Sequencing Assignments

Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:29:31 -0500
From: Paula Mathieu
Subject: articles on sequencing, inquiry or cohesion of a writing course

Hello colleagues and happy new year.

I hope the question I have is not too vague:

For the graduate course I am teaching (to prepare new teaching fellows to teach the first-year writing course) I am looking for an essay(s) or book that addresses issues of having an overarching inquiry or structure holding a composition course and the assignments together. I'm not talking about a 'topic' per se, although a topic could be one form of inquiry. I'm trying to help students construct syllabi that connect writing genres with a purpose and audience and construct assignments with some sense of deliberate sequence. Typically, our graduate students draft syllabi that are a collection of four or five unrelated assignments in no particular order. I'm hoping to engage them in thinking about the logic of a course overall, with issues and questions that get explored throughout the semester.

I have had success helping students think on the assignment level, but less so in having them think about the goals and issues keeping the course together more broadly. Can any recommend possible readings to address this?

Many thanks for your help.

All the best,
Paula

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Ideas for English 101, ed. Richard Ohmann and W. B.
Coley (NCTE, 1975). Articles by Elbow, Coles, Bruffee, Winterrowd et al.

David Jolliffe's book, Inquiry and Genre (Allyn & Bacon 1999)

[Chris Anson: David's book is terrific for its wedding of theory and practice. Its most important contribution is to show how wrongheaded we are to assign new domains or topics for students' writing every couple of weeks--as if they can write authoritatively about something they haven't had nearly enough time to investigate. David's pedagogy in this book (which didn't get the attention it deserves) argues that students become more authoritative, confident, and successful writers in relation to their immersion, over time, in a specific area of inquiry (duh).]

Kenneth Dowst's "The Epistemic Approach," in Donovan and McClelland's Eight
Approaches to Teaching Composition, in which Dowst refers to several
assignment sequences and principles for constructing them.

The chapter "Designing Writing Courses" in Erika Lindemann's A Rhetoric for
Writing Teachers gives some attention to sequencing.

Betty Pytlik's piece on sequencing: "Sequencing Writing Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking." In The Critical Writing Workshop: Designing Writing Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking. Ed. Toni- Lee Capossela. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook/Heinemann, 1993. 71-93.