It's interesting to see the way that composition is integrated into the English department at Tech as a student who's not taught from the rhetorical stance before. We spoke in class today about the different ways that different institutions lay the groundwork for comp., I.E., what specific offshoot of the English department (if any) is in charge of the program. I realize now that Vanderbilt (the school I'm coming from as a masters students and a teacher) divides FYW among the disciplines. That is to say, English has a FYC, Medicine Health and Society has a FYC, Business has an FYC, and so on and so forth.
On the English end of things (I have experience with MHS, as well, but the course I taught was structured much like an English course), FYW is definitely bent toward literature and literary analysis. Within this, students have the opportunity to choose through which literary facet they want to get their FYW experience. 102W, for example, is a course on literary theory, but the underlying goal is composition. 116W (a course I taught a few times) was introduction to poetry. The challenge, however, was integrating the idea of training to write academically into what looks on paper like a survey course.
Something that I used to do a lot of, that I realize now perhaps taught some of the same sensitivity to rhetorical choices that I'm having my students look at through essays in 1301, was to not only examine essays on poetry, but to examine the poems themselves. That is to say, who is the audience of this poem? What is the argument? And how does the speaker effectively convey her standpoint? As a beginning exercise into looking a literature this way, I always spent the first day "exhausting" (my term) a short poem by looking very intensely at all aspects in order to gain the most understanding of why the poem is written in the form it appears instead of some other way (with different language, different formal decisions, etc.). I typically would use William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say." Students would get to see how in very few words, WCW masterfully creates a speaker and, maybe more importantly, an imagined audience about which, by examining the rhetoric of the piece, we can make a myriad of observations.
I wonder: has anyone else tried something like this? Granted, when it comes to developing the skills needed to write at the college level, there is no substitution for actual scholarly essays. But this always seemed to me a nice, compact way to introduce students to a sensitivity toward purpose and choices in writing.
Chad, I too found Chalice's discussion on Tuesday about FYC programs to be extremely enlightening. Ideally, I think first year composition should be tailored to the students' major, but this also puts a lot of pressure on deciding a major early on in your college career. It seems to me also that Texas Tech could not possibly do this with the rapid influx of undergraduates they receive. I personally think students should be given at least two years to decide on their desired major, but this flexibility cannot always be accommodated by the university.
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DeleteAbsolutely. Students need time to figure things out. I can't help but wonder, though, -- and this may be getting a bit off topic -- if the structure of the FYW program at Tech (and surely elsewhere) is doing a disservice to the English department's numbers, overall. The numbers of English majors are declining all across the country. Could it be that students who are first exposed to a tech comp and rhetoric based FYW (something that is self-described as necessary on an interdisciplinary level) as an "English" course are given a misleading glimpse at the field, and what many other classes in the discipline entail? It seems that the aesthetic (if not the ideological) rift between the motives of FYW and, say, a literature survey are too vast to assume that one gives any indication as to what the other looks like. And so, students who may have had some interest in literature develop in FYW the skill necessary to enter into the field of English, only to, ironically, become unfairly disillusioned to the actual dynamic nature of English studies.
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