Parts II and III:  Core and Elective Course Descriptions

Parts II  and III of Coming of Age present essays that describe, theorize, and reflect upon an advanced writing course the author has taught (and would like to teach again).  In the introduction, Rebecca Moore Howard writes that the editors saw a pattern emerge from these essays that suggested to them the three primary goals of an advanced undergraduate writing curriculum.  The essays are presented in categories reflecting these goals: “Preparing Students for Participation in the Discipline of Writing Studies,” “Preparing Students for Participation in the Profession of Writing,” and “Preparing Students for Participation in Public Writing."   Part II presents “core” courses in each “field,” and Part III the "elective" courses.  While each of these essays describes a thoughtful course with theoretically-grounded, pedagogically-sound goals, the organization of essays into three content areas is less than satisfactory, as is the distinction between "core" (which appear in full text in the book) and "elective" courses (which appear in full text only on the CD-ROM).


Preparing Students for Participation in the Discipline of Writing Studies

The courses described in this section are identified by the editors as courses that prepare students for participation in “the Discipline of Writing Studies.”  They make writing the explicit subject-area of study, approaching it in specific historically, culturally, and politically situated contexts.

Core Courses
In “Histories of Writing and Contemporary Authorship” Andrea Lunsford describes a core course about the history of writing and authorship that proposes and attempts to answer questions such as, “What is writing, where does it come from, and what does it mean—on many levels—to write?  How can writing work to both oppress and liberate people?” and “What rights and duties accompany various acts of writing?” (58).  The course assignments give students the opportunity to enact the core issues and then reflect upon them. A collaborative assignment, for example, provides first-hand experience for discussions about issues of ownership and authorship.

In “Theories of Composing,” Sandra Jamieson provides a rationale for teaching undergraduate writing theory.  Jamieson provides a detailed overview of a course that asks students to apply writing theory (from current traditional rhetoric to social constructionism) to the act of composing.  She states that the benefit of exposure to such theories is that students gain a more complex understanding of the nature of writing and develop a more sophisticated understanding of themselves as writers and their own writing process.

Gail Stygall describes a course in “Discourse Studies” that gives students an understanding of rhetoric through the primary research of a discourse situation.  Through their research and writing, students learn to analyze the way discourse functions in constructing subject positions and persuading our understanding ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Elective Courses in the Discipline of Writing Studies
In “The Rhetoric of Gender as Advanced Writing,” Mary R. Lamb describes a course that attempts to give students “a deeper understanding of how gender and sexuality are constituted through language.”

Arthur E. Walzer and David Beard outline a course that investigates the rhetorical theory of Artistotle, Cicero, Campbell, and Burke.  In their essay “Rhetorical Theory: Major Figures in the Aristotelian Tradition,” they describe the issues guiding the study of these theoretical perspectives--the relationship between words and things, the epistemic role of language, and the ethical relationship between rhetor and audience.

Deepika Bahri’s essay “What We Teach When We Teach the Postcolonial” argues for the value of examining postcolonial material in the advanced writing classroom.  She suggests that postcolonial material “demands” closer, more careful examination of the conditions of production and reception.  Thus, its study presents students with unique opportunities to analyze ideology, the relationship between texts and their historical context, and the material conditions of production.

Dennis Baron’s course “Literacy and Technology” sets its primary goal as providing students with a sense of how technologies affect the ways they read and write.  Among the topics addressed in the course are “the information glut; class, gender, and literacy; the apparent decline in literacy; the development of virtual genres; and the emergence of a transnational web culture.”

In “Below the Surface: A True-to-Life Course in Editorial Practice,” Chris M. Anson discusses a course in editorial practice that brings composition theories about the nature of error into the classroom.  Students are asked to think about error as a social construction, rather than as “universal, systemic, and inviolable.”

