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English 114B Rationale

As I complete my first semester of teaching and prepare for my second semester, I feel
that I have a better idea of how I might achieve my goals for the 114B course. I have taken stock
of what worked and what did not work and it has helped me to focus my ambitions for the future.
Keeping all of these lessons from the previous semester in mind, I decided to build this coming
semester around one common theme, which I hope will create an engaging and meaningful
teaching experience.
I choose to organize my spring semester around a theme of identity formation. I picked
this theme with Kathleen Black Yanceys article, Attempting the Impossible: Designing a FirstYear Composition Course, in mind. Yancey argues that, validating students experience is a
key move in helping students learn (326). According to Yancey, moving students from the
familiar to the unfamiliar facilitates learning. I believe my class theme, identity, will allow
students to do just that. I have chosen readings the students can relate to and build upon, such as
Brent Staples article, Black Men in Public Spaces, which explores issues of identity, race, and
power. I think issues of identity are familiar to all students. I plan to begin by discussing what
has influenced their own identities, and then branch out into unfamiliar identity topics. I hope
that using this theme throughout the semester will help establish a fruitful classroom dialogue.
I will begin the semester with project space; we will explore how physical spaces
influence/shape identity. I planned this with, again, Yancey in mind. I plan to begin with several
readings to introduce the concepts, and then have students explore how different spaces have
influenced their identities. After this first assignment I will move onto argument based writing.
For project text, the class will read Passing by Nella Larson and they will be asked to write an
argumentative essay about a theme in the novel. The novel will fit well within the theme of

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identity as it centers on questions of identity formation, race, and power. The last project of the
semester will be heavily based in research. According to Yancey, though the research assignment
is really only exists in academia, it is still a valuable assignment: being able to identify evidence
and employ it to make a point is valuablewhether one is applying for a job, deciding on a
candidate to vote for, or writing ones way through college (331). I hope the students will learn
skills from this genre that will transfer beyond my classroom. For this final project, the students
will delve into the exciting new world of multimodal composition. This project will center
around the construction of online identities. After researching their specific topics, students will
create their own multimodal project as they build a website that combines text, images, and
video to present their argument about online identities. My hope is that the common theme will
make all the connections between these assignments clear, which will help students link concepts
from each project and build upon those ideas as the semester progresses.
Having a consistent theme to work with and taking a step-by-step approach to the
projects will also help students to build up gradually to the major essays. One of my major goals
is for my students to leave the class with the view that writing is a process. I drew from the Peter
Elbow school of thought when including freewrites and low-risk early draft writing. I also want
students to learn that writing is not a simple linear process. In Concepts in Composition, Irene
Clark states We know that this linear model of writing as a series of discrete stages does not
reflect what most writers actually do, because writers frequently discover and reconsider ideas
during, as well as before, they write, moving back and forth between the prewriting, writing, and
revision stages as the text emerges (8). I hope my students will gain this understanding of
writing. I have included many revision assignments, which support this view, such as: multiple

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drafts, function outlines, and peer reviews. I hope my syllabus reflects a philosophy of writing as
a process.
One way I hope to foster revision in my classroom is through whole-class workshops and
peer reviews. This technique will be helpful to the students and me. I adopted this technique
from The St Martins Guide to teaching Writing, by Cheryl Glenn and Melissa A. Goldwaithe.
According to Glenn and Goldwaithe, the whole class workshop can help to train students in the
peer review and revision processes. This previous semester, I found myself overwhelmed as I
tried to give each student detailed feedback on every draft they submitted. I soon realized that
that level of feedback will not be sustainable when I have multiple classes to teach. After
observing colleagues, and reading about whole-class workshops, I felt that this option would
allow students to learn about the revision process by observing and participating in it, and help
alleviate my workload. I will select a few students for each project whose work will serve as the
subject for the workshop. A few days before the workshop, the students will be required to
upload a polished draft of their essay onto Moodle. The rest of the class will be required to read
and respond to those essays. On the day of the workshop I will print the students Moodle
responses, so that I can prompt discussion.
In addition to whole-class workshops, I plan to include several peer review days. I started
doing peer review this past semester, and I ran into some difficultly in my first attempt. First, I
discussed and modeled a successful peer review strategy for the class. Next, I paired the students
up and had them trade papers. However, the feedback they gave each other was limited to
general statements such as, I like it and it flows well. I also found that they focused on
correcting each others grammar (often incorrectly). Despite my modeling, the students were not
making effective use of the time. I searched for answers and came across several solutions in

