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WPA-L November 2005 Part 4

‹ WPA-L November 2005 part 3 | List of November Messages | WPA-L November 2005 part 5 ›

Yes, what can transfer for students are

1. the awareness that being able to write well in one context does not guarantee the ability to write well in another;
2. the ability to recognize a “new” context; and
3. an understanding of a process whereby one can go about learning what needs to know to be able to write in the new context.

This kind of knowledge, along with general linguistic competence, is probably what most of us have acquired perhaps unsystematically through experience. The School House, as I recall, helps students learn what to look for in a new discourse arena, to build rhetorical awareness. If something like this is correct, what would it mean for the design of FYC courses?

I’m not optimistic that it can be done with first year students. I think they have to have experienced different disciplines, read bad writing in them, and to have done some writing of their own. Our LRS experience was that juniors, seniors, and graduate students) were the most receptive. That does not mean that a lot of groundwork can’t be done in FYC, but that requires a lot of coordination up and down.

As my spouse and others have said in this discussion, most first year students do not feel that they have anything to learn in a writing class. One of the things we COULD do for first year students is to help them come to understand

1. that they have a lot to learn about writing and
2. what it is that they have to learn.

They might learn, for example, the general principle that whatever they now can do in writing is limited in scope and will not serve for all of the occasions on which they will need to write in college and beyond. That would be a great revelation for many students. And then they could go through the process of expanding their rhetorico-linguistic inventory to complete projects that were initially beyond their scope in one way or another. There are issues of form, strategy, understanding, new or special language, sentence pattern inventory, etc.

It would be interesting if one of the outcomes of FYC would be for students to understand, to some degree, what they have yet to learn about writing, what they can do in writing and what they have yet to learn how to do.

The best thing that could happen to them [FYC students] would be to be assigned writing projects in other classes and then get a seriously critical response demonstrating how much they have to learn.

‹ WPA-L November 2005 part 3 | List of November Messages | WPA-L November 2005 part 5 ›