English 271 (ES-02): Special Topics: Seminar: Spring 2010
Teaching Academic Writing:
History, Theory, Practice
Wed-Fri, 2:50-4:05 pm, Social Sciences 109
Writing has been a teaching subject in American colleges and universities since their beginnings. Well before English literature was established as an object of study, American colleges had appointed Professors of Rhetoric and Oratory, and in recent decades, as literature courses and majors have declined, the demand for the teaching of writing has steadily increased. And yet the status of writing as a subject of study has remained curiously low—with writing commonly viewed as a basic skill that everyone should already know, and composition as a remedial course that almost anyone should be able to teach.
But it turns out that writing about texts and ideas is a complex craft—and one that can prove frustratingly hard to teach. We will thus begin this seminar by comparing several leading approaches to teaching writing. We will look at how these pedagogies have been put into practice in particular writing programs and courses. And we will try to account for their differences by analyzing the theories of writing and discourse that inform each. I hope that through this work you will gain a broad understanding of the
controversies that now drive the teaching of writing and form a more specific sense of how you might want to teach writing yourself.
In place of a final seminar paper, I wlll ask you to take on several projects over the course of the semester. The most ambitious of these will be a sequnece of writing assignments for a course you plan to teach next year. But i will also ask you to complete several brief responses to readings, an analysis of a writing program, a wikipedia entry on an important text or figure in writing studies, and a proposal for a talk at a conference on teaching writing. See Projects below for more on this work.
Good luck! I look forward to working with you!
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