|
Inventing the First Seminar | Writing Vision Statement | On Being a Student
First Seminar Lessons Learned (March 2005) | Writing Workshops for Faculty (Spring 2005)
Since SAGES itself is continually evolving and changing, this page has been composed in the progressive tense. We expect to add lessons learned and best practices as the program develops. Please feel free to send your comments or suggestions to writing@case.edu.
Inventing First Seminar
Molly Berger & Chalet Seidel are sharing their exciting ideas about designing their First Seminar on the SAGES Wiki. You are invited to log in and share your experiences.
Back to the Top
SAGES Writing Vision Statement
SAGES encourages faculty and students to affirm the importance of writing across the undergraduate curriculum, and to make thoughtful engagement with writing—especially persuasive, expository writing—a priority in every classroom. We do not regard writing as merely an ancillary skill, incidental to the primary intellectual work of the seminar. Instead, we see it as an intellectual activity in its own right—one that requires clarity of presentation, linguistic resourcefulness, and the exercise of reflective judgment.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of SAGES, we want our students to recognize that no single combination of attributes constitutes "good writing" in every situation or for every audience. As a result of their seminar experience, we hope that these students will notice and value the deliberate choices that writers make in response to social contexts and disciplinary expectations. One of the goals of writing instruction in SAGES is to provide students with the background and skills to make such choices in their own work.
As a result of their high school writing experiences, many students assume that good writing is primarily a matter of correctness. They expect their teachers to point out their mistakes in spelling and punctuation, mark sentence fragments, and send them to a thesaurus if they make an error in word choice.
We agree that correctness is important: if an essay is filled with errors, then readers may have difficulty following its argument or accepting the writer’s authority. For this reason, we are committed to assessing our students’ command of grammar and usage, and to providing the classroom and tutorial instruction they need to become proficient in the mechanics of written English. We do not expect students to produce error-free first drafts. We do expect them to acquire the knowledge and working habits necessary to correct and improve their drafts, both independently and in consultation with more experienced writers.
Yet success in college writing obviously extends beyond mechanical correctness. It requires students to develop their powers of analysis and reflection; to define a compelling purpose for everything they write; and to build coherent arguments without remaining caught within the rigid framework of the five-paragraph essay. As our students grapple with complex ideas, their writing may temporarily fall below their usual standard; the technical proficiency that they ordinarily display may falter as they direct their cognitive energies elsewhere. But as these students become conversant with the patterns of thought and expression in their chosen fields, and as they become increasingly resourceful editors, they can achieve new clarity and sophistication in their writing.
Above all, SAGES seeks to cultivate the habits of mind that lead to successful writing. Expert writers produce clean, consistent, and persuasive prose, but they also learn to stretch their thinking, seek advice, and incorporate new ideas. We want our graduates to become citizens who can enter into (and sometimes transform) the terms of debate in the world beyond the classroom; whose ongoing engagement with writing informs their intellectual and professional lives; and whose practical knowledge of the writer’s craft makes them discerning readers. In all of these ways, our students will experience and demonstrate the centrality of writing to the life of the mind.
Back to the Top
On Being a Student
In his Fall 2000 Convocation speech, Case's Ted Gup, Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism, gave students advice about their academic careers. "Be a real rebel--a thought rebel" he writes. "Question, critique, accept nothing at face value. Lies and half-truths have a way of surviving only where complacency thrives" (4). He has given his permission to use the text of his speech in SAGES courses.
Back to the Top
March 2005 - First Seminar Lessons Learned
March 10, 2005
Dear Colleagues,
Recently, members of the First Seminar Committee and several of the program's co-instructors met to discuss the specific challenges of teaching writing in First Seminars. This letter summarizes their conversation. It will serve, we hope, as a useful supplement to the course template, putting into general circulation some of the ideas and teaching strategies that have emerged during SAGES' pilot phase.
I. First Principles
What essential concepts about writing do we want First Seminar students to grasp? Darcy Brandel opened the discussion by saying that her consistent theme is purpose. "We are trying to get students who are coming from high school to understand that they need to have a purpose beyond 'I've been assigned a paper.' They have to care, invest something in the paper, prompt the reader to feel that there is something at stake." Accordingly, the question she continually asks students about their writing is, "So what?" What is the argument here? Why does it matter?
There was considerable talk about why students often lack a sense of purpose in their writing. Like Darcy, Brad Ricca thinks that many students emerge from high school -- even from excellent high schools -- without developing a voice of their own or a commitment to critical thinking. Their command of rhetorical structure may not extend beyond the five-paragraph essay. Their ideal of formal English may be corrupted by a body of nonsensical rules (don’t begin a sentence with the word “but”). Even worse, they may expect to be rewarded simply for telling their teachers what they want to hear. As a result, when some of our first-year students sit down to write, "they turn their brains off. They're fulfilling an obligation. They don't think of themselves as writers."
