Rethinking The Academy:

Whether or Not Students Ought to be Allowed to Design Course Syllabi


Note: The following linear text was originally given as a presentation ("The Last Bastion: Student Self-Determination and the Making of a Syllabus") at the 1995 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Washington D.C. on March 25, 1995.


In the last decade or so, most teachers have opened their classrooms to student self-determination in very many ways. Most educators at least tolerate -- if not enjoy -- a great deal of student freedom and room for choice in the classroom through work in small groups, student-led discussions both in the traditional classroom and in the computer lab, self-selection of topics for papers, student-taught classes, etc.

But there is what can be called the last bastion: usually we still determine the contents of our syllabi. Though many of us do feel comfortable, I would propose, with allowing our students to make small-scale decisions (as in "What day would you like to do your presentation?" and "Who wants to go first?", and perhaps even "What do you want to do your paper on, Eve?"), I would suspect more than a few teachers might find themselves in agreement with my colleague who critiqued a student-determined syllabus I had prepared for a course in gay and lesbian culture (which I'll talk about later) by asking who I thought was the teacher for the course.

She believed I was abdicating my role as teacher simply by allowing students to choose the readings for the course though I had chosen the subject matter and even the text. But I would disagree with my colleague, as much as I respect her teaching and professionalism. My experience is that student-self determination opens up a class in a way I had not experienced before in my teaching, that students do more self-assigned reading than they did my teacher-centered reading, and that they read more carefully. Further, they seem to be more involved in both class discussion and in their own writing.

Today I'm going to discuss several of the syllabi I've used in the past in an attempt to begin developing both a philosophy and a rationale for student-determined course-content. I had hoped to talk about how new technologies would affect the creation of syllabi, especially in terms of how writing can be taught on and amongst the Internet, but I'll have to leave that for an expansion of this talk into a longer essay.

Instead, let me begin by talking about the syllabi for two courses I taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago: English 152, Introduction to English Composition, our so-called basic writing course, and English 161, English Composition II, our so-called research paper course. I'll also have to give you a sense of the institutional context in which the two courses exist, in order to talk sensibly about what happened in my classes. Though I enjoyed teaching 152 back in Fall Semester, 1994, I've only recently begun to realize just how teacher-centered the syllabus at the front of the packet I've handed out was, for I had believed until recently that it offered my students freedom in the way I am proposing in this talk. For 152, I required students to write no less than three four to five typed double-spaced pages on a topic of their own choice and then to pick two of those papers for rewriting and for expansion to a total of eight to ten pages, all in 15 weeks!

While you're looking over the materials, I'll give you the background. I promised earlier: 152 precedes the two composition courses required for all University of Illinois at Chicago students. Freshman at UIC end up in 152 as the result of a placement test in which they have to read a short selection of prose and write a brief essay that responds to a prompt given the students as they sit down to the test. There is no opportunity to take the placement essay home and revise it over a period of time; students who were preoccupied with personal affairs or ill the day of the test may end up in 152 as a result of poor performance on the test. Of course, many of our ESL students do not do at all well in the face of this kind of placement process and are put into a section of 152. In response to this situation, I tried to build a course that would allow students a great deal of freedom and this syllabus was the result. It wasn't until I completed the course that I realized just how closed and how instructor determined my open course in fact was.

Look at all the authority I did not relinquish -- I determined the number of assignments, the length of the assignments, the date they were due, the number of rewrites, the dates the rewrites were due, the number of papers that could be rewritten, the length of the rewritten papers, the percentage each paper was worth towards the final grade, the standards by which I evaluated the papers, the weight content held in that evaluation, the weight correctness held, the weight originality held, the penalties for a late paper being turned in late, the penalties for tardiness, the penalties for absence, even penalties for not speaking in class. Further, I told students that we would use group work to discuss the papers and the essays from our text, which I produced using Primis, which allows inclusion of material provided by the instructor. In this case, I used student essays written for an earlier section of our English 201, Introduction to Non-Fiction Prose.

