Course Goals

From your years of experience as writers and students/teachers of writing, you've already acquired a body of assumptions about writing practices. Underlying those assumptions, whether articulated or not, is theory. "The relationship between theory and practice at any point," Louise Phelps, a noted composition theorist, says, "is not a simple one-way influence, but a dialectic." She calls this dialectic the Practice-Theory-Practice (PTP) arc: "Theoretical ideas filter into practice and are in turn affected by it. What distinguishes the terminus of the arc is that at some depth, theory (explicit formulations of deep structures) acquires the power to counter strong tacit assumptions with new conceptions."(Anson, Writing and Response, 45). In our survey of the theories that have been most influential in the field of composition, we'll be concerned with that dialectical relationship. As one focus in the course, we’ll explore the historical and ongoing debates around the role of "the personal" in teaching writing. As you'll see, questions about the relationship between personal and public writing are at the heart of all of the theories we'll study, i.e. What role does expressive (personal) writing play in how writers process ideas? In what writers (should) write about?  In how writers create a public ethos, whether on the page or in cyberspace? In creating that public ethos, what identities can be/get to be expressed? Which, historically, have been suppressed? What and whose literacies have been valued? What role does access play in acquiring literacy? In short, if the personal is political--and I believe it is--what do our theories argue about the relationship of the individual writer to those for whom and to whom s/he is writing?

The required texts for the course are:

• A Guide to Composition Pedagogies edited by Tate, Rupiper, and Schick (CP)
• ALT DIS: Alternative Discourses and the Academy edited by Schroeder, Fox, and Bizzell (AD)

• Teaching Composition: Background Readings edited by T. R. Johnson (TC)
• Additional readings online and handed out in class.
  

Course Requirements/Grading Policy

• Literacy Narrative (personal history and what your experiences suggest about a theory/theories for teaching writing): 10%
  
• Theory-building project: 30%
  
• Theory-building presentation (praxis): 10%
  
• Participation in Townhall "theory forum:: 25%
• Active attendance in class (I expect you to attend every class): 25%

Literacy Narrative: Draft due Feb. 7. Final due Feb. 16.
This is a story about your experiences of writing and being schooled in writing. Think about the ways you use writing to express yourself, to display knowledge, to transact "business," to persuade--to portray yourself, in other words, as a literate individual whatever that means to the others to whom you are writing. As you decide on what to include, consider how your experiences and the way in which you recall and recount those experiences are shaped by the subject positions you occupy (gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, cultural/regional orientation, etc). Reflect on how all of these factors might lead you to be drawn to particular theoretical perspectives and not others. Your narrative can be as long as you'd like, but a minimum of 1000 words. You may choose to incorporate parts of this narrative into your theory-building project. 

Class participation: Includes active participation in class discussions, in-class exercises, and engaged responses to your peers’ teaching presentations.

Townhall, an electronic forum: Beginning in Week Three and continuing until Week Fourteen, you’ll write in response to a prompt based on our class readings and discussion. I’d like you to make two Townhall entries each week, one between Thursday and Sunday and one between Monday and Wednesday. The latter entry might consist of a response to other class members’ entries. Your entries for the week should fill at least one full screen of text. I think you’ll find Townhall provides a good way to get to know each other’s perspectives on the theories we're reading and talking about. Note: I advise you to compose off-line and paste in your text; students who lose their text tend to become terribly frustrated with the process.

Theory-building project: Proposal for the project due March 2.. Draft due April 27. Final due May 12.
A detailed description of this assignment will be given out in class. Feel free to experiment with voice, style, and format, using our readings as models for what is possible, including "personal" essays, mixed genres, alternative discourses, and websites.

Theory-building presentation: Presentations begin April 13.
The presentation gives you the opportunity to bring theory and practice together (praxis). You'll develop and try out with the class a teaching practice based on theory you've researched. The 20-minute presentation consists of an overview of your research and an activity that engages all of us. You can give us a reading and/or writing assignment in advance of your presentation, providing copies of relevant materials. In your theory-building project, you'll include a reflection on your presentation.

Some Useful URLs: CompPile: http://comppile.tamucc.edu/  This is an easy-to-search database of research in composition studies.  National Council of Teachers of English: http://www.ncte.org/.
George Mason University Writing Center: http://writingcenter.gmu.edu.   GMU WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) Program: http://wac.gmu.edu.

Week One, January 26: What is theory? Theory with a capital "T"? (Notice that our textbook is not called Guide to Composition Theories but rather Guide to Composition Pedagogies.)

Week Two, February 2: Theorizing Writing Processes: How do writers write? Guest speaker: Professor Don Gallehr. Readings: CP: Preface, Tobin. TC: Perl. Handed out in class: Gallehr "Using Koans" and Emig "Non-Magical Thinking." See also the website of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, which Prof. Gallehr directs: http://www.nvwp.org/.

Week Three, February 7: Theorizing assignments: What should students write in school? Readings: CP: Burnham, Covino. JSTOR: "Interchanges: Responses to Bartholomae and Elbow" ; Elbow:  "Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals". Handed out in class: Connors "Personal Writing Assignments." Also due: Draft of  literacy narrative. First set of Townhall responses.

Week Four, February 16: Critical pedagogy: What--and how--should students write? Readings: CP: George. CT: Freire. Online: "On the Students' Right to Their Own Language"  Due: Literacy narrative.  

Week Five, February 23: Feminism and composition: CP: Jarratt. Handed out: Ratcliff  Online: Zawacki--
"Recomposing as a Woman. An Essay in Different Voices"  (in College Composition and Communication, Feb., 1992, pp. 32-38).

Week Six, March 2: Capital "T" theory and composition: Postmodernism and Cultural Studies. Reading: CT: Berlin, Rothgery. Handed out: Zawacki, “Telling Stories.” Due: Proposal for theory-building project. 

Week Seven, March 9:  Alternative discourses: What’s culture got to do with it? Readings: AD: Bizzell, Powell, Kynard, Lan.  

Week Eight, March 13-17: Spring Break

Week Nine, March 23:  Theorizing Basic Writers: Who writes and how? Readings: CP: Mutnick. CT: Bartholomae. AD: Elbow. Online: Williams: "The Phenomenology of Error"

Note: Class will be held on Townhall as I’ll be in Chicago for the College Composition and Communication conference.

Week Ten, March 30: Academic Writing across the curriculum and in the disciplines: What does it look like and why? Guest speaker: Professor Chris Thaiss. Readings: CP: McLeod. Handed out: Thaiss "Theory in WAC: Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?" 

Week Eleven, April 6: Writing for community: Service Learning and Collaborative pegagogies. CP: Howard and Julier. CT: Brandt. Due: Presentations begin.

Week Twelve, April 13: Technology and literacy: What's access got to do with it? CP: Moran. Online: Dufflemeyer and Ellertson: "Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication Across the Curriculum."

Week Fifteen, May 4: What is writing? Who "owns" it? Readings: Handed out: Hesse, Yancey.

May 12: Theory-building project due.