Teacher Resources: Course Description and Pedagogy: Goals and Assumptions

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Goals and Assumptions
English 101 is the required writing course for all first-year students at Rutgers. By the end of the semester the 101 student should be able to compose an expository essay that reflects his or her own point of view and that demonstrates thoughtful engagement with complex readings of some length.

The course encourages students to see themselves as participants in an ongoing written "conversation" about the most important issues of our time: globalization, the rise of the "knowledge society," biotechnology, environmental decline, the encounter between different regions and cultures, the changing nature of identity, and the search for enduring values beyond the prospect of seemingly random change. This conversational model of writing assumes the notion of a community that includes the authors of the assigned texts, the English 101 teacher, and all other students in the class. It assumes also that in the absence of definitive "answers," the writer's most important task is the understanding of complex issues and the communication of this understanding to others.

English 101 presupposes that the context for writing is always prior reading, and in this spirit the centerpiece of the course is an anthology rather than a textbook or rhetoric, although teachers should make use of the handbook, The Prentice Hall Reference Guide, throughout the semester. The point of the anthology, The New Humanities Reader, is to elicit writing that closely approximates the work students are likely to do in many of their college classes and, later, in their professional lives. To create writing of this kind, teachers should construct "sequences" of readings and assignments that will lead incrementally toward the final goal of a paper, roughly 5 to 7 pages in length, that synthesizes multiple sources while making an independent argument.

During the 14-week semester students will complete two sequences, each making use of three or four readings. The first assignment of the course should address a single text, with an emphasis on exploring the implications of the author's argument rather than on summary or on "personal response." The second assignment should provide an opportunity to examine the relations between two texts placed in "conversation" with one another. The third assignment of the semester-and the final assignment of the first sequence-should require students to develop an argument that draws on all three texts for its conceptual "frame" and for supporting evidence and illustrations. The second sequence-comprised of the fourth, fifth and sixth assignments of the semester-should repeat more or less the same stages with new texts. The only difference is that Assignment Four requires students to work with two texts rather than one: the last reading of the previous sequence as well as a new reading that will move the second sequence in a fresh direction.

The assignment sequences that you create will define a problem or shape a project for your students. In the last two essays of the course, however, you might also help students advance and articulate their own projects. You could begin this process by listening to the questions that students raise in their discussions of the readings, and then you might foreground these questions in successive assignments. You might have students use writers like Tannen and Scott to consider a cultural document of their own choosing. Alternately, you might ask students to use one of their final papers as an opportunity to write about one of their own early essays, or you might invite students working in small groups to revise an assignment you have created in a way that modifies it in keeping with individualized projects.

Reading, interpretation, connective synthesis, and the use of textual evidence should receive highest priority during the first half of the course, but at the same time, teachers should work with students to address sentence-level error and the lack of clarity. English 101 might be understood as a process-oriented writing course to the degree that it incorporates cycles of reading, pre-writing, drafting, rereading, and revision. Unlike some process-oriented writing courses, however, we ask our students to produce presentable final drafts, which become more and more polished over the course of a semester. From the start of the term, we address grammar, clarity, and structural coherence in the context of revision: the principle setting for the discussion of these matters should be rough or final drafts written for the course, as opposed to workbook-style exercises or lectures on correctness and style. Our basic approach is to help students recognize the patterns of error in their own writing, and to see problems of organization as a consequence of conceptual confusion.

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