[As the Fall
semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing
some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your
fall classes and plans in comments!]
On two of the
many vital skills that first-year writing courses teach.
There’s been a
good deal of discussion of our first-year courses at Fitchburg State in the
last couple years. Some of it has echoed and extended a familiar and long-standing
refrain: that our students don’t know and don’t learn how to write sufficiently
(in their first years and/or at any time before they graduate), and that we
need to address this deficiency. Despite its familiarity, I believe that
refrain can indeed lead to important discussions about where and how we teach
writing across our college and curriculum. Whereas I have much less patience
with what has become a second main thread of discussion: that at least some of
our first-year writing courses should be shifted away from English Studies and
toward faculty and departments across campus. I believe such arguments almost
always betray a striking lack of awareness of what happens in first-year
writing courses, and not just in terms of the teaching of writing (although
yes). They also seem largely unaware of the many other things we work to teach
in these courses, a set of interconnected skills that make first-year writing
classes some of the most demanding and important to teach.
For one thing,
first-year writing courses are among the most consistent spaces where students learn
and practice how to read at the college level. Partly that means the skills
required to read tons of pages of difficult material efficiently yet
effectively, and to take notes on or otherwise process and retain that material
enough to work with it in class and assignments (and, ideally but certainly,
learn it for long after the class has ended). But it also means reading a wide
variety of genres and media—over the course of my Writing I semester, for
example, students read, discuss, and analyze personal essays, short stories,
song lyrics and poetry, multimedia and digital texts, and scholarly essays. Each
of those genres and forms requires different approaches and skills, and I’ve
designed my assignment sequence to help students practice working with each of them,
while at the same time helping them develop such writing-specific skills as argumentation
and thesis-building, the use and close analysis of evidence, and the incorporation
and citation of sources. That’s a great deal to ask of any one class (or even a
two-part sequence of classes like our Writing I and II courses), but it’s an
unavoidable and vital aspect of first-year writing nonetheless.
First-year
writing courses are also something else, though: one of the few places where
all first-year college students are introduced to what it means to be a college
student. (FSU is currently developing a First-year
Experience program and course that might take on some of this pararaph’s
content, so watch this space for further discussion of all this!) There are
many, many many, aspects and skills that comprise that complex lesson, so I’ll
just highlight a few here: what materials to bring to class and how to make the
best use of them; how to navigate phones and other technology in the classroom;
the appropriate tone and style to use in emails to professors; and how to use and
benefit from one-on-one conversations with faculty, whether in conferences or
office hours. I believe too many college faculty (including myself, much of the
time) forget just how much our students need to learn about all of these
topics, perhaps because many of us (again, including myself) came from
environments and privilege that had better prepared us for college life. But
their success depends in significant part on whether and how they learn these
so-called “soft skills,” and First-year Writing I remains (and will likely
always remain) one of the key places where that learning begins.
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fall courses or plans you’d highlight?
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