Curriculum & Philosophy

The FYW Program's Outcomes for English 120 and 121 build on the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (2000). EMU's only addition to the WPA Outcomes is "Use of Technology." The program, however, includes some significant ways in which it attempts to "frame" it's purpose and activities. What follows will be a discussion examining the philosophy behind the program as revealed in its general outcomes statement and in various frames used:

Outcomes for ENGL 120 and 121 at Eastern Michigan University

ENGL 120 and 121 are inquiry-based writing courses. In them, students should use writing and reading (primarily from non-fiction texts) to investigate issues that are significant for their development as writers and readers in an academic context. Through this work, students will develop habits of mind that are important for writers: assessing audience expectations; reading critically; engaging with others' ideas in analytic and research-based writing; developing control over surface features of writing; and discovering, cultivating, and being reflective about their writing processes. This development takes place recursively – that is, students master these strategies by practicing with them repeatedly through their work in these two courses and others at EMU. This work begins in ENGL 120 and continues through ENGL 121, by the end of which successful students will have achieved these outcomes. ("Outcomes")

Inquiry-based
Writing is conceived in the FYWP as a way of thinking and "grappling" with ideas. Rather than writing being seen as the means of representing an answer already found, writing is framed in this curriculum as a means for finding and addressing questions that may lead to deeper and more significant questions (rather than simply answers). As Adler-Kassner says, "We love the word grappling in our program and promoting thinking and learning as a process of grappling" ("Interview"). English 121 as a research-based course is particularly designed to promote this kind of "grappling" in students and help them learn strategies for research and writing.

Strategies--not skills
The outcomes statement above uses the term "strategies," but the phrase "habits of mind" works as a synonym. The program seeks to promote the development of strategies, not skills. The reframing from skills to strategies is significant. Representing the outcome of a writing class as the acquisition of skills promotes the idea that writing proficiency is a object that one gets and then possesses and that can be carried anywhere. It leads to the mistaken notion that students should learn in First-Year Writing everything they need to know to write well.

Framing the the goal of writing instruction as the learning of strategies, instead, promotes the idea that the strategies involved in the act of writing are things than need constant refinement and retooling for different tasks and contexts. Students in the FYW, then, begin a process of learning writing strategies that they will continue to develop through their academic and professional career.

The seven "interlinking core strategies" include:

• Critical Reading
• Critical Writing/Representation
• Critical Research
• Critical Analysis
• Revision
• Reflection
• Work with Conventions

Recursive Development and Portfolios
As we will see in the close-examination of the curriculum, each course is designed around "interlinking core strategies," and each assignment is designed within a continuum for developing these strategies. Thus, the curriculum is built upon a recursive sequence. This notion of recursive development is promoted by labeling the work students do as "stages" rather than "essays" or "assignment." The four major projects in ENGL 120, for instance, are labeled as Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4 rather than "Essay 1" or "Assignment #1."

Below is a chart with the titles for these Stages. Note the inclusion of the word "curiosities" as a way of framing the activity as inquiry, as well as the progressive development apparent in the titles:

All courses also produce an end-of-course Portfolio where students select two essays and revise them. During the course, the major writing pieces do not receive grades; they receive lots of feedback from peers and the instructor, but not a grade. Essay Packets when submitted get full/half/no credit grades, and this essay packet grade can be 15% of a student's grade. Feedback, then, can focus on being "formative" (rather than "summative"), and students have extensive opportunities to revise their writing throughout the course. Structuring the course around the portfolio (without grades in the process of getting to the portfolio) provides the supportive structure for students to develop their strategies.

"The words they carry"--The prominence of reflection
In discussing what students should take away from the curriculum in ENGL 121, Adler-Kassner said that it's the strategies they learn for investigating and writing on a topic that matter most, rather than any specific knowledge they have learned about their topic. Reflection is interwoven throughout the curriculum to help students construct an understanding of these strategies that they can transfer to other contexts. Talking about reflection, Adler-Kassner said, "...because if you don't reflect on what you are doing, you aren't going to know what you are doing and you aren't going to be able to carry it to those other contexts" ("Personal Interview").

Key places for reflection include:

• Quick writes in-class such as entrance or exit tickets
• Reflective letters to accompany submission packets for essays
• Reflection letter with the final portfolio

The "Big Ball Park" and Collaboration
Dr. Adler-Kassner uses the metaphor of "the big ball park" to describe the parameters and guidelines for the First Year Writing Program. This metaphor expresses the restrictions on the curriculum, as well as the openness that is possible within these boundaries. In addition to the outcomes and philosophies (articulated above) that bound the program, each course has its own requirements such as the theme for the course and the number and type of assignments (which will be described below).

When Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem revamped the FYW curriculum after their arrival in 2000, they started with the outcomes and strategies, and then took these to the faculty and asked their ideas for how best to reach these goals. This openness and collaboration is both a philosophy and what might be called a culture for the FYW program. Faculty are encouraged to share innovative assignments, and these are made available to the entire program (this warehouse of pedagogy used to be housed in notebooks, then online in pdfs, and now in a wiki). The ball park metaphor expresses the notion of a shared enterprise as well as individual effort.

My own comparison for this relationship between openness and structure in the FYW Program is the open-source development of software. Each faculty member who is part of the writing program is a user of the same program as well as a collaborator and contributor to the program.

