly in terms of assumptions, goals, and practices. For example, whereas AP courses (at the administrative level) could be said to prioritize testable knowledge, UConn FYW courses begin with the expectation that successful student writing will advance and in ways transform the terms and effects of the class conversation. FYW courses are intended to provide students with experience as academic writers, and they therefore emphasize the collaborative and interactive qualities of academic inquiry. The circulation of student work and the continued reflection on and revision of this work is essential in FYW courses.Despite differences, at many sites Advanced Placement courses are merged with UConn FYW courses. And many crafty teachers find ways to bring the two worlds together in meaningful ways. What follows is a policy supporting the productive coexistence of ECE and AP courses.
- We welcome any feedback or suggestions for revision.
- ECE and AP can co-exist in the same course.
- They should do so openly, with AP elements included on ECE syllabi.
- Because of the much greater amount of class time in most high school classes (compared to on campus courses), what is important is that ECE goals are met, not that every day or hour is spent on ECE activity. That is, AP activity may complement ECE. But even when it does not, it need not be prohibited.
- AP work can support ECE work in a number of specific ways. For example, AP Literature work can provide practice with close reading and analysis of texts, tools that are essential, too, in ECE courses. AP Language work can provide rhetorical frameworks and terms that can be helpful for student writers (although FYW courses rarely posit a completely stable or universal rhetorical schema).
- ECE/FYW courses depend on the development and revision of four to six major writing projects, with attention, too, on the Information Literacy, Reflective Writing, and Multimodal components. As long as these requirements are met, the course can have additional elements, including various AP activities.
There are of course some significant differences between AP and ECE, and these differences need to be acknowledged (and understood) by teachers, students, and ECE administrators. If you feel that for whatever reason your AP and ECE elements are in tension, let us know. We can work with you to develop some plans for addressing AP and ECE coexistence.