All Workshop courses lead students into and through a multitude of theory-building activities and use discourse as the medium of inquiry as well as the substance of it. Discourse also serves many functions in Workshop classes. Writing assignments that appear to be typical personal experience essays are part of the basis upon which students build, collectively and individually, the theories they pose.
Classes are often noisy, busy, unruly, and thus a-typical of college classrooms.
This course sequence is modeled on the basic reading and writing course taught at the University of Pittsburgh. Instead, however of merely expecting students to perform the abstract tasks of reading and writing. These courses. . . In place for a number of years, this course sequence has undergone several formal and informal revisions. In Winter 1993, Amy Goodburn interviewed teachers to collect information about the variety of ways of teaching English 109.01 and 109.02 as they existed then.