Instructor: D’Orazio
M 4:00PM – 6:50 PM
This course is designed to provide future educators of writing and English with theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and practical frameworks for teaching composition in secondary education settings and beyond. We are pursuing careers that are likely to place us in the classroom, and so this class will focus on two core units related to teaching others to write: 1.) First, we will explore theories that might come to inform your teaching. We will investigate theory related to literacy and what it means, historically and currently, for students to be “literate,” the ethical implications of literacy and teaching when working with diverse student populations, and the various issues of access within educational systems. 2.) From there, we will move towards more practical methods in preparing you to teach writing courses. How do you build a writing assignment? How do you create ethical and fair assessment criteria for a subjective practice? How do you handle plagiarism in the classroom? Or AI? How do you teach source credibility in a post-truth world? These are the kinds of guiding questions that will inform the second half of our class.
One important detail to note about this class is that we will view writing as a process. Therefore, this class itself is very much a process-based class. In other words, this is not a lecture-based class. To successfully navigate such a class, we will be building on ideas from one assignment to the next. In addition, we will be working together to gain a deeper understanding of our own writing process by giving and receiving feedback from each other. This means we will draft our writing in stages and participate in various kinds of peer response/review, the kind of processes you might teach to your future students.