Kath leen Blak e Ya nce y is Pearce Professor of English at Clemson University, where she directs the Roy and Marnie Pearce Center for Professional Communication and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and professional communication. Editor or author of six books and numerous articles and chapters, she chairs the College Section of NCTE and is vice-president of WPA. Her current interests include reflection as a means of enhancing learning; the design and uses of electronic portfolios; and ways of assessing digital texts.

Notes how early junior college compositionists sought to socialize a largely working-class student body into a middle-class sensibility. Argues that educators must make time to create historical narratives of two-year colleges as a valuable precursor to fighting for institutional reforms within institutions. Analyzes the manner that curriculum builders in the 1920s and 1930s constructed first-year writing courses at junior colleges.

Describes a class discussion in the author’s first-year composition class at a New York City community college, after students read a volume of Sappho’s poetry. Discusses issues of reading comprehension, poetry, gender-preference prejudice, and how they were all set straight by one student from Brooklyn.

Describes the design of a standard first-year composition class in which the author used online discussion forums. Discusses how these design choices helped create a dynamic community of readers, writers, and learners in a writing classroom. Discusses pedagogical goals, and course design. Discusses several reasons why this approach works so well, and offers some cautionary notes.

Describes a “distant service learning” unit in a first-year composition course in which students wrote for a nonprofit organization in the classroom. Discusses program activities in relation to the first-year composition curriculum, program activities and the nonprofit organization, classroom implementation and assessment (including scoring guide criteria), and assessing student impact and impact on the nonprofit organization.

Shares freshman-composition students’ stories about portfolio assessment (interviewing students at length three times during the semester), to examine ways students understand portfolios, how portfolios work, and why sometimes they do not. Suggests concerns relevant to implementing department-wide competency portfolios. Argues that community colleges may be better situated than large universities to reap the benefits of portfolios.

Offers seven brief descriptions of class projects and assignments used successfully in writing classes of all sorts, from first-year composition classes to business communication to computerized writing labs.

Marjorie Roemer, Lucille M. Schultz, Russel K. Durst, Reframing the Great Debate on First-Year Writing, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 3, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 377-392

Describes a vocabulary activity the author uses in first-year composition classes which is effective, interesting, and fun for students who write an ongoing serialized short story with required vocabulary words chosen weekly from assigned student readings.

Details a first-year college composition course that blends journalism instruction with first-year composition. Describes how students learn about news gathering and news writing techniques common to feature writing and complete a profile writing project which encourages a level of discourse that bears closer kinship to everyday workplace writing. Discusses course design, implementation, and evaluation.

Concentrates specifically on the experience of using “Maus” (a narrative in comic strip form) with one class which met in spring 1996, after the accidental killing of a Black child by a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights, New York. Uses the text at Medgar Evers College in a freshman composition course which also functions as an introduction to literature. Describes the classroom dynamics.

Shows how some key postmodern ideas about texts forced a teacher and her students to rethink typical writing assignments and typical student responses. Describes the assignments and considers how they invite postmodern critique. Suggests giving up grandiose, romantic notions that Freshman Composition can fix students either personally or politically.

Contends that service learning--community service linked to academic courses--adds a valuable experiential dimension to composition classes. Describes service learning at Raritan Valley Community College where in composition it fits as an optional alternative for the research paper assignment that is the culminating course project. Discusses how projects are developed and implemented.

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Discusses how to teach a first-year composition course, expository writing, required of most students at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Considers how to motivate students and help them to see connections between writing and their technical work. Offers various techniques for getting the students to write comfortably.

The inquiry posed two basic research questions: a) Could changes in student writing be tied to conferencing, and b) Could the status of the student (weaker or stronger student, native or non-native speaker) or the type of writing course (general freshman composition or specialized genre-specific course) be tied to any systematic differences in the conferencing process or its outcome? This study tracked the discourses generated by 4 teachers around a set of their teacher-student writing conferences. They collected copies of first drafts, tapes of their conferences, and copies of subsequent drafts from one stronger and one weaker student, for a total of 8 students and 32 texts. All students revised their papers in ways indicating that the conference had had an effect on their revision process. The findings indicate that what is ostensibly the “same” treatment does not generate the same response from all students. They also indicate that the divergent backgrounds students bring to instructional events have a structuring effect that cannot be dismissed solely as teacher bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

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This project investigated the effects of training for peer response in university freshman composition classes over the course of one 15-week semester. Eight sections of composition (total n = 169) participated. Students in the experimental group, composed of four sections, were trained via teacher-student conferences in which the teacher met students in groups of three to develop and practice strategies for peer response. Students in the control group, also four sections, received no systematic training aside from viewing a video example. The experimental and the control groups were compared with respect to the quantity and quality of feedback generated on peer writing as well as student interaction during peer response sessions. Analyses of data indicated that training students for peer response led to significantly more and significantly better-quality peer feedback and livelier discussion in the experimental group.

