Hi Everyone,

We’re posting a few readings for our next seminar on March 9.  The primary reading is “Barbarians at the Gate: Professors from Outside the English Department Reflect on Teaching First-Year Writing.” Please pay particular attention to the introduction by Paul Hanstedt. As you’re reading, think about your answers to the following questions:

• Does Roanoke College’s program seem replicable at a CUNY campus?
• If you teach outside an English Department, how would you respond to a call to teach first-year writing?
• If you teach in an English Department, how do you feel about people outside the department teaching first-year writing courses?

The following are secondary articles that will give you some background information about some of the issues we’ll be touching on in our discussion:

Here’s a link to a New York Times article, “Making College ‘Relevant’” that was written late last year. It discusses a trend among some colleges to eliminate departments (like Classics and Philosophy) because students don’t see these majors as leading to viable jobs. This passage from page two of the article summarizes its point:

“We believe that we do our best for students when we give them tools to be analytical, to be able to gather information and to determine the validity of that information themselves, particularly in this world where people don’t filter for you anymore,’ Dr. Coleman says. “We want to teach them how to make an argument, how to defend an argument, to make a choice.” These are the skills that liberal arts colleges in particular have prided themselves on teaching. But these colleges also say they have the hardest time explaining the link between what they teach and the kind of job and salary a student can expect on the other end.

Amy and I will be asking how we can make the goals of college writing relevant to students, or whether that’s even the kind of question we should be asking as we design first-year writing courses.

We’re also posting Patricia Bizzell’s “Composition Studies Saves the World!”, which is Bizzell’s response to Stanley Fish’s Save the World on Your Time. Fish’s argument in his book is similar to one he makes in the articles we read for our first seminar. Bizzell responds to Fish’s insistence that the college classroom should be free of politics (or the political opinions of the professor) by arguing:

In other words, for Fish, the professor is a brain in a jar.

This is not true to my own experience of the classroom. I believe that when my students encounter me as a writing teacher, they encounter all of me, my entire personality, informed by all my religious, political, moral, and social commitments. I firmly endorse that aspect of the objection of impossibility with which Fish himself agrees, namely that “purity” is impossible and I cannot divest myself of all these commitments when I enter the classroom. I also agree that I can and should behave “properly,” as he says, and not trumpet my convictions or blatantly reward those students who can convince me that they agree with me. But I believe that I can and do make my commitments known without becoming that exaggerated figure of fun, a character out of Dickens or Swift, who is the straw man Fish invokes in advocating the compartmentalization of one’s commitments.

Fish believes the first-year writing classroom should focus on grammar and that politics should be left out of it. Bizzell questions whether that’s even possible, especially if we are to successfully teach rhetoric. In our discussion next week, we don’t want to return to the question of whether the first-year writing classroom should focus on grammar (and Bizzell doesn’t argue for excluding it entirely), but we do want to discuss what you think should happen in the first-year writing classroom.

Finally, as background information, we thought you’d find the Council of Writing Program Administrator’s Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition helpful.  It’s a short document that’s easy to skim.

Thanks for reading along! See you on March 9.

Karen and Amy

p.s. There will be three people presenting for our next meeting. Erin will be posting a few of her own readings soon.