In addition to giving voice to the value of what we do in First Year Composition, Lee Ann Carroll, in Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers, draws on the full longitudinal
study of students at Pepperdine to make recommendations to improve composition programs. I found several useful reminders and some new ideas. Do these ring true to you?
- Think of student work as literacy tasks rather than merely assignments.
- Focus on students' writing differently rather than better.
- Audit the writing program to fill in gaps in literacy instruction.
- Provide a variety of writing opportunities and set them up so that students have to negotiate complex tasks, including ones that will lead to failure.
- Scaffold assignments.
- Teach discipline-specific research and writing skills.
- Design assignments that challenge all students, even if the final products are less than perfect.
- Use grading so as to award improvement.
- Schedule interim deadlines for longer projects.
- Require classroom workshops and teacher conferences.
- Determine whether "what the teacher wants" (students' perception of with writing is all about, in other words) is a match for what the discipline needs or should want.
I found the term "literacy tasks" very helpful, especially in light of Carroll's discussion that people would not be so quick to collapse writing down to competencies if they unpacked the number of literacy skills students have to have in order to complete a single paper for a discipline-specific course. She details how students' actual writing processes contrast to compositionists' understanding. What a good reality check!
If I really believe in the various components of the writing process, then I have to design courses so as to provide incentives to make students learn their value as well. At the same time, though, I really ought to be aware--and I should share that awareness with students--that there are many occasions where the process isn't appropriate in its traditional forms. Sometimes, there simply isn't the occasion for revision, for example.
Work Cited
Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 2002.
