Thinking about how to teach upper level/grad courses on composition...

Should I have started with the process movement? Part of me is feeling like that story needs to be told... Who helps me?

Yagelski's book review: he proposes we read Murray, Elbow and Freire.

Lad Tobin's introduction to Taking STock: The Writing Process in the 90s

ENGL 378 or other Upper Level Studies in Composition

Framing Questions:

• What is writing?
• What does writing do?
• Who is a writer?
• What is an audience?
• Why does one write?

Hayden James

ENGL 378 Writing Stories

RHEA JONES:




MORGAN PATRICIO:




ALISON PANICHAS:


DANIELLE IZZI: KATHY LAURENT: KELSEY DUBEAU: HAYDEN JAMES:

Projects, ideas, etc.

Mark Bittman's Food blog on the NYTimes.

The True Cost of Tomatoes (Bittman)

Here's the passage that caught my eye:

Most of us eat or buy industrially produced tomatoes, and it doesn’t seem too much to ask that the people who pick them for us be treated a little more fairly. Speak to your supermarket manager or write to the head of the chain you patronize (the easiest way to do this is to visit this page on the CIW site). Supermarkets, I expect, are as susceptible to public pressure as fast-food chains.

There are few places in the country where migrant and immigrant farmworkers are treated well; in Immokalee, at least, they’re being treated better. Bit by bit.

This is a case study...the course could be organized around case studies with digital literacy projects in response to the studies....

Contribution from David Barton (ecologies of literacy)

This morning, I'm reading the chapter "Public Definitions of Literacy" in David Barton's book, Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. As I'm reading, I'm thinking that this would be an excellent chapter to ask students to read early on in a WAW course to get them thinking about the question: What is literacy or what is writing? The chapter unpacks common misconceptions about literacy--or what Barton sees as misconceptions. Specifically, it focuses on the skills and cultural literacy views--but there is a lot more in it that is of use.

Because students have internalized these "public definitions of literacy" and because they guide their thinking about literacy, asking them to read this chapter and interrogate these assumptions could be enormously useful in framing the start of a WAW course.

To Study Writing (what does it mean to study writing?)

Of course, to study writing can—and should—mean many things: to study the ways that texts are produced, by single writers, dyads, or groups; to study the functions of literacy in personal development and in social and institutional contexts; to study how writing is mediated and distributed; to study the practices of literacy in situ; and to study how written texts work within or against cultural discourses, among others. (Haas, et. al, "Young People’s Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging" p 379)