Analysis of Class Syllabus
Introduction
I choose to structure my classroom in a way in which we could explore social and cultural constructions of communities, as advocated by John Trimbur, Kenneth Bruffee, and Kenneth Burke. This would be an experimental class since it would be the first composition course I will have ever taught. I will, of course, improve on the structure as I gain more experience teaching, but, for now, this syllabus presents a beginning for a potential first year composition course.
Course Objectives
My course objectives are explained using the words "we" and "us" to demonstrate to students that we are both learners in the classroom. I want to encourage my students to question the status-quo of the hierarchy of authority figures. In doing so, I hope to establish an environment in which we will all feel comfortable to participate in and speak out minds.
Required Texts
I choose my texts very carefully because I wanted to give students a look at multicultural literature as well as essays that focus on a variety of themes ranging from economics, technology, and gender. The grammar book was included as an afterthought and will be used to not only teach better usage of English but to also question whether all the "rules" are really necessarily, especially in comparison with Danticat's writing style. I also want to touch on issues of grammar in relation to each student's experience in previous classes. Photocopied excerpts from the final text, Composition: Writing, Revising, and Speaking, is really an amazing piece that the class will focus on during the fifth and sixth week of class till finals. It is a collaborative effort between Virginia Tech professors of English and first year composition students. This is the type of collaborative work I hope to inspire wherever I end up teaching. I want professors and students to do research as a means to breaking down the departmental hierarchy that hinders our creativities. I am hoping students will learn, from reading fellow students' works, to realize that everything they write is important and can make a difference.
Required Assignments
Although the writing assignments seem a little overwhelming, I will be sure to explain that the reading meditations are meant to be very similar to a learning journal. They are graded credit/no credit and as long as the student writes the minimum requirement, they will receive easy points. Instead, I want to focus the students on their essays and revisions of essays. The reason I offered so many essays, and types of essays, is because I wanted to stress the common assumptions that Victor Villanueva stressed in his article "On Syllabi:"
Writing is ontological (decidedly human); it is epistemological (a way of learning); it is ideological (tied to ways of seeing the world and its peoples and social systems). As such, writing becomes a medium for self-reflection, self-expression, and -most important- communication. (99)
I structured the essays from easiest to hardest. The first essay will be based off the novel, since that is a good transitional point for students being as it is a familiar way of writing passed on from high school English classes. Through group work and free-writes, I hope to encourage students to experiment with more nontraditional forms of essay writing, such as a collaborative essay. I want to encourage them to create new styles of writing essays. Eventually, they will write a traditional research paper, a skill that they can carry to other academic disciplines. The order of the collaborative essay and research paper might shift depending upon how well the class understands the discussions and whether they seem to be working well together. I plan to offer about four weeks worth of time for writing these two essays. However, if students handle the first essay rather efficiently, then we will spend more time developing the last two. The mini-essay was added as a way for students to bring other aspects they are interested in outside the classroom into the classroom
Portfolio
I included the requirement of a portfolio as a way for the students to collect everything they wrote within a binder that they label with appropriate sections, such as meditations, collaborative essay, cultural essay, special interest essay, etc. Following Villanueva's example of stressing to students that everything they write is important. I am hoping that if students get easy points from compiling everything they wrote into a nicely arranged set-up of their choosing, they will be more likely to save their writings from the course.
Grading Rubric
I left the grading rubric off my syllabus until it was necessary to complete one. I am hoping that I will have the time to create specific rubrics for each type of essay the students write. I also want to encourage a context of community classroom, as explained by Gregory Clark in "Departmental Syllabus: Experience in Writing:"
Conceptually, it suggests that when people write they do so in response to others just as one person's talk in a conversation is in response to what others have said or done, and it suggests that when people read they do so to understand, evaluate, and prepare to respond to another in much the same way that a person engaged in conversation actively listens. (105)
Thus, since there will be a large emphasis on group work and collaboration amongst the students and myself, I thought it only fair to allow them the opportunity to throw our suggestions for how their papers should be graded. Of course this style of teaching will require some example rubrics, which I can easily bring to class for a discussion on how we want ours to look the same or different. Of course, I will have the final say and, if ideas are not feasible, I will not include them in the grading rubric.
Schedule of Class
I assigned a lot of reading from the grammar book within the first three weeks of class because I am hoping to create a discussion on what good grammar really is. Danticat's novel plays with the structure of traditional English, and might be a little awkward to a first time reader. Also, since, based off my interviews with students in the English 100 class I observed, students seem to fear grammar the most, I was hoping to alleviate their fears early on and de-emphasize grammar in the class. By reading the book with mini-class lectures on concepts discussed in the chapters, students will learn that grammar is important to succeed in this type of a society, but is not the end all of how writing should always be structured. Meanwhile, many of the essays I assign from our main textbook will deal with cultural and social issues raised in some of Danticat's short stories. As Villanueva states:
Our books [will] demonstrate the lives and ideas of people different from ourselves and many of our students are not to be ‘appreciated' but to be engaged, wrestled with. Our classrooms can be comfortable environments, but the issues might not be all that comfortable…Authority concerns keeping the course moving, not knowing most about writing, or racism, or about classicism, or about gender, or about any of the many other issues that should arise in an active classroom. (100)
Depending on how well the class is dealing with the issues raised, I will lighten some of the class load or readings, especially since I want to do a lot of in class peer reviews and brainstorming. Overall, though, I think the class is well-balanced and will give students an opportunity to look at how communities have shaped their existence. Depending upon how comfortable I get teaching this course, I would like to eventually include Susan some explorations of Susan Bennett's autoethnography workshop. For further information on this concept, please visit my autobiography section.
Works Cited
Roen, Duane, Veronica Pantoja, Lauren Yena, Susan K. Miller, and Eric Waggoner, eds. Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002.