The Program: 1999 Programmatic Excellence Award

Rutgers-New Brunswick Writing Program
1999 Rutgers Award for Programmatic Excellence in Undergraduate Education

PROGRAM MISSION

The principal mission of the Writing Program is to introduce beginning undergraduates to what might be called the "culture of books." We say "introduce" because we believe that students seldom encounter this culture before they arrive at Rutgers. For many, reading has meant finding the "right answer" on tests designed to legitimize rankings of various kinds. We might describe this sort of reading as competitive literacy or the "culture of tests." Reading also plays a part in the consumption of mass market publishing outside the school, but a book in that context is often only another commodity, purchased for private enjoyment. We might describe this way of reading as consumerist literacy. We regard the culture of books, by contrast, as a distinctive historical tradition that reaches back to the largely oral societies of classical antiquity. In our time, the culture of books survives primarily in issue-oriented journalism and in the discourses of the academy. We believe that reading and writing in this tradition are best understood as forms of conversation or dialogue. Even the discourses of the sciences belong to this tradition, since articles and books in physics or biology respond to previous articles and books, and they do so, no less than in English or History, with a sensibility that is both collaborative and critical.

For this reason, we believe that to participate in the culture of books is always to enter a particular conversation. The subject of the conversation may be the nature of historical research, the proper aims of anthropology, the consequences of globalization, or the decline of civil society--and all of these are topics that our courses address. But no matter what the subject, entering a "bookish" conversation begins as an effort to understand the ideas of prior participants. For teachers in the Writing Program, however, understanding is never simply the ability to recapitulate an argument; in our view, students have not really understood a text until they can apply the author's "way of seeing" to subjects the author herself may never have considered. At the start of a semester, teachers often ask a question like "What would Geertz say about X?" or "How would Barber explain Y?"

Once students have begun to understand the text as a "way of seeing" which they can use to explore any number of subjects, the next step is for them to recognize how a text "speaks" to other texts within a learned conversation. In our Program, mid-semester assignments typically require students to explore the relations among different authors who are writing on a common topic. In the final third of the semester, however, we ask students to go beyond these relations to the development of a position of their own--a position which responds to prior writers in detail while adding some new insight to the conversation.

Needless to say, teachers in the Writing Program are also quite concerned with the mechanics of writing: logical organization, paragraph coherence, grammatical correctness and so on. But we are convinced that a more or less exclusive attention to mechanics will not produce the "higher order" literacy that undergraduates now need for their studies here at Rutgers and for their working lives in the information society. Literacy includes grammar, but also a great deal more. Whether we like it or not, the culture of books has grown increasingly distant from ordinary life and language as most people know them. Outside the academy as well as inside, there are multiple discourses with multiple "dialects," multiple logics, and multiple standards of evidence. For these reasons, a course in writing today must be a course in discursive hermeneutics first of all--in other words, a course about how to make sense of readings that require some degree of interpretive work.

PROGRAM SIZE

During 1997-98, the Writing Program offered 524 sections to about 11,500 students: 352 sections in the fall and 172 in the spring. During 1998-1999, the Writing Program offered 481 sections to about 10,500 students: 316 sections in the fall and 165 sections in the spring.

Teachers include two tenured faculty members, program director Kurt Spellmeyer and associate director Richard Miller, and 7 assistant directors, who are recent Ph.D.s in a variety of disciplines. During 1997-98, other teachers included 14 assistant instructors, 110 teaching assistants, and 63 part-time lecturers.

PROGRAM TEACHING ACTIVITIES

The Writing Program offers classroom instruction at three levels: (1) basic or remedial writing, which includes 355:098, "Composition Skills," and 355:099, "Reading for English.; (2) introductions to "expository" or discursive writing, which includes 355:100, "Basic Composition," and 355:101, "Expository Writing I"; (3) writing in the context of research, which includes 355:102, "Expository Writing II," 355:201, "Discourse in the Professions," 355:301, "Writing and Research," 355:302, "Scientific and Technical Writing," and 355:303, ""Writing for Business and the Professions." The Writing Program also offers a graduate seminar, "The Teaching of Writing," every fall semester for first-time teachers.

MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS/ACTIVITIES

I. CURRICULAR INNOVATIONS

Intellectually Rigorous Pedagogical Approach: Over the last ten years, the text-centered, dialogical pedagogy of the Writing Program at Rutgers has achieved national recognition. Few other programs in the country are so highly regarded for their theoretical sophistication, institutional coherence, hard work, and high standards. Every semester, colleges and universities--most recently Johns-Hopkins--ask us to send them our extensive course materials: in effect, we have exported our approach all over the U.S. The Rutgers pedagogy has proven to be "exportable" to this degree precisely because the basic approach remains the same whether the course in question involves remedial instruction or advanced research-writing. To begin with, teachers arrange reading assignments in what we call a sequence: each text in a sequence presents a different perspective on an issue or set of related issues. Each essay assignment after the first one requires students to make connections among the readings until the cumulative learning process provides enough background knowledge for the student to develop a sophisticated independent argument by the end of the term. We ask our students, in other words, to do exactly the kind of intellectual work that professional scholars do.

In tandem with these pedagogical innovations, in recent years the Writing Program has undertaken a number of other significant innovations--innovations which have earned six separate Dialogues Grants.

101: The Public Speaking Component: With the required writing course, Expos, 101, the Writing Program has introduced the required public speaking component.

Expos. 201: Research in the Disciplines: In an effort to work against the prevailing tendency to have students learn about "research" in the abstract, as a set of skills divorced from any particular content, discipline, or set of convictions, the Writing Program has created a series of interdisciplinary writing courses, which we offer under the rubric of "355:201 Discourse in the Professions," which are designed to give each undergraduate the opportunity to receive sustained writing instruction while working on a topic drawn from his or her major area of interest. Some of these 201 courses are paired with content courses in history, biology, English literature, and several are linked to the Cook College mission courses. Other freestanding 201 courses require students to pursue tightly focused research and writing in the social sciences, the sciences, or the humanities. And recently, with the assistance of one of its Dialogues Grants, the Writing Program introduced its most successful version of the 201 course: "Issues in the Health and Medical Professions." This course, which was specifically designed to improve the performance of Rutgers undergraduates on the MCATs, the national test which determines access to careers in the health and medical professions, embodies the Writing Program's commitment to meeting the instructional needs of the entire undergraduate community.

Research and Professional Training: Over the last four years, the Writing Program has assumed responsibility for "Scientific and Technical Writing" and "Writing for Business and the Professions." The design of these courses now reflects our emphasis on reading. As a consequence, students in these courses are required to complete the kinds of research-based writing projects they will need to do in their professional lives--and which they can show to potential employers as evidence of their communication skills.

Improving the Retention of Transfer Students: In the interests of better meeting the needs of Rutgers' growing transfer population, the Writing Program and the Math and Science Learning Centers collaborated with the FAS Deans' Office is drafting a grant proposal seeking funds from the Bildner Foundation to underwrite the creation of support services for this vulnerable sector of the undergraduate student body. As a result of having been awarded this grant, the Writing Program has used its funds to hire a full-time transfer coordinator and to develop a new course, 355:301, "Writing and Research," which is specifically designed to address the unique set of writing deficits transfer students bring with them to the university and thereby improve the retention rate of this portion of the student body.

Integrating Computers into the Writing Program's Pedagogy: Finally, this year the Writing Program has launched an ambitious project to integrate computerized instruction into all of its courses over the next five years. Recognizing the need to train students how to take full advantage of the resources made available by the World Wide Web and how to assess the information they find there, the Writing Program has formulated a workable, pedagogically meaningful plan to introduce web-based research skills into all sections of 102, 201, 301, 302, and 303 beginning next year. Then, if our grant proposal to the Student Computing Fees Committee is accepted, we will begin the process of integrating computerized instruction into the required writing course, Expos. 101, and the other remedial courses with the goal of being able to guarantee, by the year 2003, that all students going through the Writing Program will receive instruction on how to compose on a computer and how to pursue research on the web.

II. TEACHER TRAINING

One way to measure the success of any writing program is to see if it succeeds in maintaining high academic standards and grading parity across sections: a program that does not achieve these goals is a program in name only. The Rutgers-New Brunswick Writing Program is distinguished both by the intellectual rigor of its curriculum and by its commitment to insuring that all students at the same instructional level are judged by the same grading criteria. It is also a program that prides itself on the quality of its teaching: over the past five years, three graduate students in the program, Hugh English, Lisa MacDowell, and Anthony Lioi, have been recognized by FAS for their outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. Last year, Professor Miller was selected to receive this FAS award and was nominated this year for the Graduate School's teaching award.

Because the Writing Program sees its role as providing students with access to the discourses and modes of argumentation most valued in the academy, all teachers in the program are required to assign reading materials and writing assignments that ask the students to develop a dexterity with critical terminology and an ability to synthesize information to generate new insights and new questions. In order to provide instruction that is both intellectually demanding and pedagogically effective, the Writing Program offers its teachers a wide array of support services.

