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Teaching Philosophy

Philosophical Premises Behind College Writing

Every curriculum, particularly one with as many sections as College Writing, needs to be guided by an overall philosophy that defines the instruction given in the course. While you will have considerable flexibility in how you teach 112, the Program operates through a common understanding of how writing works and how people learn to write. This understanding guides instruction in all sections of the course.

The philosophical premises underlying College Writing may be different from those underlying other writing courses or programs that you’re familiar with. In other courses, for example, writing may be approached mainly as a matter of grammar, with students learning the rules and application of standard linguistic forms; or it may be seen more as an art, mysterious and ineffable, with the focus on personal expression; or it may be tied to literature, with students learning to write by reading the writing of others. Writing may also be seen as essentially formulaic, a matter of filling new content into prescribed formats, or as subordinated to “content,” with the emphasis on some theme or subject matter and writing secondary to that.

We approach writing, rather, through a series of linked principles that highlight not just its importance and power but also its diversity, complexity, and thoughtfulness:

Writing differs according to the contexts writers find themselves in, the audiences they engage, and the purposes they pursue, including personal, academic, professional, civic, and creative purposes.
Writing is fundamentally a series of choices (regarding ideas, organization, style, etc.) that writers make in response to the contexts, audiences, and purposes that call it forth (and which writing itself helps create).
Writing is a recursive process of continual revision, reflection, and response from others. ·
Writing exists to be read, and thus writers must also be readers—of other texts, of contexts, of culture—in order to read their own texts and assess their effects on potential readers.

These principles encapsulate our belief that “good writing” can never be defined outside of context, and that writing emerges not only from the self (i.e., what I want to write about) but also from external influences that prompt (even require) one to write. If writing always emerges from context, the choices a writer makes about how to form a text also emerge in response to that context: the audience’s expectations, the writer’s own goals, the topic taken up, the style used. Thus, how “good” a text is can only be evaluated according to context and the situated choices the writer makes in that context. For instance, does the purpose fit the occasion? Are the ideas organized so that the audience can follow them? Is the level of support appropriate for this situation? Rather than teaching writing as a matter of “rules” about how to produce specific forms, we treat writing as a process involving choices made in response to context.

To become more effective writers, then, students need to become more aware of the rhetorical contexts they find themselves in and learn to ask good questions and make thoughtful choices in response to those contexts. Revision is the way writers ensure they are making effective choices.

Through revision, students can also use writing to analyze their own thinking. Revising, in short, refers not only to changes in the text, but to a writer’s own position within society. In many cases, writers become attached to the ideas and meanings of the texts they produce, often seeking to reproduce their already fixed thinking for new audiences. This investment produces hesitancy toward revision because writers often fear that change will distort their meaning. Thus, in encouraging and teaching revision, we teach students not only to revise their texts to communicate more effectively but also to revise their ideas.

Through revision, we demonstrate how writing can be a process of re-evaluating one’s position in the world—a primary goal of undergraduate general education. By putting their thinking into new contexts, writers are encouraged to reflect on their own expectations and beliefs as well as the cultural expectations and beliefs of their audience.

Our hope is that, through this process, students can recognize writing as a powerful cultural act which can be used both to meet their own purposes and to effect change in the world around them. They will begin to see how writing can serve not only academic and professional goals but also personal, cultural, and civic ones as well.

In keeping with this emphasis on context, audience, and purpose, each assignment in College Writing is structured around and/or invokes a particular rhetorical situation, a social matrix that includes the writer, the audience, the topic or subject matter, prior texts and discourses, and the occasions that bring all these components together. Our role as teachers, then, becomes helping students examine how such situations define the range of choices available to them in terms of genre, organization, style, etc. Such analysis involves understanding both the rhetorical context itself and the contexts students bring with them to the writing process.

More than a simple accommodation to context, writing involves the ability to adapt or change the expectations of an audience in order to meet one’s own purpose. In this way, we presume that writers are given some degree of power over the ways they might respond to particular rhetorical situations. Academic contexts, for example, prescribe a certain set of norms that student writers must learn to reproduce. But writing in this context is not completely controlled by such norms. Instead, such contexts embody particular assumptions that an audience will bring to a text—expectations about purpose, genre, development—which a writer needs to understand but not necessarily reproduce.

