Unit Brainstorming

The working title for the course Jessica Brugler and I are working on is Becoming a Member of the Academic Discourse Community.  The course would be for both native and non-native beginning writers.  Our course is based on Bartholomae & Petrosky’s idea of placing students within a discourse community so they can learn the language of academic reading and writing.  We also incorporate elements of Kutz, Groden and Zamel’s theory that every student has something to bring and that learning composition is very much like learning a new language. 

 

We are planning to develop unit two of this course and our topic focuses on Acknowledging student’s Linguistic Competence; Every student has a language to bring; Building on one’s linguistic knowledge; Bringing one’s language & adapting it to the language of academic discourse.  This unit will build upon pre-reading, annotation and pre-writing heuristics that were taught in unit one.  The previous unit will have begun to introduce our students to academic discourse and have given them some tools they can use to further develop their writing process.

 

This second unit will help them assimilate even further into the new academic language they are learning and facilitate them in developing arguments and claims.  In unit one our students have been doing expressivist writing and will continue in unit two only they will start to incorporate taking a stance in their writing.  We begin unit two with a writing to read activity where the students write an anonymous letter to a friend.  This assignment will give the students an opportunity to express their identities in their writing as well as see the diversity of their fellow classmates.  Our goal is to show students that there are benefits to both being a native English speaker as well as a non-native. And to debunk the myth that native speakers find learning this new language of writing easier than non-native speakers due to English being their mother tongue.  The students first homework assignment will be to write a personal narrative about their experience as beginning writers. We then wish to give our students a taste of academic success by having them read short stories from How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life by Tom Miller.  It is an interesting book of 55 short stories of second language learners having success at learning English.  We would probably give our students a choice of several stories from the book and have them read two.  The stories are about three to five pages long.  It stated in The Discovery of Competence that national statistics indicate that almost half of every entering group of first year students at public institutions of higher education have dropped out by the end of the first year.  Our motivation here is to give our students confidence that they can be successful.  We would then assign a paper similar to the one in Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts (p. 32) only have the paper topic be recalling a time when they experienced success.  We would formally teach thesis statements and give activities facilitating students in taking a stance.  We like the idea of having students volunteer their papers to have them critiqued by the class and foster their revision. This is something we would have modeled previously in unit one. 

 

The end of unit paper assignment would be as follows:

Argument Essay                                                                                                                                                                                                       

●       Formal (thesis statement, reference class readings, 1 outside resource)                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 

●       Informal (expressivist, personal experience)                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

●       Prompt: Has your current knowledge of English facilitated or debilitated your transition into academia?

 

 

 Jessica and I will bring an example of the grid for our unit to class.  The subsequent unit of our course would continue to immerse our students in an academic discourse community helping them build on and incorporate their linguistic competence into the new language of academic reading and writing that they are learning.  The papers assignments would progressively become more formal.

Thoughts on The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers by Eleanor Kutz, Suzy Q Groden and Vivian Zamel

Suzy Q Groden begins the book with a short story of how she recued two birds that were stuck in a catwalk between two buildings at the university where she teaches.  It was a powerful metaphor of the struggle new writing students go through finding their place amongst an academic discourse community and how composition teachers have to guide them in learning what the authors refer to as a new language. Eleanor Kutz, Suzy Groden and Vivian Zamel explain how all teachers must contribute to helping their students, but a majority of the responsibility falls on composition teachers. With their book the authors have taken an action research approach with the aim to help students recognize that they bring a certain amount of competence from their outside lives into their new discourse community.  The three teachers explain that teaching is an ongoing learning process and that composition teachers need to adapt to their changing classrooms as well as question traditional curriculum that does not address diverse student’s needs. 

Kutz, Groden and Zamel find that theories of cognitive and intellectual development are not as useful for them because they are faced with students with many different backgrounds that will not fit neatly into such molds. The authors hope they can create an environment where the students can realize their potential and develop as writers. Like Bartholomae and Petrosky’s they argue that students need to be immersed in an academic community to then become a part of it.  I also see similarities in their theory that the academic discourse community speaks an academic language that new writers must acquire.  The authors even compare the process to that of 1^st language acquisition.  They look at students writing in new ways thinking of the possibilities of their writers rather than focusing on errors.