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Computers and Communication” course “is organized around four ‘moments’ in computers and communication: communication as articulation/connection, communication as the fluid blending of multiple media, on-line communication as a social activity, and technology as politics.”  Examining the relationship between these four moments, students consider writing as an act of “articulation” rather than an act of individual genius and examine the way “technologies and cultures interlock in relations of unequal power.”


Preparing Students for Participation in the Profession of Writing

The courses described in this section are identified by the editors as courses that prepare students for participation in the profession of writing.

Core Courses
In “More Than a Matter of Form: Genre and Writing,” Kathleen Blake Yancey describes a series of innovative assignments that helps students assess genre and rhetorical situation.  Identifying the ability to “work with and work in diverse voices” as a primary goal of undergraduate writing courses, Yancey asks students take a writing topic through a number of genres and different rhetorical situations and then reflect upon the way genre and rhetorical situation influence the writing and, consequently, the meaning that is created (91).  Following Donald Schon’s methodology, students “work in context with others, then review, reflect, and theorize” (92).

In her essay “Style, Race, Culture, Context,” Rebecca Moore Howard makes explicit from the beginning that good usage and clarity derive from standard, privileged registers and preclude the use of vernacular or slang.  Thus, she concludes that “the language of Ebonics cannot be the vehicle of good style” (96).  Researching the etymology of African words that occur frequently in the English language, students gain an understanding of style as a cultural construction whose valuation has more to do with cultural values than abstract principles of clarity and correctness.

In “Theory of Visual Design,” John Trimbur theorizes how visual communication is taught throughout the curriculum.  Trimbur suggests that the justification for focusing upon visual communication in professional writing courses seems to be utilitarian, in that visual design is viewed primarily as a skill students will need in the workplace.  Conversely, he suggests that in the introductory writing classroom, visual design is often discussed in order to teach students to decode the visual so that they are not duped by it or to teach students to disregard the visual so that they can improve their print literacy.  Trimbur wants to join these two purposes—production and criticism—in his advanced course so that students are "both critical participants in visual culture and designers of visual messages” (110).

Elective Courses in the The Profession of Writing
Mary M. Lay’s “Technical Communication” emphasizes the social construction of knowledge in the workplace.  Lay writes that she combines a prescriptive and heuristic pedagogy in order to prepare students for workplace writing.

While cultural studies is often introduced in the first year composition classroom, in “Cultural Studies: The Rhetoric of Everyday Texts,” Diana George explains that the advanced writing course addresses more complex issues in cultural studies and examines the theories guiding its study. Like many of the other authors discussing themes and issues often studied in first-year composition courses, George claims that the advanced course is able to pursue the issue in greater depth or context.

In “Taking the Rhetorical Turn in Advanced Creative Writing,” Mary Ann Cain and George Kalamaras describe an advanced creative writing workshop that emphasizes the classroom context in which student writing is discussed, interpreted, and assessed.  Additionally, students are encouraged to view their interpretation of texts as rhetorically-situated “arguments.”  Cain and Kalamaras suggest that the attention to metadiscursivity, argument, and the rhetorical situation lends a value to the course that extends beyond the act of creative writing, helping students to develop as “writers, readers, and, ultimately, citizens who occupy multiple roles and responsibilities.”

In “Writing About X: The Arts,” Joseph Trimmer describes a themed writing course that emphasizes visual communication.  In this essay, he describes a course that focuses upon the arts, but he explains that “X” can be any number of subjects.  In the sequence of writing assignments, students work in a sketch book, experimenting “with the relationship between image and word by expanding their drawings with textual montages and reshaping their written texts by weaving them around and through their drawings.”  They write a memoir, conduct interviews with members of the arts community, research an artistic controversy, and review an exhibit or performance.

In “Teaching Writing Like a Lawyer,” Richard Fulkerson outlines a course for pre-law majors that encourages students to “think like a lawyer.”  Fulkerson suggests that the writing assignments help students to “reason logically about the connection between a set of facts and a legal principle and write the results in a globally coherent, clear, and lawyerly manner.”

