Rhetoric History and Theory | Research Colloquium
When I began my coursework at MSU in the fall, I was teaching at Alma again. This semester I taught two sections of English 100 and began my position as a Writing Center director. I had taught 100 the previous year, but at that time I was "given" the course at the last minute to replace someone else who had already ordered the books and designed the course, so I used her materials and tweaked them as best I could to make them work for me. I wished throughout the semester that I had taken the time to completely redesign the course, because it did not suit me well at all, nor did it suit my pedagogy. So this past semester when I designed the course, I started from scratch. Since it is a rhetoric course but is also meant to meet the needs of beginning writers, we spent most of the semester looking at rhetoric in contemporary society and the various ways we as Americans and consumers are persuaded by media, music, film and television. The semester was divided into two sections, the first guided and the second collaborative. They engaged in guided research, response, and analysis. The sample unit here is a multigenre unit, something I find is effective for beginning writers as they begin to work their way into academic writing: it gives them some confidence in genres they are familiar with while they are able to try new and more challenging genres in a safe environment. This semester was particularly encouraging as I saw greater changes in student writing than I had any semester previously, and many of these students are in my 101 classes now and are doing very well. The changes in readings and pedagogy seemed to make quite a difference, which testifies to the importance in having sound theory and planning carefully. What struck me, too, as I taught this course while taking my own coursework in the Rhetoric and Writing program was how valuable this kind of writing was for my 100 students: it helps them "invent the university" as Bartholomae discusses and also fits well with several theoretical frameworks, as you can see in my metacommentary below.