Depending on the writer’s purpose, the choices he or she makes in this context may also include attempts to alter the audience’s expectations rather than simply accede to them. Thus, while much of this course focuses on making the expectations of context apparent to beginning college writers, we also focus on how writers’ own experiences, knowledge, and desires interact with such contexts. The goal, in short, is to offer students a range of choices in how a text might be produced in a given context.

This is where the focus on writing as a recursive process of drafting, revision, reflection, and response connects to the more rhetorical understanding of writing as a series of choices undertaken through critical reading of texts and contexts. Through the writing process, writers develop purposes that are their own. But by constantly considering and reconsidering context and audience, those purposes may themselves change. Invention and drafting become ways of “re-seeing” one’s own positions in light of local contexts, putting the writing subject at the center of how context is negotiated.

Assumptions about Teaching and Learning

All the courses we teach in the Writing Program are based on the same assumptions:

Writing is primarily an activity and not a subject;
People learn to write by writing and by receiving feedback on their writing;
Writers need to become aware of their own writing processes;
Students’ own writing should be the focus of the course.

As a result, we presume that students best learn the rhetorical concepts described above through practice.

In order for students to grow and develop as writers, they need to occupy the role of writer. By acting like writers, doing the kinds of things writers do, our students face the choices and decisions that assist in their ongoing development. Through drafting, response, and continual reflection about the choices made at each point, the curriculum enables students to “think like writers” whose texts emerge out of complex practical situations.

Direct instruction—“this is the best way to write X”—rarely occurs; rather, teachers present choices by exposing students to multiple ways to develop, organize, research, and adapt their ideas with the goal of helping them decide on their own what will work best to meet their purposes for a certain context. It is in the actual work of writing—in the nitty-gritty of drafting and revision—where the primary work of the course occurs.

Our role as teachers, then, is to guide students through these choices by helping them not only assess the expectations of a given context but also by helping them develop a larger repertoire of “tools” (genres, styles, etc.) that they can draw on in the diverse contexts they will encounter. We function as more experienced writers who can guide students through the process of making such choices, helping to make apparent the kinds of thinking processes writers go through as they decide how to form a text and revise it to meet both their own goals and their audience’s needs. In this way we can help students develop “metaknowledge” about their own writing. Metaknowledge (i.e., the ability to articulate why one makes the choices one does) is developed slowly and generated continually through reflection on specific practices rather than overt instruction.

Because our courses focus on the activity of writing, you may need to adopt a teaching style that is somewhat different from the styles you have observed or practiced in the past. The composing process is at the center; the teacher is not. The teacher’s function is to keep the students writing and re-writing, to help them become aware of their own writing processes and of the choices available to them in a variety of writing situations. This is not always easy; but, from our perspective, when the class is busy writing, revising, and editing, things are going well.

Because Basic and College Writing are activity courses, students may also need to adjust to new learning styles and demands. We expect them to spend at least ten hours a week on coursework, including scheduled class meetings, assigned work, and conferences.

Course Goals

The course syllabus presents the main goal of College Writing as helping students develop their writing abilities—not only for university writing assignments but also for writing effectively in other parts of their lives. In trying to realize this goal, it is neither possible nor fruitful to give students practice in all the genres they will encounter in college and beyond: e.g., a history term paper, an engineering lab report, a job application, or a résumé. Some of these, in fact, are the province of the Junior Year Writing Program.

Instead, College Writing aims to give students occasion to work on writing that presents a range of broadly applicable intellectual and composing challenges and, in so doing, to help them develop as writers. Those challenges include writing to accomplish various purposes—for example, to render experience, to interpret, to explain, to persuade—for various audiences. Those challenges also include being able to make meaning and compose from various sources, including one’s own experience and knowledge as well as new knowledge gleaned from reading, observing, and listening to others. Most fundamentally, those challenges involve the ability to link personal interests with those of a more public audience in order to accomplish one’s purposes in writing.

Thus, College Writing aims to teach students to make informed choices about their writing processes and final written products. Our assumption is that by modeling the process and choice-making strategies within the contexts we set up in the syllabus, students will be able to apply these ways of thinking to future writing situations. Thus, the writing assignments included in the curriculum focus on educated audiences both inside and outside the academy. The assignments help students use academic writing strategies and skills to write to more public audiences for non-academic purposes.

