Curricular Thinking

Lately I've been thinking about the shape of MIAD's writing curriculum. For me, lately, it has seemed more of an inherited structure, a familiar holding pattern, rather than an exciting sequence. I think it's time to consider an overhaul.

Why do we offer 4 courses in writing? Well, we inherited 4 writing courses--in the past, it fit the college's scheduling structure. There were no full-time liberal studies faculty, and the part-time faculty was dominated by creative writers who were not trained in composition. So, naturally, we offered 2 advanced-level courses in creative writing to complement the two required freshmen courses in writing and literature. We also did this to fit the part-time faculty's experience: we had never considered a course in "composition" or non-fiction--we believed that courses in creative, or imaginative, writing would somehow complemented the learning happening throughout the majors. But the program was a bust. At best, the freshman writing sequence was a course in literary appreciation, a kind of sophomore level high school catch-all. The advanced creatuve writing invited students to spend 6 required credit hours writing poems and short stories, but the students were not committed and the courses were too often unchallening. There was very little learning going on, and the writing that resulted from any moment in the sequence was too often abyssmal.

To corrrect this, we made a programmatic shift in rigor and structure. We stopped offering creative writing and instead offered two advanced-level courses: Business and Prorfessional Writing and Senior Thesis. We shifted the 2nd required freshman course to the sophomore year and shifted our focus from litery appreciation to a composition sequence that stresses reading and research and analysis.

We also added full-time faculty in writing and have made signicant changes in the hiring of part-time faculty.

What has been the result of this programmatic shift?

--There is more rigor in the writing courses. Our emphasis on writing makes our institution unique.

--Students are writing college-level texts.

--Students are able to meet the writing standards that we set in several forms: inquiry-based writing; analysis; professsional research; and a creative, investigative trhesis.

The trouble is, we are victims of our own success. Now all students complete the same sequence of courses, the same asssignments, and many of the strategies and techniques that they learn in their writing classes are mimicked in other courses, so that the freshness of what we offer is diminished.

We have created a cadre of students who can do what we ask: successfully complete the 4-course sequence, but they have not, as writers, stretched themselves, nor their ideas, in any form outside of this four course sequence. Pound's isistence to "make it new" is missing. We are replicating thee same kinds of products without any thought to why we are doing this. Why should every writing assignment result in an essay?

Students' writing is limited largely, although not entirely, to essays, familiar academic products. And therefore their thinking is often limited to what they tyhink we want when we ask them to write an essay.

But writing is growing. Digital technologies offer multiple opportunities to present writing for new purposes and audiences. The explosion of formal and informal writing sitauations (from websites and interactive media to blogs and instant messsaging) is still unfolding, yet most of our writing pedagogy has remained faithful to the essay, the traditional academic, expository "paper." Ironically, our students are coming to us having experience with a variety of writing sitautons, but we are not meeting them halfway in our writing classrooms. While the academic paper is a powerful instrument from presenting ideas in a particular form, it seems to reduce thinking to specific shapes and purposes: contradiction, multiple perspectives, and multiple, even competing ideas and experiences are not open for consideration. Discontinuity is not offered.

So, the questiuon becomes, how do we reshape our writing currciculum to met our students' needs? How do we identify our students' writing needs, and then, how do we transform that into a viable curricuum? How do we prepare teachers to teach this curriculum? What do we want out students to be able to do, and how can we assess this so that they grow, that our courses grow, and that we, as faculty, grow?

It's time for a revolution in our thinking!