Then, too, as Alan Rocke and Roy Ritzmann noted, some students believe that writing skills are irrelevant to success in their chosen careers. ("I'm going to be a big-shot lawyer," the logic goes. "I'm going to have a secretary.") Thus, we have to be prepared when students challenge us with the question, "So what?" Why should I care about learning to write?
In Alan's view, SAGES can offer a distinctive answer to this question by presenting writing as central to the intellectual work of the seminar. Students often assume that scholars and scientists regard writing as a second-order skill -- that the real work occurs in the laboratory and the archive, and that writing up the results is a mere afterthought. But in fact, "writing is part of the process, part of the investigation; the very act of writing creates new ideas and makes new connections." This is one reason to incorporate a variety of writing activities -- including response journals, e-mails, and blogs -- into First Seminars. By such means, we teach students that writing is a way of generating and furthering thought, and not merely of recording what thought has already conceived.
First Seminars can also begin to redeem writing for our students by making it a topic for inquiry and reflection. The co-instructors mentioned several assignments that serve this purpose. Early in the term, for example, Brad has given students a quotation from a course reading and asked them to write about how it affects their understanding of the whole. The seemingly straightforward task of answering a question -- "The answer is your paper" -- is difficult for some students: they may fail to address the quotation, or even to talk about the book at all. But the discipline and skills associated with textual analysis -- engaging responsibly with the material, demonstrating comprehension, and offering original interpretations -- are essential to seminar discussions, and so it makes sense to inculcate them as early as possible in the writing component of the course.
Such analysis (the co-instructors went on to say) will often have as much to do with style as with content. What audience did the writer have in mind, and what rhetorical choices did awareness of that audience inspire? Why does an essay begin or end as it does? In "An Anthropologist on Mars," what image of himself does Oliver Sacks knowingly project, and how does this image influence our perception of his cases? By explicating selected passages, or by reading and writing full-scale book reviews (Narcisz Fejes' suggestion), students begin exploring questions of rhetorical design and acquiring a vocabulary for assessing writing. Then they are ready to reflect on their own expository strategies.
In this connection, Darcy spoke of having her students write assessments of their First Seminar papers, analyzing and defending the rhetorical decisions they made with respect to audience and subject. Sometimes, students will say, in the midst of this process, "I never realized I did these things." But as they gain in self-consciousness, they become increasingly resourceful at writing effectively in different situations.
II. Implications
When we treat writing, above all, as an intellectual activity, does this mean that we no longer care so much about the mechanics of writing? Certainly one of the ways to enhance writing's prestige is to shift the conversation from comma placement and paragraph structure to the mind on fire. But within the SAGES community -- and even within the psyches of individual members of that community -- there is considerable ambivalence on this point.
In a follow-up note to our discussion, Brad recalled that when he taught with Alan Rocke last fall, they set aside time ("at his urging, not mine") for lessons in sentence structure, paragraph boundaries, and transitions. "We did this in little chunks before or after seminar discussion, in connection with [Joseph Williams's] "Style" book. We found that it went much easier in portions as opposed to whole class periods." Moreover, instruction in the fundamentals "produced immediate results." The wishful assumption that students have already learned the basics invariably comes to grief. Which is why Roy Ritzmann keeps telling us: When you find that your students don't know something -- how to read a graph, how to write a topic sentence -- there's no time for lament or indignation; instead, just summon all available resources to teach it to them.
Three other significant implications followed from the first principles outlined above.
A. Faculty Interviews. According to the co-instructors, the papers that come out of the faculty interview assignment in First Seminar tend to be lacking in purpose: they are often descriptions or narratives that fail to engage significant issues from the seminar itself. In contrast, Narcisz recalled a First Seminar in which students conducted their interviews and wrote their papers only after reading Stephen Toulmin's "Cosmopolis," which explores the relationship between the humanities and the sciences. Toulmin's book gave the students "an agenda, a background," Narcisz said. "When they were writing the papers, they had an argument; there was an overarching purpose to the piece." Any number of other readings could serve a similar purpose for this assignment.
B. Revision. Alan said of his students, "In my experience, they never do revisions. They don't know this is how one writes." In part, this problem is traceable to the working habits of college students, who tend to write their papers at 2 in the morning. But as Mano Singham has pointed out in other contexts, it is possible to design seminars in ways that encourage revision. Strategies include scheduling intensive peer editing workshops and setting successive deadlines for drafts or sections of a major paper.
C. A Culture of Writing. Everyone in this small discussion group liked the idea of reinstituting monthly meetings of First Seminar instructors, where writing (among other subjects) could be a topic of conversation. Everyone favored establishing lines of communication between First Seminar and University Seminar instructors, so that teachers at each level would know where their students have been, in terms of writing, and where they are headed. And everyone agreed that providing enhanced support for student writers and teachers of writing is critically important. I hope that these notes will help document, and contribute to, an evolving culture of writing in SAGES.
Thanks,
Arthur
Back to the Top
Spring 2005 Writing Workshops for Faculty
Coming soon.
Back to the Top |