Libby Miles’ course in publishing allows students to actually set up and work in a small publications office.  Thus, they are able to experience first-hand many aspects of the “business” and issues surrounding such work.  Students handle budgets, do clerical work, and are exposed to issues such as “organizational hierarchies, internal politics, and corporate rhetorical situations” that lead to their research projects.  In her essay “Working in the Publishing Industries,” Miles describes the course as having the somewhat conflicting "purposes of preparing students for a publishing career, and providing the analytical framework to critique--and perhaps alter--their own actions within the context of capitalism.”


Preparing Students for Participation in Public Writing

The courses described in this section attempt to prepare students for public writing by exposing them to cultural difference, argumentation, and classical rhetoric.

Core Courses
In “Contrastive Rhetoric/Comparative Rhetoric,” Yameng Liu explains that a course in contrastive rhetoric allows students to assess the dominant rhetorical styles and compare them to other cultural styles.  Liu suggests that an understanding of the relationship between rhetoric and culture is essential to writers in a multicultural, global society.  In his essay, Liu is extremely attentive to the difficulties one faces when addressing such issues, such as the difficulty of representing "others" without essentializing and misrepresenting.

John C. Bean’s course in advanced argument negotiates modern and postmodern paradigms of argumentation.  In his essay “Seeking the Good: A Course in Advanced Argument,” Bean explains that he first relies both upon formalist methods of argumentation, such as logically driven claims and support, classical logical and oration.  He then introduces postmodern perspectives, “where truth is perspectival and evidence is constructed,” that disrupt the author’s authority and challenge the transparency of truth.

In “The History of Rhetoric,” Richard Leo Enos outlines a course that introduces students to the Greek oral tradition, looks at major rhetors (Plato to St. Augustine), and compares British and American rhetorical theory and traditions.  Enos specifies that a study of classical rhetoric encourages students to view language as social interaction that reflects cultural values, to view the writing of history as a rhetorical act, and to improve their own rhetorical style.

Elective Courses in Public Writing
In “Civic Literacy and Service Learning,” Bruce Herzberg traces the development of composition courses from gatekeepers of academic discourse to facilitators of civic rhetoric. He writes that “the move toward civic literacy fueled by service learning” responds to “demands for social relevance, public accountability, and community integration.”

In “Political Rhetoric and the Media,” Beverly Wall describes a course that assesses the way debates are argued and “won” in public arenas.  Wall writes, “If we want students to achieve civic literacy in a multimedia public world, then we need the help of rhetoric to reweave its oral, visual, and deliberative threads into our teaching of writing and critical thinking.”  In order to reconnect these rhetorical threads, Wall’s course brings Aristotle, Isocrates, and Cicero to bear upon public discourse and argumentation.

Valerie Balester approaches race and ethnicity in her advanced composition course in order to help students understand difference in language.  Students reflect on their own race and ethnicity, writing an ethnicity autobiography and researching another ethnicity.  In “Writing About Race and Ethnicity,” Balester argues that students “should consider how language other than semiformal, academic, standard English can be used strategically for many purposes, including establishing identity, showing solidarity, recording accurate speech, or expressing irony.”

Patricia Bizzell outlines a course that teaches “Writing as a Means of Social Change” by introducing a connected set of texts from “the contact zone.”  In her essay she describes one possible selection of texts in which antebellum American women's rights are articulated with African American rights.

In “Writing for and About Business and Nonprofit Organizations,” Kitty O. Locker describes a service-learning course which asks students to reflect on tolerance and difference in spoken and written communication.  Among the assignments is an exercise that asks students to locate and invite a consultant to help workers at a nonprofit organization deal with diversity.

H. Brooke Hessler's advanced community-engagement writing course focuses on the uses of rhetoric and writing for social change and also has a service learning component.  In her essay "Constructive Communication: Community-Engagement Writing," she explains that students work on a writing project "that contributes to the communication practices of a community, addressing such subjects as flaming on a community discussion board, the creation of a new forum for concerned citizens, or the use of reflective writing to train volunteers."


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