College-Level+Writing

Get stuff together for your section of the handout. Write one or two sentence starters about your section.
 * HOMEWORK:**


 * TIMELINE FOR HANDOUT**

By midnight on Sunday - post what you want on the handout 250 words maximum. (bullet points, paragraphs, whatever you think is appropriate.) Monday night - 9:00 p.m. Aylen will send out copies of handout for review By noon on Tuesday - e-mail back any feedback to Aylen about handout. Aylen will photocopy handouts for class.


 * PRESENTATION AGENDA**

3 minutes - Sentence Starter Activity. Each person in class gets the beginning of a sentence and has to finish the sentence out loud for the class. Here are the sentence starters:\ College level writing is..... I use/don't use the five paragraph essay with students because..... I approve/don't approve of homeschooling because.... College level thinking is.... Some pedagogical elements that constitute the college classroom are.... I think AP English course are an adequate/inadequate replacement for first year college writing courses because... My students' reading affects their writing because.... When I make a sandwich, I choose the __(inside/contents or bread) first.__

__Review of Sections (18 minutes):__ __Start with the theoretical framework / theory of literacy the whole section (or a particular chapter you want to focus on) features and then move into practice__ __Holly and Kim present Section One__ __Kristen and Becky present Section Two__ __Aylen presents Section Three__ __Elizabeth presents Section Four__ __Kristen and Becky present Section Five__

__Questions and Answers with class (if time allows)__

__**--HANDOUT BLURBS (Post yours here!):**__

**//How do we introduce our students to “academic writing”?//**
 * //Organic Literacy (Holly)__//**
 * **//Blau suggests using a workshop that allows students’ literacy within a discipline to grow organically. He does this by giving students only necessary instruction as an introduction to a genre and then allows them to process and consider what might be acceptable within that genre.//**
 * **//Blau’s method allows students to develop “as contributing members of a legitimate academic community” (49).//**

Mind the Gap: Private Pedagogy and Public Genre (Kim)


 * Kittle and Ramay propose ideas in closing the gap between (private) classroom practices and the perceptions of our students' work, whether judged by our collegues or the general public (98)
 * By recognizing that 'academic' can have a pejorative connotation: elitist, irrelevant, unimportant, removed from real world concerns (99)
 * And challenging this perspective with pedagogical elements that include:
 * inherent engagement of public discourse, with writers addressing real problems for real audiences
 * encouraging academic skills necessary to read, research, and write about shared issues for the public
 * fostering an educational environment that not only values students' voices but provides public opportunity for those voices to be heard (101)
 * Accepting the "belief that what makes our students' work increasingly compelling - its public nature - is also essential to bridging the problem of defensiveness in our own profession" (116)


 * Teaching Underprepared Students (Aylen)**


 * Smith maintains that it's not the conventions (or grammatical usage) that qualifies a student's writing as "college level" -- it's the type of thinking the student is doing THROUGH the writing that makes him or her at college-level. It's the thinking that matters, not the writing.


 * Given this, she says that many developmental writing students ARE at college-level, since they are thinking critically and deeply and performing all the thinking patterns that students who are in "college level" classes are doing.


 * Also, she says that we should not discuss "college level" as one level, but as a set of changing levels, or at least "college entry level" and "college exit level." The performance levels of students should change throughout their college careers, after all!

___ Becky: Sentence Starters:

We can transfer writing from academic settings to the workplace by …. Genre knowledge is important because ….

Breaking Away from or Building on the Five-Paragraph Essay (Kristen) Edward M. White
 * Section II: The Importance of Writing Assignments**
 * The five-paragraph essay stifles the development of writers.
 * We should approach how we teach it for what it is, a way to pass essay tests. After mastering that, we need to teach them to be writers.

Alfredao Celedon Lujan
 * The five-paragraph essay is what teach and use to assess, but our texts use five-paragraph essays that are sometimes forty-two paragraphs long.
 * From an identity literacy theory perspective, Lujan claims that from the time students walk into his class their “paper has been in process their whole lives” (143) because as they are experiencing life they are developing their perspective, voice, and story.
 * Lujan proposes the student start by gathering the inside of a sandwich and build out from there because the five-paragraph essay does not promote creativity and reflection. Instead, the students feel compelled to follow a formula that they won’t necessarily use later.

Chapter 9: “What is College-Level Writing? The View from a Community College Writing Center” ~ Howard Tinberg

“Hybrid Literacy” – Transferring knowledge from the classroom to the workplace (Becky)
 * “Hybrid Literacy”: exposure to the forms of written and spoken communication available in the professional setting while requiring students to demonstrate competence in standard academic prose (171).


 * How do we, as teachers, help students transfer their writing skills from the classroom into the workplace?


 * 1) Introduce a wide range of genres
 * 2) Topics should be designed to bridge academic prose with workplace literacy
 * 3) Link the assignments to the objectives of the course (175)


 * How do we write assignments that encourage this “hybrid literacy?”