Some of those requirements are very interesting given the student population taking the course: all but one of the students in that section were ESL. Think of what that means: only one of the students was from my own culture and could therefore understand the cultural position from which I created the course. I privileged creativity over invention in the classical sense of that term. As Rita Copeland puts it in her Rhetoric, Hermenutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, invention "has little to do with originality or with creation ex nihilio. In all of its theoretical avatars, invention is what Roland Barthes has aptly termed an 'extractive' operation" (151). But one of my students was Arabian and, as Ilona Leki has pointed out in Understanding ESL Writers, students from his culture are at a disadvantage in assignments that don't have an fixed topic because it is the development of an idea, the ability to play with it and expand on it that is judged as literate in his culture, not the ability to "do your own thinking" and "be creative" so privileged in ours. To sum up, the syllabus that I had thought of as so open was in fact very closed in terms of student tasks and expectations and not sensitive to the needs of writers from other cultures.

Now let us look at the second of the two syllabi I've provided in the handout: again, while you're looking over the syllabi for English 161, English Composition II, I'll attempt to put that course in institutional perspective. English Composition II is a course mainly taught by TA's and by instructors; we are encouraged to create special topics. Thus, these courses are content-driven. Of course, as at many institutions, the students are more concerned with meeting the requirements and progressing towards their degrees than with the subject area of any given course, so they register for sections that fit their schedule without noticing the focus for the course. Sometimes they are unaware that 161 generally has a topic. This means that as many as 90% of our students are surprised when the instructor announces the topic. With a controversial topic like my "Writing about Lesbian and Gay Culture," the surprise can be quite intense.

Again, since 161, like 152, is a required course, I wanted to give students as much say in the course as I could. In this case, I gave them a text, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, and the following framework: the students were required to design a five week unit for the course; their first writing assignment was a short proposal for the unit which consisted of a descriptive title, a summary of the goals and purposes for the unit, a list of the articles proposed for their reading list which had to come from at least two units of the reader, and one short writing assignment for each of the articles included in the unit. Students were then asked/required to bring five unsigned copies of their proposal to class and to go through a review process in five small groups. Each of the small groups would send two proposals for units to the rest of the class. These proposals could be the work of individual students as presented to the group and sent on without change, or could be proposals modified by the group from students' work, as the group desired. Each of the two units would culminate with a 4-6 page research paper on a specialized topic of the student's choice within the broader area of the unit's content area. That is, if a student was writing a paper for the unit on "Homophobia," she might choose to write about internalized homophobia, or analyze the assumptions behind the fear of openly gay and lesbian teachers in the classroom. Each student would then choose one of the two papers she'd developed during the class and expand it to a total of 8-10 pages with additional bibliographic resources.

Since there were five groups, there were a total of ten proposals; I gave photocopies of the ten proposals to the class and sent them home for the weekend. The next week, they worked together to winnow the ten selections to the two that we actually used. I relinquished my right to vote for any of the proposals on the grounds that doing so would be used as a clue by students to "give me what I wanted." In the process, my students chose one unit by a lesbian woman titled "Money, Power, and the Development of the Gay Community" and merged two of the units on "Homophobia," one by a straight-identified man, and one by a straight-identified woman, into one.

There were surprises for me: the best unit by far was by a gay man and was called "Sex." It was voted down, partially because it required a good deal of reading, partially because eight units needed to be eliminated; something had to give. I would have loved to teach that unit; I think the course was weaker for not using it. But I had given up my right to choose, and so it went by the wayside. Procedurally, there were surprises, too. When the students could not choose between the two units on "Homophobia" submitted by the small groups, they asked me to choose. When I refused, they made the decision to take the time and effort to merge the two into one unit. Interestingly, their decision serves as a prime example of collaborative effort, for the decision to merge the two units into one was done for the sake of the small groups. As one of the students reasoned, the small groups had done their job well and had picked out a good topic. This was evident from the fact that two of the groups had chosen the exact same theme; clearly, he argued, both of those groups had done a good job of reading the community of the classroom. And therefore, again, as this student argued, the good work of both groups should be honored by choosing elements from both units. This concern, an attempt to be sensitive to the effects of the class's collective power over various constituencies within the group, was central in helping these disparate students begin to come together as a community.

