Designing—and Sustaining— an Independent Writing Program

Designing—and Sustaining— an Independent Writing Program Joseph Harris, Director Center for Teaching, Learning, and Writing Duke University joseph.harris@duke.edu

The Problem • Faculty at Duke were convinced of need for writing to become a stronger part of the undergraduate curriculum, but . . . • Most were not interested in teaching writing themselves, and . . . • Many were concerned about loss of support for graduate TAs working in Writing Program

Lessons • A curriculum structures both student learning and faculty labor • Curricular reform must respond both to the needs of students and interests of faculty • “Who will teach this?” is as important a question to ask as “What needs to be taught?”

Response: Curriculum • Writing 20: Academic Writing Undergrads select a first-year writing course with disciplinary theme related to their interests. • Writing in the Disciplines (WID) Undergrads take two advanced courses focusing on uses of writing as a practice of inquiry in disciplines. • The Writing Studio Undergrads offered one-on-one help with writing for both first-year and WID courses.

Response: Labor • Writing 20: Academic Writing Taught by postdoctoral Mellon Writing Fellows, recruited from across the disciplines through a national search. Funded by tuition and foundation support. • Writing in the Disciplines Taught by faculty assisted by graduate TAs.Funding for TA lines linked to number of faculty teaching WID courses. • The Writing Studio Free one-on-one tutoring in writing for students in any undergrad course at Duke. Staffed by graduate TAs.

Writing 20:Academic Writing • First-year course required of all students, with no prerequisites and no exemptions. • Introduces students to practices of close reading and critical writing. • Limited to 12 students per section. • Sections listed by title, description and instructor on university web site, and thus selected by undergrads according to interests.

Writing 20: Course Goals • Read closely and critically • Respond to and make use of the work of others • Draft, revise, and edit texts • Make texts public

Writing 20: Natural Sciences Communicating Science to the Public The popularity of science magazines such as Science News, Scientific American, and Discovery has increased dramatically in recent years. Similarly, there has been a prolific increase in the quantity and popularity of book-length translations of science by such authors as Jane Goodall, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, and Carl Sagan. This increase in demand for scientific information begs the question: How is science communicated to the public? Specifically, how do writers present abstract or complex scientific subjects to a general audience? . . . . In this class, we will examine what happens to scientific information when it is prepared for and presented to a general audience. Can writers avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification and obfuscation? What changes occur in the language used and the assumptions made? . . . . Not only will students examine how published authors communicate science to the public, but they will also use their own writing to engage and inform audiences about an aspect of science that interests them. All students will publish at least one essay produced on the course web page located at http://www.science-writing.org.

Writing 20: Natural Sciences From Walking With Dinosaurs to The X-Files: Science in the Popular Media What do you know about dinosaurs? Asteroids? Viruses? Volcanoes? While scientists hope that people get this knowledge from textbooks, many of our perceptions of the natural world come from entertainment media sources . . . . To understand the role that science communication outside of scientific journals and textbooks plays in the formation of knowledge students in this course will read, view, and write about various entertainment texts. . . . . During the semester, students will explore the theme of science and entertainment media across different media formats, historical periods, and cultural contexts. Students will closely analyze entertainment texts in order to develop clearly reasoned argumentative essays about how the texts communicate science. Students will also work on a small “movie treatment” to explore the ways in which filmmakers and scientists must contend with the limitations and possibilities of communicating science through entertainment media.

Writing 20: Social Sciences The Spoken and the Written Word: What Is a "Language"? The Oakland School Board's decision in December of 1996 to label African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a separate language instead of a dialect of English disturbed many politicians and public figures. The Reverend Jesse Jackson called the move "an unacceptable surrender, borderlining on disgrace." The Clinton administration labeled AAVE a "non-standard form of English" rather than a "foreign language," as it might otherwise have been termed. These political positions tacitly rest on certain views about the nature of language. We will attempt to determine what those views are, and investigate them using the tools provided by theoretical linguistics. . . . How do we determine (politically, linguistically, ethically) which language is standard, and which is not? How are the structures of written and spoken language related? How are they importantly divergent? . . . Our first project will be an analysis of the different ways in which AAVE was defined during the Oakland School Board's debates. In the second project, we will use the techniques of sociolinguistics to analyze the distribution of information in the transcripts from the Oakland School Board hearing to determine how politicians and researchers make arguments. Finally, you will be asked to do a research project on the current state of English and the growing concern that it is declining as a language.