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Glenn and Goldthwaites St. Martins Guide. The first one I attempted was having the students
pair up and create a function outline of each others essays. This was an extremely helpful
lesson. The main benefit of this method of reviewing was that the students were able to identify
extraneous paragraphs in each others writing that did little to support their peers thesis. The
next peer review method I attempted was a worksheet with focused questions for the students to
answer about their peers essay. I used questions provided by Glenn and Goldthwaite to create
my own worksheet. I found both of these methods to be far more productive than my first
attempt at peer reviews. I will be using both again in the spring semester; I think they both teach
students valuable lessons about revision and the writing process.
Hand in hand with teaching revision as a part of the writing as a process, is teaching
genre awareness. I believe students can benefit from learning to identify various genres, their
functions, and the conventions of that genre. I plan to make genre an important part of the
coming semester. I drew heavily from Deborah Deans text Genre Theory, when considering
genre in my classroom. Dean writes that students often think there is only one correct way to
write, but genre can show them that writers must adapt writing to situations (5). This is an
important skill for students to learn not just for their 114B class, but for any writing they do in
their academic career. When students learn about genre, they also learn to identify the audience
and rhetorical situation.
My syllabus includes readings from a variety of genres that students will learn. Beyond
the traditional essay, we will also be looking at newer web based genres for the multimodal
project. In this way, I have modeled my multimodal course work after Erik Ellis course
described in Back to the Future? The Pedagogical Promise of the (Multimedia) Essay. Ellis
describes his course as beginning very traditionally, with print readings: First, students immerse

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themselves in the genre by reading, annotating, analyzing, and discussing a variety of exemplary
essays by professional and student writers as well as a handful of scholarly works about the
genre (38). After completing this step, Ellis has his student produce an essay in the traditional
print essay genre. They then transform that essay into a multimodal project. At this point the
students have studied the print and multimodal genres extensively. I have borrowed this same
genre approach for my own multimodal assignment. I believe, like Ellis, that the students
success often lies in their knowledge of that particular genre, and multimodal genres are no
different. Online genres change and evolve at a fast pace. It is not enough to simply teach the
students the genre of the blog because by the time they enter the work force, a whole new online
genre is likely to emerge. Hopefully teaching genre awareness will enable my students to assess
these knew and changing genres as they emerge on the web.
Taking the genre approach to teaching writing will not only help the students succeed at
the multimodal assignment, but will help the skills they learn in my class transfer to other types
of writing. Once they have genre awareness, they will be able to evaluate the rhetorical purpose
and the audience for each new genre they encounter. Irene Clark sums up this benefit of genre as:
this insight will enable students to abstract principles from one rhetorical situation and apply
them to other situationsthat is, to transfer knowledge from one genre to another (187). While
some scholars, such as Aviva Freedman argue against the explicit teaching of genre, I tend to
side with those who believe it to be useful. Kathleen Blake Yancey provides evidence to support
the effectiveness of explicit teaching when she cites studies that support the use of key terms as
was for students to create mental maps (324). Yancey lists rhetorical situation and genre
among the key terms she uses in her own classroom. Learning terms such as these is said to help
students create connections between the terms and the concepts, which helps students make the

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terms their own. I plan to take this same approach to the teaching of genre in my classroom. I
feel that this will help the students to transfer the skills they learn in my class to other types of
academic and professional writing situations.
At the end of the day, or rather the end of the assignment, the time must come for me to
evaluate and grade my students work. Going into 114A, this was the part of teaching I dreaded
the most. However, I have found several ways to make the experience valuable for the students
and myself. I have borrowed from many scholars when creating my own grading criteria, but
none so much as the great Peter Elbow. Elbow advocates for rubrics, and though I was skeptical
at first, I have come to see the usefulness of rubrics. In, Good Enough Evaluation: When is it
Feasible and When is Evaluation not Worth Having, Elbow writes: a rubric can be used by an
individual teacher, he or she can design it to fit his or her particular valuesand also create
different rubrics for different assignments that call for different textual strengths (308). Elbow
describes rubrics as more flexible and versatile than I had ever thought of them. He goes on to
point out the main benefit of rubrics, they give students the criteria for the assignment before the
turn it in (310). This is the feature of rubrics I have come to embrace the most. This past
semester I created several rubrics for my class, which the students used to evaluate their writing
before they submitted it to me. I found the self-evaluation created a level of meta-awareness in
the students. They seemed to view their writing different when evaluating it using the rubric, and
they were surprisingly honest about recognizing flaws in their own writing. I believe the rubric,
when paired with written feedback, ultimately produces stronger writing in the revised drafts. It
forces students to think critically about their own work and it gives specific, detailed instructor
feedback. After all, writing is a process.

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Over the past semester I continually reminded my students of the fact that even
professional writers must create multiple drafts before they publish a masterpiece. Above all
else, I hope my students will remember that fact and use it in their future writing endeavors.

Work Cited
Clark, Irene L. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. 2nd
Edition. Routledge Press. New York and London. 2012. Print.
Dean, Deborah. Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being. NCTE, 2008. Print.
Elbow, Peter. Good Enough Evaluation: When is it Feasible and When is Evaluation not Worth
Having. Writing Assessment in the 21st Century. Ed. Norbert Elliot and Les Perelman.
New York. 2012. Print
Ellis, Erik Back to the Future? The Pedagogical Promise of the (Multimedia) Essay.
Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres. Ed. Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus.
Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P., 2013. Print.
Glenn, Cheryl, and Goldthwaite, Melissa A. The Saint Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing.
Bedford St. Martin's Press; 7th Edition. New York. 2013. Print.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Attempting the Impossible: Designing a First Year Composition
Course. First Year Composition: From Theory to Practice. Ed. Deborah CoxwellTeague and Ronald F. Lunsford. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2014. Print.