Translated into more specific objectives, we hope that our students will develop their abilities to

enact writing’s multiple possibilities for fulfilling personal and communicative goals;
compose essays using various lines of development;
use the writing process as a way of extending thinking, of stepping outside personal presumptions and assumptions;
interpret particulars, move between particulars and generalizations, and develop ideas more fully;
compose in structures and styles appropriate to particular audiences, being aware that audience expectations and the conventions of writing vary from context to context;
recognize textual conventions and use those conventions (or change them) to meet their purposes;
choose from a larger repertoire of the options writers have at their disposal to respond to writing situations;
understand text in the broadest sense, including genre options, purposes for writing, and possibilities for reading the world;
better assess the choices made in their own texts by responding to others’ texts in process;
revise their drafts to attend to concerns about development, organization, style, voice, and audience; and
discover what processes work best for their own writing.

Finally, and more generally, we hope that students will feel that writing is a medium they can use for personal and public purposes to gain understanding, create particular effects, and communicate with others.

The Teaching Philosophy in Practice

The writing our students engage in through the semester varies in source material, aims and audiences, ways of developing an essay, and the stance they define for themselves toward their readers and their material.

Students might draw on their own experiences and memories to write a personal reflective essay with their peers as readers. Their aim could be to evoke the feeling of a given experience and make some meaning of it for their readers. They might draw on their observations of people around them to write an essay interpreting something about how people interact. Their audience again might be their peers, aiming to give them an insight into human nature and social conventions. They might use something they have read as a starting point for an essay reflecting on a contemporary issue such as gender inequalities in school and work. They might draw on a particular expertise they have and write an explanatory essay to inform readers about the pleasures and challenges of deep sea diving, various types of rap music, or the role of computers in education. For such essays, they might imagine writing for readers of specific newspapers or magazines. Or, they might write to formulate for themselves and their readers an interpretation of the meaning of a public event, or to persuade readers of a particular view on a public issue. Again, sources could include readings, observations, and their own experiences.

To achieve such breadth, some teachers allow students to choose their own subjects; others assign them. The only constant is that the “prompt” for writing should always reflect a given unit’s common goals and include a specified context and audience, whether that context is made part of the assignment or developed by the student as part of the writing process.

Most of us move between the extremes: for instance, initiating an activity in class that would lead students to write persuasive essays unconfined to any one particular topic, or, alternatively, introducing a general topic to be explored and presented in a mode of each student’s choosing. An assigned topic often lends itself more easily to class interaction; open topics allow each student to discover a center of interest.

Whatever way you choose, you will want to address both the predictable needs of relatively inexperienced writers and the individual and idiosyncratic needs of each writer. Our experience tells us that the student writers in your section will be a diverse group. They will vary, for instance, in their past writing experience, their confidence in themselves as writers, their methods of composing, their willingness to revise, and the apparent ease with which they write. Still, all will come with experiences and interests they can draw upon as writers.

Types of writing assignments and exercises will be suggested in workshops offered by the Writing Program staff and will also be discussed in Course Director meetings. The Teacher’s Resource Database, the Writing Program’s online database, is an additional source for assignments. For most units, the database includes not only exercises but also sample assignments others have used as well as the types of generative writing and workshops designed for that assignment. Feel free to copy, adapt, or use these assignments and exercises as they fit your course design.

The best preparation for a writing class is to do the writing that you have assigned your students. When you have faced what the students face, you can coach them more easily and successfully. A given assignment has its own particular problems that you will, when you do it, solve in your own way. When you read your students’ writing from this perspective, you will see them solving the same problem. You will be able to suggest alternative solutions, structures, and approaches. Having written the assignment yourself, you are the expert, the coach.

Finally, Writing Program courses are neither literature courses nor creative writing workshops. They are expository writing courses, focused on the essay, with the students’ own writing the primary text of the course. Still, reading published texts from more experienced authors plays an important role in the course as students learn to read as writers. Students read such texts in order to begin their own essays and to help them re-imagine their ideas (for example, in Unit I). In other units, reading serves as the source for a response and a way of investigating what others have said on a topic to better understand the context of their own writing. Still other uses include reading for source information and reading to understand and evaluate the choices other writers have made given their contexts.

Just as the purposes for reading as a writer are varied, so should the texts students read. Other Words: A Writer’s Reader provides a range of essays that can be used for many purposes. By varying the sorts of materials you introduce to prompt and/or focus the students’ writing, you help them become aware of the multitude of writing types and occasions open to them as writers. In the same way, while the writing your students do will be almost exclusively expository, generative writing in other genres may be helpful in meeting the course’s objectives.