ENGL 120 Curriculum

The FYW Program at Eastern Michigan is constituted by two courses. ENGL 120 is the first of the two courses, and is an elective course. In many respects, ENGL 120 resembles a "Developmental" or "Basic" writing class that might be found in remedial programs at other universities or colleges. However, the way the course is offered at EMU frames it very differently.

Dr. Adler-Kassner has written extensively on "Basic Writers," and her expertise and views on this population of writer's shapes the way this course is put together and presented. The first most significant characteristic of this class is that it is elective--students choose to be in this class rather than are placed there, and the credit for the class counts toward graduation. Although the course description of ENGL 120 states that a goal of the course is to prepare students for ENGL 121 (a general education requirement), nowhere are students labeled as "remedial" or "basic" or "developmental." Adler-Kassner is quite sensitive to the negative affects of such labels on developing writers, and she is opposed to the types of curriculum that is typically delivered to these writers. She sees Eng120 as being like other first semester writing classes whose primary goal is to work on the basic tenets of college critical reading and writing.

Students in ENGL 120 write "Long Essays" of about five pages each. Essays are not graded as they are turned in, though students receive full/half/no credit grades on their "essay packets" when submitted. Students choose two essays for revision to contribute to an end-of-course portfolio. This portfolio gets the largest portion of the grade (typically from 40-50%).

The theme of "Reading and Writing the College Experience" structures the course's assignments and activities. One example of a first essay assignent for ENGL120 is entitled "You as a Writer." Each assignment producing a Long Essay (LE) is called a "Stage." In addition to the more high stakes (LE) assignment, there "low stakes" writing pieces called "Writing Explorations" (or WEs) and "Short Essays." A paragraph from LE 1 on "You as a Writer" does a good job describing the overall mission of this course:

We're going to work a lot this semester on honing our abilities to analyze contexts and definitions of good writing, on analyzing what writing strategies we already have that can be used to produce that kind of writing, on developing new strategies to produce it, and on making decisions about whether we actually want to produce is (and why we might decide as we have). ("LE1 CommonAssignment")

Students are encouraged to look at writing outside the context of school as well as within it; thus, students explore a broader definition of writing than most college composition classes (which have a myopic focus on the academic essay). LE2 and LE3 focus on genres inside and outside of school, while LE4 is a reflection on the student's first semester at EMU. Each LE has multiple versions of the assignment (created by faculty who have taught the course and shared their work), and teachers can select and adapt these versions of the assignments as they wish (as long as they stay in the "big ball park"). See the "Curriculum guide and sample assignments for ENGL 120."

ENGL 121 Curriculum

ENGL 121 is primarily a course on research writing and research strategies. Rather than similar classes at other colleges and universities that focus on argument or literature and composition, EMU's course focuses on academic inquiry and writing from this research. The General Education Course Rationale states: "In English 121, EMU students develop the foundation for writing, research, and critical thinking strategies that they will use throughout their college careers and in the workplace." The overall theme for the course is researching community. For example, many students choose "Researching the Public Experience: College as Community" which allows for students to use their university context as the subject of their research. Students can also choose to research communities outside the university setting. Students write three or four Long Essays, and in the process of these essays produce 50-70 pages of draft work and 20-30 pages of polished, final-draft work. Students also complete a project for the Celebration of Student Writing that represents findings from their research. Like ENGL 120, Long Essays are not graded (but essay packets receive full/half/no credit), and students select and revise two of the Long Essays to include in an end-of-course Portfolio that gets a major course grade.

Faculty shape their course around one of three researched essay models: Ethnographic Researched Essay, Inquiry-Based Researched Essay, and Multi-Genre Researched Essay. Some instructors will use two researched essays, starting students with an inquiry-based essay that gets extended into an ethnographic or multi-genre essay. A full description of each research model can be found in the Eng121 Curriculum Guide.

Celebration of Student Writing
This public event is the culmination of ENGL 121 where students display the results from their research projects. The Celebration is held in the EMU Student Center Grand Ballroom, and each class has a table and space to display their projects. During the event, students from the entire campus community are invited to view these displays. No one model exists for the display of research projects, and students get very creative in ways they choose to showcase their work. The Celebration creates a public, campus event where "the work" of Freshman Writing can be displayed and talked about outside of the English Department. More will be discussed about the significance of this campus-wide event in Presence and Positioning Within the University.

Pictures and videos of the Celebration of Student Writing are available here.

A Special Word on Technology and the FYWP
EMU provides no computer classrooms for any sections of ENGL 120 or ENGL 121 to meet within. That doesn't mean technology does not exist within the program. The program outcome for Use of Technology states:

By the end of ENGL 121, students will:

* Experience working through the drafting process using computers
* Consider the relationship between on-line (e.g., hypertextual, e-mail) and off-line genres of writing
* Use computers to facilitate their processes of inquiry
* Locate and critically assess sources available on-line ("Course Outcomes")

These appear to be modest, but typical goals related to technology designed to help students become more proficient with using technology to assist their writing and research. Implicit within this outcome is the ubiquitous use of computers for writing. The outcome related to online genre's of writing fits within the larger goals of the program to help students become more sensitive to various genres for communication (electronic or otherwise). At this point, the FYWP has not made the production of New Media texts a requirement within its mix of writing assignments.