Writing 20: Social Sciences Claiming Citizenship: Belonging and Exclusion in America How does one claim citizenship? How have group classifications such as race, gender, class, sexuality, political beliefs, language, and religion affected a response to this question for varying groups at key moments in US history? . . . The methods of the course are collaborative and historical. As a group, you will first be asked to engage in the project of researching and identifying the key terms scholars, lawyers, state agents, activists, and others use to understand and define the category of citizenship. You will then be asked to use these terms and definitions in your own reading of several different kinds of citizenship documents, including history textbooks and monographs. In a second project, you will be asked to write an essay in which you develop your own definition of who belongs as a modern American citizen. For the final project, we will turn to the question of how those excluded from full citizenship have used writing to make demands for inclusion, or to forge alternative kinds of citizenship and membership. Students will work together to find and analyze sources, and to create a public venue for their findings.

Writing 20: Social Sciences America Without High School High School is an almost universal experience for Americans alive today; it is one of the predominant social institutions of the 2oth century . . . However, the current conception of high school is increasingly under criticism on several counts: that it is inherently biased and reinforces inequalities of race and class; that its scale allows too many students to remain anonymous and uncared for, that its uniformity prohibits students from learning their true interests . . . In this course you will read the work of many critics (and some supporters) of the modern American high school, in order to move from complaints to grounded concerns. You will create documents for use by other students in the course as you work to develop an co-author focused policy proposals that promote alternative methods of educating America’s teenagers. The proposals will be sent to Kenneth Jones, Program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “High Schools for the New Millennium” initiative.

Writing 20: Humanities Special Collections What do we treasure, and why? What do we hang on museum walls? Stash in Rubbermaid tubs in basements? What has been tucked in lockets or buried with pharaohs? As we explore an array of individual objects—from a Gutenberg Bible and a 1999 Delaware state quarter to Baltimore album quilts and a "guaranteed authentic" Velvet the Panther Beanie Baby with a tag protector—we will develop a complex and nuanced definition of value. During the second half of the course, we will turn to the practice of collecting itself. How are special collections defined, preserved, organized, and displayed? Here we will pursue our inquiry through primary research, as each student locates and writes about a specific collector and collection.

Writing 20: Humanities Writing About the Web Though the invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computer set the stage for its arrival, the Internet has revolutionized the world of communications as nothing before it. . . . . This course will take as its focus Web Studies, a still emerging field of scholarship, in order to examine and write analytical and argumentative essays about these implications. Writing assignments will be drawn from three broad areas: web life, arts and culture; web business; and global communities, politics and protest. The course also includes a hands-on component: students write, edit and publish the next issue of the online journal, Living in the Digital World: A Journal of Technology, Media Culture, located at http://www.duke.edu/~mepetit/DigitalWorld2002.

Writing 20: Humanities The Rhetoric of Justice: Academic Writing and Political Dissent Academics and intellectuals outside the university have often felt compelled to venture beyond the relatively self-contained environment of the world of letters into the broader and more concrete world of human affairs and the claims of justice. . . . In this course, we will examine various examples of writing that is both "academic" and "activist" in nature, including Plato's Apology, Engels' and Marx's Communist Manifesto, selections from The Collected Papers of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Steve Biko's Black Consciousness in South Africa, and Aung San Suu Kyi's "Freedom from Fear.” We will focus on the ways in which these authors put the values and conventions of scholarly discourse to work in service of their social and political agendas. Over the course of the semester, we will undertake various, interrelated reading and writing exercises culminating in the production of an academic text that offers a developed and sophisticated critique of one or another definite political structure or social practice.