Persuasive/argumentativew riting is an importanta nd difficult mode of discourse for student writers. It is particularly problematic for non-native speakers, who often bring both linguistic and rhetorical deficits to the task of persuasion in English. This study analyzed 60 persuasive texts by university freshman composition students, half of whom were native speakers and half of whom were non-native speakers of English for 33 quantitative, topical structure, and rhetorical variables. The results showed clear differences between the essays of native and non-native speakers. These results and their implications for second language composition instruction are discussed.

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To understand the ways that teachers adapt writing instruction to a microcomputer classroom, the researchers observed and recorded activities minute-by-minute in four classes for a full semester of introductory composition. Two experienced teachers each taught two classes: one traditional class and one class that met for half of its time in a microcomputer classroom. This report contrasts their classes, calling attention to (a) the time pressures created by teaching with computers, (b) issues in training students to be proficient at word processing and revising, (c) ways a microcomputer classroom can foster workshop approaches to teaching writing, (d) the need for carefully structured classroom activities, and (e) the importance of teachers sharing with students common values for learning with computers in a group setting.

(1990). Cultural literacy, curricular reform, and freshman composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 270-278.

learning, one that will bring about changes in teaching as well as in student writing. We also need to establish quite clearly that WAC programs certainly do not exclude examinations and more coursework in writing as a means of establishing proficiency, but that WAC is not to be identified solely with writing proficiency. Finally, there is an issue not dealt with directly by my survey, but which has come up in anecdotal comments at the meetings of the National Network of Writing Across the Curriculum Programs and which deserves further study-the matter of change and faculty resistance to it. The idea and the practice of writing to learn goes against the predominant paradigm of education in the university, which valorizes the teacher-centered lecture class. In this paradigm, students are passive rather than active learners; they learn from the expert, not from each other. WAC programs challenge this notion of education, and those of us involved in such programs like to point to the successes we have had in changing faculty attitudes towards writing and learning (See Robert Weiss and Michael Peich, Attitude Change in a Cross-Disciplinary Writing Program, CCC 31 [Feb. 1980): 33-41). But changing attitudes and changing actual classroom practice may be two different things. Faculty resistance to change can be profound, as Deborah Swanson-Owens found in Identifying Natural Sources of Resistance (Research in the Teaching of English 20 [Feb. 1986): 69-97). Such resistance could, over a number of years, gradually wear away even the most firmly established institutional program. But I do not want to end on a negative note. While we need to be aware of the dangers that face the WAC movement in general and second-stage programs in particular, the survey results indicate cause for some cautious celebration. WAC as a movement is strong and is continuing to grow. It is up to all of us involved in such programs to be alert to the dangers, but also to be pleased that we have come this far.

Recent studies indicate that scientific research is part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. This article argues that since invention in scientific research is discovery of the unknown of the scientific community and invention in writing is discovery of ideas within existing knowledge, scientific research cannot be part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. Researchers should be aware that inventional heuristics introduced in freshman composition courses, which serve to discover ideas within existing knowledge, are not always applicable in real-life situations where scientific writing occurs, because the content of discourse is sometimes given in these situations.

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James Sledd, Sally Reagan, Reginald D. Clarke, A Comment on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge" and "A Polemical History of Freshman Composition in Our Time", College English, Vol. 49, No. 5 (Sep., 1987), pp. 585-593

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I am coming on my twentieth year of teaching composition to college freshmen, and my fifteenth administering a composition program. These anniversaries incite me to think about the circles we who teach writing have perambulated in that time-to count the ways we have, for worse and better, changed how we shape composition programs, how we manage those programs, and how we teach the courses in them. From the fifties through my days as a student and then as a new teacher, rhetoric-meaning the analysis and presentation of arguments-dominated college composition programs. But at many colleges then, the English requirement included a literature survey, and composition programs often and awkwardly stirred rhetoric and literature in one pot. For example, research papers were on literary topics, an approach that encouraged publishers to produce hundreds of excellent casebooks, all recycled long ago. The rhetorical lion and literary lamb did not get on amicably, however. They tussled. The lamb often turned wolfish. The experiential programs of the early seventies-with their emphasis on narration and description, on journal writing, on films and visual arts as aids to invention-were a victory for the literateurs, and their last hour. For then came graduate programs in composition, and the gospel of process was heard in the land. Rhetoric-now meaning heuristic strategies-ascended. Literature became, and has remained, a negligible part of most composition programs. And today, as the slogan Writing Across the Curriculum is blazoned on textbook covers and eagerly mouthed by deans who see a way to save a buck, literaturemeaning the study of fiction, drama, and perhaps even (though that's radical) poetry for their own sweet sakes-dwindles to a thin shade in freshman writing

Some of the attempts to establish what standards can define acceptable writing have resulted in the development of grading scales of one sort or another. The controversy about using grading scales to evaluate written composition has received much attention in research and in theory over the past 50 years, but the results of a survey of 600 members of the College Section of National Council of Teachers of English revealed that in the spring of 1984 only 45 or 11.6% of the 386 respondents actually used scales in their evaluations of freshman composition. The theoretical interest in these scales is apparently not matched by their use by teachers of freshman composition.