I feel like I can really relate to what the authors are proposing and I think it complements Bartholomae and Petrosky’s model.  I see both cognitive and socio-cultral elements in this teaching theory.  I like how it addresses ESL and other diverse members of the student population.  I truly believe in immersing students in the academic discourse community so they can be a part of it and I want to build my unit plan with this in mind.  I also agree with the authors that academia has its own language that needs to be acquired by the novice writer.  The only thing I found missing in this book so far was the practical way to accomplish these goals.  I would have liked to see more of a unit plan showing future composition teachers how to use this model.  Perhaps I will find that by reading the remaining chapters.  The past two weeks reads inspire me that we can possibly create composition unit plans that will address the needs of the current diverse student population and help them acquire the language of academia         

Comments on Empowering Revision by Nicholas Coles

Coles begins his argument explaining that novice writers do not like to revise their work like experienced writers do.  He describes how the act of revising for the inexperienced writer is just fixing surface errors and making different word choices where as the more seasoned writer is willing to let go of their first draft and make changes to the meaning of the paper.  Coles suggests giving students subjects they have a stake in and will want to write about.  The author talks about how experienced writers revise their work to generate knowledge and to have something to say about a subject. Coles goal is to get the student to shift from not only writing about general things, but also being more particular. The author then talks about two methods (feedback from peers and teacher comments) that help his students achieve this goal. 

I think Coles approach fits into Bartholomae and Petrosky’s course because it immerses the students into an academic discussion with their peers.  The peer feedback method made me think of students having the chance to test out their writing on the audience they are writing to.  It is like getting a taste of your audience’s reaction to aid your revision. I would like to include this type of activity into my unit plan. My only reservation is that not all of the students would have the opportunity to have their paper up for discussion, but I still think the students would learn from this activity because they get a sense of the audience they are writing to and it prevents them from the thought that the teacher is the one and only audience of my paper. After this exercise I think would be a good time for the instructor to initiate a little discussion about audience. I think the teacher comments are also beneficial to students revising their papers because it encourages them to actively read their own papers.  They are analyzing them to find what is significant (something they should be doing in all their readings) and making sure they are conveying that which is significant in the writing.  Through my feedback as an instructor I would want to foster my students in expressing what they want their readers to understand from reading their papers.           

Comments on Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course by David Bartholomae & Anthony Petrosky

I began reading this book very casually since Mark said it was a lot of reading and asked if people were having difficulties with it.  I guess my strategy was if I approached the reading as reading for pleasure I may retain more.  It was not until about the eighteenth page that Bartholomae and Petrosky reminded me that this was a foolish idea so I took out my highlighter.  I like how Bartholomae and Petrosky want to show their students that they can read for pleasure.  Some of my best professors were ones that got me excited about reading outside of the classroom.  The authors talked about if a reader could remember everything they read from a text it would be madness and that the writer has the opportunity to be creative in their composition.  I think if these thoughts are conveyed to student readers and writers it would take a lot of the burden off them in regards to reading and writing.  I like the idea of making the course like a graduate seminar and immersing low level students in an academic discourse community because it may help facilitate them rising to that level.  I believe we read in this course about creating materials that are just slightly above our student’s abilities so they can learn. I believe this course does that with this type of setup.  The collaborative learning environment of this course is also appealing to me as teacher because I believe we can learn from our peers as well as inform them about things they may not fully understand.  I think the bound book of student writing is a really cool idea as well, but I do not know if that would be possible in a regular sixteen week remedial or freshmen writing course.  One of my questions would be with the current state of education and funding being cut, would this fifteen student two teacher course be freezable today?  One of my favorite activities from this course was the one where students write a journal entry selecting a quote from each chapter that seems to be the authors main point of the chapter and then they have to explain how and why the quotes they have selected relate to the authors overall message. This enables the student to analyze a text and discover what they think is significant about what the author is saying.  That seems to be one of the core objectives of this course.  I think this is something I would like to add to my unit.  I will have to ask my partner what she thinks.