Orientation: For new teachers, the Writing Program provides a week-long orientation in August, which includes: an introduction to The New Humanities Reader, the required text in the course; practice writing and revising assignments; workshops on commenting on student papers; sustained instruction on the Writing Program's grading criteria and hands-on experience applying that criteria to sample papers. (In recognition of the value this training can have for all teachers, the Foreign Language Departments now regularly have their beginning instructors attend this orientation.) Because this orientation can only prepare the new teachers for their first few weeks in the classroom, the Writing Program offers considerable additional pedagogical and administrative support over the course of the semester. For TAs in the English department, the Writing Program runs a semester-long, credit-bearing graduate seminar and practicum, where first-time teachers have an opportunity to learn more about literacy and literacy instruction. Graduate work from this seminar has been presented at national and local conferences (CCCC and NJCEA) and, most recently, an essay written for this course was published in Bedford's Teacher's Guide for Ways of Reading.

Mentoring Groups for Teaching Assistants from Disciplines Other than English: For those teachers who come to the Writing Program with some previous experience in the classroom, the Writing Program offers other forms of support. Specifically, when the Writing Program arranged to have teaching assistantships distributed to departments other than English, including History, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, and Economics, the goal was to provide additional support for advanced graduate students in other disciplines and to train future teachers outside the English department about the central role that writing instruction can play in content-centered courses. For the thirty-five graduate students drawn from these other disciplines who now teach for the Writing Program, we have developed a set of small, tightly focused mentoring sessions over the course of the fall semester. These lively and engaged sessions, which are led by the Writing Program's senior assistant directors, provide TAs from the other disciplines the opportunity to read and discuss material designed to help them improve their work as writing teachers. They also insure that these teachers, and the many beginning part-time lecturers who also elect to attend these sessions, all receive careful instruction in the Writing Program's pedagogy and its grading practices.

Mid-term and End of Semester Folder Review: On the belief that student writing is the best indicator of what has taken place in a composition classroom over the course of a semester, the Writing Program requires that all of its teachers meet individually with one of the program's directors twice a semester for a "folder review." This labor-intensive procedure, which requires that each instructor bring all of writing that his or her students have completed in the course up to that point, serves a vital pedagogical and administrative function: it allows the teacher the opportunity to discuss what is going on in class with an objective observer and it allows the Writing Program the opportunity to make certain that grading parity is being maintained across the sections. In this way, folder review insures that students throughout the university are being held to the same standard and that the program's teachers are receiving ongoing pedagogical advice about how to improve the quality of their student's writing.

Additional Support Services: In the interests of creating an environment where the boundary between teaching and scholarship is productively called into question, the Writing Program has established a host of extracurricular events where its teachers can focus on composition as an area of intellectual inquiry. Five years ago, the Writing Program began offering an annual Conference on Teaching First-Year Writing. These conferences, which occur in the middle of the fall semester, feature four graduate student presentations and regularly attract an audience of at least forty teachers. In addition to this, three years ago, the Writing Program began to convene a Composition Discussion Group, which meets every three weeks to discuss a reading central to the field. Formed in an effort to make graduate students from the Rutgers English Department more competitive on the market, the discussion group has developed into a much more intellectually ambitious enterprise: the group quickly spawned a parallel entity--the Composition Writing Group--dedicated to working collaboratively to produce publishable scholarship and, this year, it brought in Joseph Harris, the nationally-known scholar and editor of CCC, the foremost journal in the field. Together, these two groups provide professional training and scholarly support to over twenty-five graduate students, full-time instructors, and part-time lecturers. That is has not only been possible but relatively easy to create such a community of avid teacher-scholars is a testament both to the quality of teacher-training the Writing Program offers and to the commitment of its teachers to do an even better job in the future.

III. CONTRIBUTIONS TO IMPROVED WRITING INSTRUCTION AT THE LOCAL, STATE, AND NATIONAL LEVELS

Because the directors of the Writing Program are committed to the larger project of improving the overall quality of student writing both at Rutgers and across the country, they have set out both to influence the curricula at the feeder high schools and community colleges responsible for educating the students destined to attend Rutgers and to participate in the national debate about the form and function of the first-year writing course.

Workshops for High School Teachers: In the interests of bringing together those who provide writing instruction at the secondary and post-secondary level, the directors of the Writing Program communicate extensively with future Rutgers undergraduates and their teachers. In the past five years, the directors have: hosted a colloquium at Rutgers for high school teachers of Advanced Placement English courses; led a number of workshops at local schools, including McKinley Middle School, Edison High School, and Hunterdon Central High School; and made numerous informational presentations about the Writing Program at the Rutgers faculty-student forum for prospective students and their parents.

