A bit of preamble 

It has been difficult to serve as the Writing Program Coordinator this fall. 

After my first year in the position, the University cut the amount of time set aside for the work in half. I also had to step in unexpectedly to serve as the coordinator of the University Reading and Writing Center. 

So, just as I was finding my feet in the position of Writing Program Coordinator, the ground shifted beneath me quite dramatically. 

While previously serving in faculty-administrative positions, I would spend a year running the program in the same way it had been run before my appointment. Only after gaining that experience would I feel comfortable setting new programmatic goals. The strategy demonstrates respect for the people who ran the program prior to my arrival and it allows for a coherent professional environment during the transition to new leadership. 

So, I was deeply frustrated to learn that my first year of experience would not be informative for the work I am doing this year. I'll adjust and move on, but it is difficult to invest in any form of long-term planning, which is kinda what I thought I was here to do. 

There were some bright spots.

One of the sites where I was able to utilize my professional and scholarly skillset was the graduate-level Composition Pedagogy seminar I led. The students in the course were engaged and intellectually curious. Together we examined the past couple of decades of theory and practice used in composition classrooms while planning our own courses. Here at the end of the semester, I drafted a personal reflection in which I attempted to describe what we learned together. 

I thought I'd share it here. I called it...

 A Really Good First-Year Composition Course

Learning to teach Composition can be a bit tricky for some, because the work involved is not the teaching of writing, even though that’s what everyone thinks we’re doing.

You see, the students we get in the first-year composition classroom can already write. Some better than others, sure, but as high school grads who have elected to go to college, all of our students have experience in spaces where writing has been expected of them. And to meet those expectations, students utilized skills that took years to develop.

First-year composition wouldn’t work as a class if we dismissed the value of those skills. 

So, what we teach in first-year composition is how to reconfigure and develop those skills for a new environment. Writing for college is not better or more difficult than writing in other settings; it’s just different enough that students benefit from a course designed to help them understand the lay of the land: the culture, the values, the goals, and the various ways things get done when writing for college – as one scholar put it, the “ways of knowing and the ways of doing” in an established community.

For new instructors, the bar set for a very basic first-year composition course is a fixed target: Getting students ready to meet a set of expectations associated with college-level writing. 

But in a really good first-year composition course, learning the lay of the land will help students develop a new skill. In that really good first-year composition course, students learn how to learn the lay of the land. That’s the kind of course I ask participants to design in my Composition Pedagogy seminar. 

You see, the process of writing up papers we’ve labeled as “college-level” presents the first-year composition students with an opportunity: Those students can examine how culture, values, and goals shape the various ways writing gets done in college. Students who perform that examination can learn how to perform a similar examination in other settings where new kinds of writing are expected of them.

What makes that a really good composition course is a poorly guarded secret that people who teach composition have known about for a few decades: The lay of the land keeps changing as we travel. 

I know it sounds like an inspirational meme caption, but travel and mapping are super effective analogs for learning and teaching. Effective writing is not a static target. It is a series of destinations.

Students start the college journey with intro courses or general education requirements. First-year composition should prepare students for most of the writing done in those settings, but even in the first couple of years, the types of assignments are different from one course to the next. The personal narrative in first-year composition doesn’t show students how to write up the lab for Intro to Geology. The road is already bumpy, but the trip is just getting started. When students start moving into their major, the types of assignments become more specific to the area of study. Research papers in Marketing don’t look at all like research papers in History, and the lab reports in Biology are different than the lab reports composed in Mechanical Engineering. And these variations in the terrain only become more pronounced after students leave college. 

Students in that really good composition course learn that they must first identify and then meet the expectations of the many different readers they will encounter on their journey. 

Instructors seeking to prepare students for this kind of journey understand this: Undergrads learning to write for college must be resourceful. 

Now, that word is tricky because people often equate “being resourceful” with just being smart. 

Being resourceful, however, is better understood as a problem-solving strategy. Resourceful people seek out and use resources when they are working to solve a problem. 

College students have a particularly messy problem to solve when they set out to write for audiences with new and unfamiliar expectations. 

An example is helpful to close.

Something taught in pretty much every first-year composition course is that college instructors expect students to skillfully incorporate other material into a text – material that often is not assigned as required readings by the instructor. We’re talking about outside sources. To teach this, we have students write papers that require the incorporation of information from outside sources. It’s pretty straightforward. Every composition student gets to practice on two or three papers over the course of a semester. 

In the really good composition course, however, students also pause to examine the writing landscape for any clues that might explain the different expectations across different tasks. Personal experience in a narrative has to be described with a credible amount detail. Expert opinion in an argument needs to be contextualized. Scholarly sources in a lit review get a formal citation style. The students in this course identify resources they can use to discern the why and how behind those differences.

Because the road ahead requires resourcefulness. 

The faculty at my university expects students to find and use countless resources in their writing: statistics, interview transcripts, political speeches, experimental results, infographics, reviews, white papers, critical analyses, case studies, films, technical specifications, instructions, poems, diagrams, and more. Students do not know how to utilize all of those resources in first-year composition. 

So, let’s say we have a senior studying economics who is working to jam the results of a regression analysis into a policy recommendation paper. After using Stata to run the statistical tests on a massive dataset provided by the professor, they must turn to yet another set of resources – mentors or model texts or style handbooks or peers or previously achieved learning outcomes – because not only do they have to understand how to describe what they have found in their research, they also have to sort out how others in the field typically incorporate the results of statistical tests into sentences while still sounding like economists. 

The writing knowledge the student brought to this task must be combined with new writing resources only available in the setting where thinking and learning get done. 

That’s why the discipline of Rhetoric & Composition developed pedagogies that do more than get students ready for college-level writing. Our students are not trying to hit a target; they are preparing for a journey.