College-Level Writing and the Liberal Arts Tradition by Edward M. White (Kristen)
 * 1) Genre exploration, especially genres not found in the classroom
 * 2) Research relying on original sources
 * 3) The creation of a realistic reader or audience
 * 4) A functionality in the writing that transcends the giving and getting of grades
 * 5) The possibility of an authoritative writerly self in whom we have every reason to believe and not merely to judge. (181)
 * Section V: Ideas, Observations, and Suggestions from Our Respondents**
 * “What characteristics clearly must be present in writing for us to call it college level?” (296).
 * Students are uncomfortable in the realm of the liberal arts tradition.
 * In college, students are just learning how to use sources to support their ideas, so if they are not able to make assertions because they have not developed as writers, they fall back on what they did in high school: summarizing and/or plagiarizing.

Chapter 17: “Responding Forward” ~ Kathleen Blake Yancey


 * Process is important in all levels of writing
 * Process connects high school and college level writing
 * Although the culture of high school and college is different, this book hopes to ask implicitly how we can all move forward //together.//

//What Is College-Level Writing vol. 2// //Eds: Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, Sheridan Blau//

Theoretical implications or issues raised by the text ; Best practices and what literacies are involved with them


 * Section I: Crossing Institutional Boundaries: High School and College**

[|Chapters 1-3 Notes]

Chapter Three Advanced Placement English and College Composition: "Can't We All Get Along?"

David Jolliffe maintains hat a good AP Program provides English instruction taht emphasizes "the close analysis of the rhtorical effectiveness of texts, the production of rhetorically effectiveargumentative essays, and the incorporation of texts in source-based synthesis essays." Jolliffee is positioning rhetorical literacy, critical literacy, and information literacy as the foundation of what can be expected of college level writing students. He also says " such a curriculum is a vast improvement over the one that emphasizes canonical literary history, repeated practice in New Critical close reading, and isolate drill-based instruction in grammar." This positions cultural literacy and parts of functional literacy, used when filling out "drill-based" grammar worksheets, at the lower end of requirements for college level writing. 68

Chapter Four Advanced Placement English and College Composition: A Comparison of Writing at the High School and First Year College Levels Ronald Lunsford, John Kisler, Deborah Coxwell-Teague

This chapter has a portion of it devoted to "literacy narratives". The assignment of a literacy narrative resembled the literacy memoir we completed in this course. The contributors talk about the relevance of such an assignment in high school/college class, stating that specific writing or reading prompts do not always lead the student to reflect deeply and critically on specific issues. 92.93 They lso discuss the difference in assessment of college level writing and high school writing. This is actaully discussed through out the book, but here it is understood to be the difference between acceptable college level material which would merit college credit and material that is not reflective of college level writing; lack of imagery, lack of reflection, lack of personification.

Chapter Five Minding the Gaps: public Genre and Academic Writing Peter KIttle, Rochelle Ramay

In this chapter the contributors talk about "real" writing and liken it to a Newsweek column entitled "My Turn" which is a weekly guest column. This notion that the first step in the process of writing is reading is cuted on page 106. "In most school genre assignments, these questions about readership are part of the instruction" (110) So literacy as it pertains to the act of reading is taught during first year writing in college but absent from higih school, where readinga ndw riting are kept exclusive.

Chapter Seven: My Five-Paragraph Theme Theme Edward M. White Without citing literacy theory, White discusses how the five-paragraph essay stifles the development of writers. He concedes that the five-paragraph essay is a great way for students to develop some sort of organizational structure but with that comes a student applying a formula rather than truly writing or more important becoming a writer.
 * Section II: The Importance of Writing Assignments**

He suggests that we have students “spend some time with narrative structures that respond to assignments calling for telling about a personal experience and what it means to the writer—and, possibly, the reader” (140). Through this approach the student should then be able to indicate the reasons in a more compelling manner. Other writing strategies should be mastered and incorporated too such as compare/contrast because at least this strategy would force the writer to consider more than just getting a good grade through illustration.

White is not suggesting that we abandon the five-paragraph essay. Instead we should approach how we teach it for what it is, a way to pass essay tests. After mastering that, we need to teach them to be writers.

Chapter Eight: The Thirty-Eight-or-So Five-Paragraph Essay (The Dagwood) Alfredao Celedon Lujan Lujan discusses how the five-paragraph essay is what teach and use to assess, but our texts use five-paragraph essays that are sometimes forty-two paragraphs long. From the time students walk into his class, Lujan reminds them their “paper has been in process their whole lives” (143) because as they are experiencing life they are developing their perspective, voice, and story.

Drawing on Vigotsky's "zone of proximal development" (142) and a Dagwood, "multilayered sandwiches that Dagwood Bumstead, from the comic strip //Blondie//, was fond of” (149), Lujan proposes the student start by gathering the inside of a sandwich and build out from there. Much like White, Lujan believes that the five-paragraph essay does not promote creativity and reflection. Instead, the students feel compelled to follow a formula that they won’t necessarily use later.