Outreach to Community Colleges: Since so many of Rutgers' transfer students come from New Jersey community colleges, the Writing Program has initiated several programs designed to foster collaboration between the University and these feeder institutions. Last year, the Program played a crucial role in the formation of the New Jersey Writing Alliance to open a discussion between representatives from community colleges around the state and the program directors about how to better coordinate the effort to provide New Jersey's students with the highest level of instruction. As one of its first acts, the NJWA convened an introductory workshop last spring on the College Avenue Campus, where more than 100 community college teachers engaged in a dialogue with Rutgers Writing Program instructors about the Program's pedagogical methods and writing standards.

This workshop, which was an overwhelming success, has already greatly improved relations between the university and the community colleges. In the interests of building on the community college's enthusiasm for Rutgers' first-year writing course, the Writing Program established the Community College Exchange Project, a program that gives community college teachers the opportunity to serve as instructors in the Writing Program for a semester. The teachers who participated in this CCEP this fall found the experience so transformative that they have already set about introducing a similar approach to composition instruction at their home institutions. To further promote this effort to initiate curricular reform at the two-year colleges from the ground up, the Writing Program is working with the NJWA to create the Rutgers' Summer Institute for Writing Instructors, a week-long summer institute that will allow community college teachers and the directors of the Writing Program to work collaboratively on the project of improving writing instruction across the state.

National Role of the Program: Professors Spellmeyer and Miller have also established themselves as prominent and well-respected voices in nationwide conversations about composition instruction. Professor Spellmeyer's book, Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (Prentice-Hall, 1993), received the Journal of Advanced Composition's H. Ross Winterowd Best Book Award in 1994 and his articles are regularly featured in the discipline's premier journal, College English. Professor Miller's exploration of the large-scale problems and solutions that confront schools like Rutgers appears in his As if Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education (Cornell UP, 1998). His article, "What Does it Mean to Learn? ETS, William Bennett, and a Praxis of the Sublime," received the Journal of Advanced Composition's James Kinneavy Award for Best Article in 1996. Both Professor Spellmeyer and Professor Miller have served on the editorial board for CCC (College Composition and Communication) and have been selected in national elections to serve on the CCC's Executive Committee, the discipline's primary policy-making body.

Because of their scholarly work on the intellectual and political significance of writing instruction, Professors Spellmeyer and Miller are among the most sought after speakers in the discipline. Along with being regular participants at both the Modern Language Association's national conference and the national conference on College Composition and Communication, Professors Spellmeyer and Miller are routinely invited to give keynote addresses, serve as featured speakers, and provide workshops at colleges and universities around the country. Between them, over the past five years, they have delivered guest lectures at: the University of Arizona, the University of Washington, Notre Dame University, Michigan Technological University, Pennsylvania State University-Erie Behrend, the University of Louisville, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of St. Thomas, Temple University, the University of Southern Maine, Illinois State University, and the Ohio State University. This spring, Professor Miller will deliver the keynote address at the New Jersey Council of English's conference at Middlesex Community College and he has been invited to speak at the University of New Hampshire's annual composition conference next fall. Professor Spellmeyer has been invited to speak at the University of Missouri-Kansas City this fall.

The Writing Program's national prominence is reflected, as well, in the success that its assistant directors have had in finding tenure-track positions at other universities. Defying the abysmal figures for job applicants in all spheres of academia, the Writing Program's assistant directors--advanced graduate students and recent graduates from the program who assist in the administration of the program--have nearly a 100% placement rate during the twelve years that Professor Spellmeyer has directed the program. Over the past five years, sixteen directors have gone on the market, eleven have landed tenure-track jobs, four have found permanent employment in the university, and one has entered the textbook industry. As these statistics show, because of the Writing Program's national reputation for providing the highest quality training, its assistant directors have no difficulty competing with graduates of rhetoric and composition programs. Consequently, versions of the Rutgers' Writing Program's demanding pedagogical approach to composition instruction are now being introduced at, among other places, Queens College, Long Island University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marietta College, and American University.

SUMMARY

Serving more than 11,000 students and offering more than 480 courses a year, the Rutgers-New Brunswick Writing Program possesses a commitment to innovation and service rarely found in a program of its size. Even as it encourages students to engage in complex "conversations" with difficult texts, the Program establishes its own productive dialogues with other Rutgers departments, with area high schools and community colleges, and with institutions of higher learning nationwide.

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