Writing in the Disciplines • After passing Writing 20, students take two WID courses in which they learn to write as apprentice members of the various disciplines. • Over 200 new or redesigned courses emphasizing writing in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. • Most WID courses are seminars taught by full-time faculty assisted by graduate TAs. • Students keep an electronic portfolio documenting their development as writers at Duke.

WID Course Guidelines • Write frequently throughout the semester • Reflect on and improve their work as writers • Discuss the work they are doing as writers in class • Consider the roles and uses of writing in the discipline they are studying

Writing 20 and WID • Writing 20 draws on materials of disciplines to teach practices of close reading and critical writing • WID courses make use of writing as a means of inquiry to investigate issues in disciplines

The Writing Studio • A space for undergraduates to talk one-on-one with trained tutors about the writing they are doing for their courses at Duke • Students can consult online writing resources • Tutors trained to respond to needs of under-prepared and ESL writers • Central and satellite locations on both Duke campuses

Obstacles to Reform Faculty concerns: • Previous versions of first-year writing course at Duke had been failures • Support for TAs would be discontinued • Teaching writing was too labor-intensive

Responses • Recruit and train a professional cadre of postdoctoral fellows to teach first-year writing • Shift funding lines for graduate TAs in first-year writing to lines in support of WID courses • Offer faculty teaching WID courses the assistance of TAs and tutors in the Writing Studio

Sustaining Change • Recruit writing fellows in an open,rigorous, and wide-ranging search • Offer writing fellows ownership over courses and program • Offer ongoing support to fellows new to teaching writing • Insist on meaningful assessment of work of individual teachers and writing program

Recruiting Mellon Writing Fellows • Open search; no inside or guaranteed lines • Three- to five-year contracts, with competitive salary and benefits • Excellent teaching conditions (60 students per year) • Strong support for development of fellows as scholars and teachers • Multidisciplinary faculty for university-wide course

Writing Fellows as Colleagues • Fellows design own versions of Writing 20 in accordance with program goals • Fellows are renewed on basis of Teaching Portfolio that they construct to represent intellectual work as teachers • Fellows participate as full voting members at faculty meetings and on program committees • By-laws • Curriculum • Policies and Procedures • Search (5/7 members are Fellows)

The Writing Program as Multidisciplinary Site • Fellows have held PhDs in: African American Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, Biology, Communications, Cultural Studies, Economics, Education, Engineering, Epidemiology, Forestry, Genetics, History, Human Environments, Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Queer Studies, Religion, Rhetoric, Science Communications, Sociology, Theology, and Women’s Studies. • Common focus on academic writing as practice centering on close and responsive work with texts.

Supporting New Teachers • Summer Seminar in Teaching Writing Three-week August seminar for all first-year fellows; focus on writing course materials and responding towards revision • Mellon Symposia Series of events organized and led by Mellon Fellows addressing issues in teaching and scholarship • Mentors and Class Visits First-year fellows are paired with more experienced fellows and required both to observe classes of senior faculty or fellows and to have own classes observed by senior colleagues • Hallway conversations

Teaching Portfolios • Fellows are offered initial three-year contract, renewable for additional two years on basis of Second-Year Review of Teaching Portfolios • Portfolios must include: • Narrative overview of work and growth as teacher • Course materials (syllabi, assignments, handouts, etc.) • Student writings with teacher comments • Peer observations of teaching • Student evaluations of teaching

Program Assessment • Ongoing review of student course evaluations. Writing 20 consistently ranked as superior in: • Overall quality of instruction • Hours of work outside of class per week • Intellectual stimulation • Text-based, program-wide, comparison of early-and-late student essays showed overall gains in their abilities to criticize as well as restate work of other writers • Review of writing portfolios of minority students and athletes in process

Designing—and Sustaining— an Independent Writing Program