This pastiche does not adhere to one genre. Yet, ultimately it still has a “middle (of course), beginning, and end” (153). This assignment requires the student to reflect on what they have written or considered before and how it fits now. Lujan even includes a sample pastiche that includes an introduction of the author, actual quiz questions and answers from the course, lyrics, reflective journal entries and more. Of course, there was also a short concluding paragraph to signal the end and summarize the semester’s work. Honestly, the pastiche seemed quite disjointed.

Chapter Nine: "The View from a Community College Writing Center" Howard Tinberg

This chapter talks about what the others call "Hybrid Literacy," which is defined as "exposure to the forms of written and spoken communication available in the professional setting while requiring students to demonstrate competence in standard academic prose" (171). In other words, this chapter talks about how communitiy college hope to provide students with preparation in their writing for not just their time in college, but into the workplace as well. The authors note: "It is possible to write well in school and in the workplace, simultaneously ... The possibilities start with an assignment that encourages (1) genre exploration, especially genres not found in the classroom; (2) reserach relying on original souraces; (3) the creation of a realistic reader or audience; (4) a functionality in the writing that transcends the giving and getting of grades; and (which follows from all these components) (5) the possibility of an authoritative writerly self in whom we have evert reason to believe and not merely to judge" (181).

Chapter Ten: "Assignments from Hell: The View from the Writing Center" Muriel Harris

This section discusses what I believe to be "assignment literacy." Students are unable to meet the requirements of the assignment because they are not clear on what they are being asked to do. Sometimes this means that students haven’t learned how to read and interpret the assignments, but often times it is because the assignment is not well constructed.

In an effort to try to make our assignments more clear, we need to think about our assignments in different ways. “Students care about their grades, and giving them understandable, concrete criteria, as complete as possible within reasonable limits, can result in papers more consciously aimed at the effective, clear, literate prose we are trying to help them learn to write” (188).

“As we create assignments, we can recognize that there are hurdles, mistakes, omissions, lack of clarity, and mistaken assumptions that we are all prone to, which can result in papers we don’t want to read and students don’t want to write” (200).


 * Section III: College-Level Writing and the Basic Writing Classroom**

Chapter 11: " 'Botched Performances': Rising to the Challenge of Teaching Our Underprepared Students" Cheryl Hogue Smith

In this chapter, Smith disputes the idea that "basic" or "developmental" writers are, simply by falling into that category, not performing at college level. She maintains that it is not the conventions (or grammatical usage) that qualifies a student's writing as "college level" -- but rather, the type of thinking the student is doing through this writing that makes him or her at college-level. She also clarifies that there are two types of "college level": entrance level and exit level. What we see from students entering college should be different than what they're up to when they exit college, specifically.

Chapter 12: "What Can We Learn about "College-Level" Writing from Basic Writing Students? The Importance of Reading" Patrick Sullivan

The thesis that Sullivan runs from in this chapter is that a student cannot be a college-level writer without being a college-level reader and without using the advanced strategies that college reading requires.He attributes many of the problems instructors see with writing as actually being reading problems - an inability to read carefully, thoughtfully, and analytically, and then to write about those reading tasks. Reading is often ignored by college writing teachers (as well as high school English teachers who believe that students already know "how to read" once they arrive in ninth grade), but Sullivan argues that this is where our work should begin.

Chapter Sixteen: College-Level Writing and the Liberal Arts Tradition by Edward M. White
 * Section V: Ideas, Observations, and Suggestions from Our Respondents**

First, White acknowledges that college-level writing is sometimes and sometimes not happening in college. And sometimes it’s happening in high school. White challenges the readers of this book to truly consider “What characteristics clearly must be present in writing for us to call it college level?” (296). It's not just or always in a college classroom.

He claims that college students “fail to write college-level papers because that they have nothing to say, particularly when they stand in the shadows of their sources” (296). In college, students are just learning how to use sources to support their ideas, so if they are not able to make assertions because they have not developed as writers, they fall back on what they did in high school: summarizing and/or plagiarizing.

Finally, White discusses how because high school learning is test-focused, writing assignments are more clear. When students finally get to college with college-writing rooted in liberal arts tradition, they are challenged to “move out of their comfort zone into new ways of thinking about complex matters” ( 298).

Chapter 17: "Responding Forward" by: Kathleen Blake Yancey

Yancey takes the opportunity in this chapter to look at how all of the pieces in this work connect. She used a wordle to see the points of agreement and the most prominent terms are: writing, students,. school, college, and essay. Yet, "writing process" is only used four times in this compilation, so Yancey looks at how "process" is used throughout the book. And, she looks at if it is a central term between college and high school. What Yancey gathers is, "Our writing cultures in high school and college are different, as the volume here shows us, although we share an abiding faith in processes of all kinds and a commitment to help students develop those processes" (309). She goes on to point out that "As this volume shows, however, the high school and college writing cultures are different, and in making those differences visible and articulate, this collection has also made them available for discussion ... this volumet implicity asks us how we might move forward //together"// (309).