Writing Reform

Students, faculty warm to changes in writing course

Friday, January 12, 2001

There is writing, and there is academic writing. Joseph Harris and Van Hillard believe that the difference between the two is at the heart of the first-year writing course. The challenge of changing students' ideas about writing hasn't won the program a lot of popularity. In 1996, voicing common complaints, a student writing in stated "the course material is boring, hard to understand and not relevant. Some of the exercises that the course dictates to be necessary are totally irrelevant and meaningless. The course does not seem to take into consideration students' interest as important." The changes start with the instructors. In place of graduate students -- who did the bulk of the teaching for many years -- most of the teaching is now done by nine newly hired writing postdoctoral Mellon writing fellows, who this each taught three courses per semester. These fellows, said Joseph Harris, director of the university writing program, bring specific expertise in writing instruction, but also enthusiasm for the project. For the first time, the instructors have arranged the course around a central issue. "These are people who are interested in developing as undergraduate teachers," Harris said. "They wanted time and space to hone their ideas of undergraduate teaching. Furthermore, they all showed an eager anticipation to work on a collective project. They are the right people to teach this type of course." One of the fellows, Troy Dostert, is teaching a course on the common good and the boundaries to personal freedom. Dostert, who first taught Writing 20 last fall, said students are responding to the course and its theme. "I've enjoyed thinking carefully about what it means to introduce students to the world of scholarship, something I think all professors here have a responsibility to do for their students," Dostert said. "Since writing is at the core of serious scholarship, you can't do the latter without first learning the former. I think that although the writing program has been much maligned in the past, sometimes deservingly so, it also serves a function that is absolutely critical to the mission of the university." Dostert said the students have brought a "level of enthusiasm and intensity" to the course. "Learning writing is more like learning an art than acquiring a set of tools - it really requires persistent and arduous effort to become proficient in academic writing," he added. "In most, cases, I find Duke freshmen ready to give it a shot, and I've been encouraged by their willingness not to take this as a mere exercise, but as a serious activity." Other long-time teachers of the writing course said also they have seen better responses to the new shape of the program. Robert Bliwise, editor of Duke Magazine, said shaping the class around the theme of "The Culture of the Campus" has helped students get into the demands of the course. "My sense is that the energy I've seen the students put into the course this semester was greater than in the previous years, where maybe the courses were more formulaic," Bliwise said. "The writing they did as the semester went on showed off more original thinking and personal engagement than what I had seen previously. "And it was more educational and interesting for me as well," Bliwise said. "I brought in campus people to talk about issues such as student drinking patterns, and I found myself really appreciating how tough it is for a first-year student to experience a climate that revolves around alcohol as a social force." Some improvement has come as well, Harris said, from Curriculum 2000, which made writing one of the focuses of the curriculum. In addition to the first-year writing course, Curriculum 2000 also requires students to take at least two courses designated as writing-intensive. These include a component of looking at how writing is done within a discipline; in most cases, students will take one of these writing-intensive courses in their major. Harris said these disciplinary writing courses relieve some of the burden on the first-year course. "In the past, when there was only a single university writing course, that course needed to try to teach a number of things all at once: the process of drafting and revising, the craft of research, use of the library, documenting sources, avoiding plagiarism, and so on. With the new curriculum, we know that other faculty will also be working with students on practices of the research and writing in their own disciplines, so we can thus focus more closely and productively on teaching close reading and critical writing." The new curriculum brought one other advantage, Harris said. Many of the graduate students who previously taught the first-year course are now assisting faculty teaching Writing in the Discipline courses in their own departments. This means graduate students didn't lose an important source of income and ended up teaching writing courses that are more appropriate to their research interests. More changes are coming. A new grant from the Mellon Foundation will enable the program to reduce the teaching loads of the Mellon fellows to five courses a year. The grant also will support mentoring and professional development opportunities for the fellows. Duke is not alone among major universities in examining their first-year writing programs, Hillard said. But Duke is at the forefront of a trend to use these programs to develop the students' intellectual and rhetorical skills. This is a skill that writing instruction is particularly well-suited for, he said. "We've been thinking about ways in which a student can be thought of as an engaged citizen," Hillard said. "Obviously, a lot of these students are going to grow up to be leaders in many different settings. Part of what we want to do in the writing course is to help prepare students as responsible thinkers able to consider disagreements from a variety of perspectives. Intellectual writing can do that. The act of discovery through writing helps open students up to other voices, ideas and claims in particular ways. "It's common today to think that thoughtful writing is merely the presentation of contrasting arguments, some sort of point-counterpoint. What we are teaching is something different. What we are teaching is that the act of deliberation is a matter of exploring situations and seeing how many ways its claims can be contested by a diverse population. They learn that sometimes writing doesn't resolve an issue but rather opens it up. That's a lesson and a skill they'll carry with them into other classes and outside the classroom in their roles as public citizens."