Teacher Resources: Course Description and Pedagogy: Points of Emphasis

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Points of Emphasis in 101 at Rutgers
Your students come to Rutgers with widely varied backgrounds and levels of preparation, so you may want to survey them informally to find out what kinds of reading and writing they have done in the past. The idea that knowledge comes into existence through conversations among informed reader/writers contradicts many of the assumptions underlying the high school curriculum. Typically students have learned how to summarize or repeat information, or to offer "personal responses" to literary works or to themes assigned by the teacher. Few first-year students at Rutgers have read prose texts as lengthy and complex as Peter Drucker's "The Age of Social Transformation" or Martha Nussbaum's "Women and Cultural Universals." In the presence of extended arguments that challenge and, at times, even threaten to defeat their best efforts at understanding, students need to be reminded that most good readings begin as misreadings, and that re-reading, writing, and revising initial interpretations are fundamental to the making of knowledge in every field.

Reading
From the start of 101, we should teach students that reading involves a range of interpretive practices rather than simple recognition and memorization. These practices include:

• isolating, discussing, and writing about difficult, interesting, enlightening, or infuriating passages
• identifying key terms, claims, and examples
• drawing on general information, or on insights from other texts and from class discussions, in order to make sense of moments in an essay or excerpt that may initially seem opaque
• using drafts, rereading, and continued discussion to test various interpretations of the assigned material

Writing
Students will come into your classroom with a great deal of practice in writing to demonstrate what they already know (a skill that will continue to have value for them in many other courses). They may have had less practice in using writing to discover a position of their own in relation to other writers, and then to communicate that position to others in a cogent way. The practices required for writing of this kind include the following:

• exploring the implications of a single text
• placing two texts "in conversation" on the level of shared content and, more crucially, on the level of shared implications
• using texts "in conversation" as a starting point for thinking that builds on the authors' work but poses new issues or explores questions left unanswered by the authors themselves
• citing and explaining textual evidence
• revising to clarify and develop ideas
• revising for the purpose of public presentation, acknowledging the conventions of expository prose (thesis or argument, unified paragraphs, transitional sentences and phrases, credible uses of supporting evidence)

Especially during the first quarter or so of the term, teachers should be less concerned with seeing a fully developed argument and more concerned with deepening the students' understanding of the texts and encouraging the making of sustained and pertinent connections. Asking content-specific questions, as opposed to focusing primarily on rhetorical form, can help students develop richer, more complex perspectives of the readings. We want our students to use the texts in The New Humanities Reader to support, stimulate, and complicate their own thinking.

At the same time, we want students to recognize that thinking, speaking, and writing are fundamentally social acts. Understanding by itself is never adequate; the point, finally, is to be understood. As the semester progresses, we can help students see that open reflection and risky engagement with texts are only the first steps in a process that ends with the convincing presentation of a new way of seeing. Without risk, the writer learns nothing; without coherence, the same fate awaits the reader. Particularly during the last seven weeks of the semester, students should be required, either in peer groups or individually, to evaluate their papers for interpretive accuracy, organizational effectiveness, and general clarity.

Revision
After receiving each new assignment, students will bring their typed rough drafts to class for the required "peer revision" group workshops. Teachers are free to experiment with different formats for the collaborative evaluation of the drafts, but each student in a revision group should read and respond to the paper of every other student in the group. The groups will not succeed, however, without prior planning on the teacher's part. Just as our students begin English 101 without knowing how to write about an essay like Benjamin Barber's "Time, Work, and Leisure in a Civil Society," so they begin without having developed the ability to read with an eye to revision, which is, after all, a very different way of approaching a text than reading to understand. Some teachers preface the activities of the peer groups with a general discussion of what to look for in critiquing the draft. Other teachers prepare written worksheets that reflect the changing goals of each new assignment.

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