Now, to my mind, these two classes functioned very differently. The research paper course gave students less control over their selection of topics than the selection of topics available to writers in the first course I described -- but I picked the texts. In the case of the research paper course, I traded some student control over their own writing by narrowing the topic of the course to gay and lesbian issues for student control over an aspect of the classroom over which not one of my students had ever had any choice: what texts were to be taught. In doing so, I believe that I allowed my students to develop and change their own literacy. In 1982, Janet Emig addressed the Conference on College Composition and Communication in the keynote speech titled "Literacy and Freedom" (reprinted in her The Web of Meaning) with the following words: "Our view of literacy is grounded, as well as informed. We know that words are events affecting other events; and that if students are truly to learn to read and write, they must witness literacy making a difference, first to themselves, then to others" (175).

Student literacy, the ability to read, write, and think critically, and to make an argument in terms and though logical modes that are accepted by the academy must occur, though students must find ways of doing so that preserve their own ways of knowing. Whether we like it or not, they are in a power struggle with us and with the institutions to which we are beholden. One of the loci for that struggle is the choice of texts. We choose texts and make assignments and students resist us as teachers in a great and varied number of ways -- they forget the textbook at home, they thought they had to read essay x next week, they didn't know the paper was due this week, they sit silent in our discussions, they cut class, they attempt to distract us with irrelevant questions. On a computer network, there are even more opportunities to resist: they can flame each other, they can quote Grateful Dead lyrics, they can anonymously attack both the teacher and the other class members, they can play Flight Simulator and Tetris, they can bring down the system and interrupt class by deleting software from the hard drive, they can infect the system with viruses.

And why shouldn't they resist? We are telling them what to read, and how to write, often without giving them any reason why they should do so. So long as they recognize that we have the power, they can and will subvert that power in any way possible until we can find a way to negotiate new power structures.

So we -- and here by "we" I intend to mean both students and teachers -- must look for other ways to inscribe the power relationships that operate in the classroom. Where could we look for other roles? I would suggest feminism and collaborative ways of learning, which have so often been the work of women in the academy, and here I am indebted to Karen Gosselink, Tina Kazan, Cathy Colton, and most of all, Carrie Brekke, all of whom are my valued colleagues in our Writing Center, for modeling other ways of putting together a class, including the development of a syllabi by the class and the creation of individual syllabi for each student. As Angelika Bammer has written in her article, "Mastery," published in Hartman and Messer-Davidow's (En)Gendering Knowledge, "[w]e inevitably see from our own centers, from the categories that constitute the identities that we have learned to call our selves. Rejecting the perspectives of those men (and women) whose privileged positions blind them to the realties of gender, race, and class, feminists have insisted on the need not only to be conscious of these realities but also to understand the ways in which our affiliations, chosen or imposed, constitute significant differences among us" (245).

What am I proposing is that this feminist vision can, if taken to heart, make us wonder not only how to choose materials for and on behalf of our students, but even if we should do so. It is this increasing awareness of mine that my students know what they want out of a class and out of their education that drives this talk and my conviction that the work of creating a syllabus can be a corporate act undertaken by the community as a whole. And it is that act that allows me to differentiate between the two courses. The simple act -- if indeed it was simple -- of letting students create the specific reading list for the queer studies course means that they shaped their learning experience in ways I could not anticipate. And allowing students to choose readings goes beyond the act of letting students choose their own topics for writing because of the way we privilege other peoples' texts over the texts created by our students in the composition course. Elsewhere in "Literacy and Freedom," Emig argued "[t]he college classroom in English then is a hierarchy with four levels of written matter . . . [Lowest in this hierarchy] are student compositions, what students write . . . (173-174)." One way we can overturn that hierarchy is to let our students know that their writing does indeed matter, especially through self-publishing, but that is a topic for another paper. Allowing students to choose texts for their own purposes also upsets that hierarchy. If a student includes a particular essay in her proposal, is that reading important? Clearly it is: it has become a class reading. And how is it important? Let me repeat Emig's call to literacy once again because it is so important to hear what she said in San Francisco, in 1982: "[o]ur view of literacy is grounded, as well as informed. We know that words are events affecting other events, and that if students are truly to learn to read and write, they must witness literacy making a difference, first to themselves and then to others." It is for these reasons that the student-included essay and the student-centered syllabi are important: by making choices for themselves, the students decide what is important in the process of their literacy on any given subject.


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Last Modified: August 2, 1996

Copyright © 1996 by Keith Dorwick