LEARNER. TEACHER. WRITER.
ENGL 602: Teaching College
Composition
During my first semester of teaching, I took Teaching College Composition, taught by UofL's Composition Director, Dr. Brenda Brueggemann. All of the second year GTAs and some PhD students were in the course. We spent our time discussing the Student Learning Outcomes, research and strategies around those outcomes, and teaching a session of 602. We wrote weekly journals, designed a day of 602, wrote assignments and created schedules for ENGL 101, and made portfolios. Sections of my portfolio are included in this website.
You can find A Day in 602, which I wrote for our final portfolio, below.
Free Illustrations from Wix
A Day in 602
As part of our teacher training, new ENGL 101 GTAs participated in ENGL 602: Teaching College Composition. Though sometimes we took breaks to de-stress with memes and metaphors for grading or telling funny stories, much of the course focused on theories surrounding the University of Louisville’s Department of English’s Student Learning Outcomes. These outcomes focus on critical thinking, conventions, confidence and ownership, rhetorical knowledge, and process(es). Our class formed four groups, and each group had the opportunity to teach the class about scholarship surrounding one of the learning outcomes as well as activities that could help students engage with those ideas. Through this project, I was able to explore the complexities of being a teacher and a student.
My group focused on process. We read scholars like Janet Emig, Donald Murray, and John Trimbur in order to understand the history of thoughts on process, put together a bibliography of scholarship, and designed a 90-minute lesson plan. Our fellow 602 members would be our students; however, sometimes they put on their graduate student/composition instructor hats, and sometimes they put on the hats that would transform them into 101 students. While I enjoy learning about the scholarship, I enjoy putting that scholarship into action more than simply discussing it, which was why my favorite parts of our lesson were the activities.
My class members liked to surprise each other with cat photos. It kept up the morale.
The first activity asked the class to be composition instructors and to think back on their rubrics. My group asked the class how they could transform the assessment criteria from product-oriented to process-oriented statements. We gave them a few statements to revise, and then set them free for a few minutes. As they worked, I watched them try to think of ways to focus on what the student is doing–their actions–in their work. As teachers, we discussed how we can never truly escape asking for a product, but that it's important to think about the process in terms of assessment.
What was perhaps the most interesting about this discussion, however, was that it spurred concerns over our rubrics. As teachers, we want to teach in the "best" way, though that doesn't exist, and we were concerned about how long we've taught with product-oriented rubrics.
Later, we asked the class to become ENGL 101 students and sketch the "beginning" and "end" of their writing process. With this activity, we were all able to visualize the good and bad parts of our writing processes and honestly show that our processes are often a mess.
With both of these activities, I began thinking more about how to teach ENGL 101 students about process, but also how to rethink process as both an instructor and student.
I was in the group that was concerned that their rubrics were too product-oriented, and that's something that I am thinking about as I write assignments for ENGL 102, especially since one of the main goals of the class is to see writing as a process with multiple steps. This session and all of the other sessions about the SLOs also helped me think about different ways to teach that will cater to various students' learning styles. As a teacher who's interested in working towards a more inclusive environment, this is important to me and is something that I plan to continue taking steps toward in the future.