Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Tue, 22 Dec 1992 00:06:00 EST
From:         MLB14@PSUVM.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Standard English

Peg and Irv,

Thanks for the suggestions, which I will mull over a bit more.

To give a bit more background in which to place my question: I am charged
with "unifying" the composition program here at Penn State-Erie.  What I've
pretty much decided to do comes close to what you've suggested, Irv; the
students will write five short papers (a narrative, a character sketch, an
explanatory essay, an argument, and one of the instructor's choosing), the
topics for which will arise out of a set of thematically-developed readings.
(I piloted this syllabus this semester and chose readings related to
education.) The capstone project for the course is a research paper (of some
sort; there's a lot of latitude here.) We're going to use portfolio
assessment to do the grading.

Yawn, yawn.  I get bored just writing this all down.  Maybe I'm too young,
but I'd really like to do something much more exciting.  Like making all
freshman writing courses lab courses--have the whole shootin' match done by
means of tutorials.  Or making all freshman writing courses produce
something of worth for the college or surrounding community--promotional
materials, books for area schoolchildren, documentation for the library,
whatever.  But several problems arise with these schemes, not the least of
which is the question of motivation.  How do I get the other instructors
enthused about these kinds of projects (assuming that the administration
bought the ideas, which is a very big assumption)?  Is it even ethical to
think of requiring that kind of work from people who are mostly adjunct
faculty?

On the other hand, it doesn't seem ethical to construct a syllabus that
allows so little room for individual creativity.  I think this matter gets
right to the heart of the status of writing in the academy--if my
institution were serious about writing, they'd have more than one
tenure-track person in composition.  Of course, who has the money for that
kind of seriousness these days?  But if we rely on adjunct faculty to teach
writing, we have to respect that they're doing an awful lot of work for not
very much money, and try to keep the exploitation to a minimum.  What's the
balance between recognizing people's professionalism by giving them freedom
to design their own courses, and exploiting their energy by requiring them
to design their own courses?

One other point.  As I read these discussions, I'm struck by how we refer to
our students as if students everywhere are the same.  Seems to me we need to
start qualifying our observations about students--they're not the same here
as they are at Michigan State, where I did my degree, nor would I expect
them to be the same at Princeton or wherever.  Every institution--and every
section of every writing class within every institution--sets its own "norm"
for writing behavior at that time and place.  Maybe students' willingness to
learn our language, or to teach us theirs, depends as much on the school
they attend and the expectations they have as on anything we do to foster
the interaction.  Maybe we need (as a profession, not just here) to describe
our students a bit, so that others will know whether our "writing community"
matches up with theirs.


Marcy Bauman Penn State-Erie
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU