Our texts need to be accessible, engaging, "meaty" and interpretable. Controversial arguments may foster good discussion, but we need to be moving our students beyond "debate" mode to discussion and writing that is more dialogic or dialectical. Keep purely informative readings to a minimum; do not use textbooks for this course. Do include texts whose medium is not words: visual art and sculpture, scientific experiments, artifacts of material culture and other "readable," interpretable objects of study.
Further advice on choosing course materials from veteran teachers of these courses:
"Unless every member of the teaching team can master a text sufficiently to lead a discussion, don't use it-and mastery does not mean learning to talk like an economist or a classicist or a physicist or a political theorist. We should be choosing readings that aim to have something to say to many people. Imaginative literature (novels, poems, plays, films, stories) is especially appropriate for these courses. Journal articles and conference papers are probably a bad idea, no matter how important we believe their arguments to be."
"It can be useful to include texts that are not the most polished, unassailable, or otherwise daunting pieces of writing, so that students will feel able to challenge and criticize them. If they feel they can find a way in and analyze a text critically, they can more readily develop their own voices as readers and writers. We are trying to promote critical but also open thinking; we want students to consider multiple perspectives and offer informed responses and analyses."
"accessibility is key; challenge is important; good writing tends to promote good writing..."
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"Lecture only as much as is necessary to stimulate a lively and challenging discussion."
"Our particular C Sem is divided among whole class discussions, small group discussions, and in class writing workshops. We lecture only briefly and on rare occasions."
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"Yes, but making noise without listening to others should not be rewarded. 'Listening,' in a metaphoric sense, is what we are trying to get students to do in their reading and writing; it should also be a dimension of their engagement in class discussion."
"Attendance at class meetings of our C Sem is required and 'active participation' contributes to students' grades. Active participation can take many forms, however; talking, taking notes, listening engagedly, seeking extra help, offering help to others in the class."
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"To make sense of the ideas, stories, arguments and images we encounter in readings and discussions. 'Making sense of' means explaining and connecting what we read and see and hear with our own response. This kind of writing is what allows us to enter the Grand Conversation that defines us as thinking human beings."
"The purpose of the writing is to give students the opportunity to respond in creative and critical ways to a variety of texts and to develop their own writing voices (a process inseparable from their development as thinkers, readers, and listeners). We want students to develop fluency with expected modes of academic discourse but also learn to be present, creative, and engaged."
"It seems that a majority of entering freshmen have learned to write the five-paragraph essay. I usually tell them that such a structure was one way to learn about organizing materials, but that it doesn't entail a developing argument, which is what I am asking them to produce."
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The best approach lies in between these extremes. It is important to have students take ownership of the assignment, but equally important to show them what counts as a good question or problem for a short paper. Assign the problem(s) or question(s), at least to begin with-and keep it short, or some students will follow your instructions seriatim to be sure of giving you "what you wanted." Quote a provocative sentence from the reading and ask a question about it; invite them to put two texts in dialogue. Avoid assignments that will give them carte blanche to surf the net for information and plug it into their own essay. Occasionally you might want to spend part of a class generating ideas for papers; or you can suggest students give you a topic proposal, so that you can comment before they go ahead with it.
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Make a schedule at the beginning of the semester that gives each student in C Sem 001 twenty minutes with you every other week. Sometimes it's good to talk about papers that have already been handed in; sometimes it's good to have a conference while the student is still struggling to work with the assignment or formulate a good question of her own.
"The conferences are a time for student and professor to focus on particular points or aspects of a student's work in the class. They represent an opportunity to take students' thinking, talking and writing to another level, beyond, perhaps, what they have achieved in their papers or in working with their peers."
"I've found that what works best is to focus on the broad structure of the paper we're discussing. We identify the central problem and the argument or route the student has taken to play it out and/or resolve it. If steps are missing, we discuss how to introduce them. If there's an opportunity, I'll raise potential objections or point out what needs to be clarified."
"I generally ask students to tell me what they want to work on, and then I offer my own perspective on what aspect of their participation in the class I think needs work."
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No. Research is discipline-specific, and should be taught in courses in the disciplines. The work of C Sems is to develop more general fluency in academic writing, not focus in on a particular discipline's set of conventions.
We do want to teach people to write 'dialogic' papers, ones that involve listening and engaging with the views of others. If 'research' is understood as the practice of looking for those interlocutory others, then we can and should encourage it-there is no reason why paper writing should be confined to the texts we assign for class. But it is important not simply to replicate the research paper experience many students have already had in high school, especially since the Internet makes 'research' easier and easier to do but harder and harder to do well."
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"Yes, but with two important caveats. Different disciplines have different conventions, so proper citation will have to be taught in disciplinary courses. And we cannot let the teaching of 'conventions'-whether of citation, research, or grammar and style-become the central work of these courses; if we do, we are giving up on the idea that our goal is to develop the capacity for reading and writing and thinking and talking about big questions. That has to come first; the C Sems are not 'service' courses."
"Faculty members have a responsibility to teach students how to document their sources in every course. Since this course is one that all students will take early in their career, and it is small, it is a particularly good spot to teach students how and when to credit sources in their writing and discussion. This can be done in the course of classroom lecture and discussion: students can hear faculty cite sources as they teach and faculty can highlight a text's use of other sources. Students need to know that faculty take these issues seriously, both in their own writing and in student assignments."
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[Here follows a range of approaches: we do it differently]
"Grading criteria should acknowledge growth and development as well as rewarding excellence in thinking and writing, and should include active participation in the course as well as timely, quality written work."
"There's more curiosity about this in C Sem 001 than in any other class, probably because the students are all freshmen. I don't grade on grammar, although I might if a student whose grammar was terrible did not take advantage of various resources available to improve her work."
"Grading every paper does give students some feedback on the quality of their writing. One can use a system that more heavily weights later papers."
"I have found that it is best not to grade the first paper, giving students a chance to learn what the expectations are for writing in the class and perhaps to take some risks early on."
"I don't put grades on the papers unless the grade falls below 2.7. I offer to give everyone a ballpark grade at mid-semester, but otherwise I grade a paper only if requested to do so. The students pay more attention to comments and suggestions when the grade is in abeyance."
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"Should the final grade reflect effort as well as quality? I don't see why not. We can arrive at the final grade on the basis of the quality of the work, but then use considerations like degree of progress or contribution to class discussion to adjust the final grade up or down."
"Breaking the overall grade down into components reflecting student progress, the weighted paper grade, and class discussion worked well for me. I found it helpful to have a final conference with each student to discuss how I arrived at her grade and what recommendations I might have for future work."
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Neither one.
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Writing assignments provide this incentive; use the papers to engage your students with the course readings. Tell them that class participation will count toward the final grade. Group work, if it is well managed, can also provide an incentive for students to prepare for class, since it involves them in discussion and collaboration with each other.
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1. In putting together a syllabus, because you will be collaborating with other colleagues, the line of least resistance may be to assign several short readings for the same class. This is a bad idea, unless the readings speak to each other.
2. Try not to change the syllabus radically as the semester goes on, since students may already have bought the books or be reading ahead.
3. Because coverage is not an issue in this course, give students the luxury that few other classes afford: time to read carefully and deeply rather than rush through lots of readings, time to explore ideas and rework papers. Less is more: assign from half to two?thirds of the reading you would assign at the 200?level.
4. It is tempting for professors, who have few opportunities to work together, to get excited about what we are learning from each other and forget that students are at a different place developmentally, and may have quite different interests and purposes. Keep the focus on the students and work on making the class theirs.
5. Consider requiring students to produce a portfolio at the end of the semester, especially in C Sem 001. This gives them the opportunity to reflect critically on their own development, to celebrate what they have accomplished, and to discern what they still need to work on.
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