Teaching paradigms of composition

So, next fall I am slated to teach the first Issues in Composition course. In the spring, I am slated to teach the graduate course in composition theory. An interesting way of thinking about how to structure this course has occurred to me this morning as I have been reading Anis Bawarshi's Genre and the Invention of the Writer. The relevant section comes on p. 51 in the section called "The Process Movement in Composition: Reclaiming Invention." The structure that occurs to me as I read this passage, a way of organizing a course on composition (history? theories of invention?):

Part 1: Current Traditional Rhetoric (19th century to 1960s)

Product to Process

Part 2: The Writing Process Movement (1960s to 1990)

Process to Context

Part 3: Post-Process (1990 to present)

I could have students read articles which embody the various positions on writing espoused during these periods. It's interesting to think about how these movements argue for paradigms, ways of thinking about how writing works and that discovering these arguments and having students examine them might be useful. We might also discuss the way that these paradigms don't die and exist simultaneously. Current Traditional Rhetoric is still with us. Among a large cohort of writing teachers, process approaches are still the prevalent way of teaching. Post-process has gotten hold, but certainly not successfully changed public perceptions about how writing works.

Bawarshi's organizing question might be a useful one here: What is involved when we say what writers are doing and why are they doing it? (50)

Instructional

Basic Editing in imovie

Audio Editing in iMovie 09

Vimeo Video School

My reading list for my dream faculty writing class

It has to begin with Gee, "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction." This has to be the first reading...all else can grow from there...

Multimodal Reading List

Assessment:

The New Work of Assessment: Evaluating Multimodal Compositions. Computers and Composition, Spring 2010 Elizabeth A. Murray & Hailey A. Sheets (Ball State University)
Nicole A. Williams (Virginia Tech)

The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media" By Anne Francis Wysocki in What Writing Does and How It Does It (Bazerman/Prior)

Borton, Sonya, and Brian Huot. "Responding and Assessing." Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2007. 99-111.

Great Quotes for Syllabi

My preferences, my desires, my subjective states must again and again be modified and repudiated as I am dragged, kicking and screaming, out of infantile solipsism and into adult membership in an inquiring community. (Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, p. 13)

Laurent Daloz expands on Knowles' definition: "In the end, good teaching rests neither in accumulating a shelf-full of knowledge nor in developing a repertoire of skills. In the end, good teaching lies in a willingness to attend and care for what happens in our students, ourselves, and the space between us. Good teaching is a certain kind of stance...It is a stance of receptivity, of attunement, of listening" (Daloz qtd. in Kiskis, "Reflections on Pedagogy, Andragogy, and Power" In Pedagogy in the Age of Politics, p. 60)

Before there was WAW, there was...

What can be transferred from general composition to other domains, I believe, is the idea that writing in all fields is shaped by an interactive relationship between the way an intellectual community constructs knowledge in writing and the genres it uses to configure that knowledge. In brief, here is how this dynamic works: Writers create texts to "do business" in certain communities of readers and writers. Within those communities, there are specific ideas, often tacit, about what constitutes acceptable subject matters to write about. About each of these acceptable subject matters, there are, within communities of readers and writers, certain status quo ideas, attitudes, and propositions, discursive entitlements Chaim Perelman calls the "starting points for argumentation." Within these communities there are, in addition, specific kinds of rhetorical "moves" or "transactions" that a writer is expected to make in order to lead readers to perceive a central idea or adhere to a thesis. Aristotle, for example, in teaching the art of rhetoric for fourth century Athenian orators, calls these "moves" enthymemes. Within these communities there are also definite ideas, again often tacit, about what functions written texts should serve--that is, the degree to which they should "shift the scene" from the written text at hand to some other arena of action.

All these aspects of "knowledge work"--acceptable subjects, starting points, transactions, and functions of texts--are constrained by the kinds of genres within which the community has chosen to conduct its business. Indeed, as I argue, the genres of different communities actually emerge from the knowledge-work its members must perform. In other words, whether a person writes about a specific subject matter, chooses to detail specifically what she believes her readers presently know and think about the subject, engages in certain kinds of rhetorical moves (for example, definition or comparison and causal reasoning), and urges some specific action depends on the genre she is expected to produce. The choice of genre also dictates, to a finer degree than other prescriptive rules, how the writer must construct paragraphs, sentences, and words.

This knowledge work-genre dynamic is what students can learn in general composition that can be transferred to the writing they must do in other courses. It is this dynamic that I believe ought to constitute the "content" of college writing instruction. (188-189)

Joliffe, David. "The Myth of Transcendence." Pedagogy in the Age of Politics: Writing and Reading (in) the Academy. Eds. Patricia A. Sullivan, Donna J. Qualley. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994. 183-194.

Quan's presentation