The focus of English 102 is creating and answering questions through research and writing that draws upon written texts and other sources. A student in English 102 should expect to create research questions, find relevant information to answer those questions, and write longer essays that use the information to create and support a clearly defined position on the topic involved. A student in English 102 can expect to write four to six papers during the term, including at least one extended research essay, totaling about 20 to 25 pages of text.
Spring 2012
In this course, we focused on discourse communities and how students’ primary discourses relate to their target secondary discourses (ie. the discourse of their academic major). We drew heavily on Gee, as well as the language of metacognition and template instruction from Graff’s They Say, I Say to reflect on the ways different discourses create different kinds of knowledge of meaning. See course description and major assignments here. Thanks to Jason Dietz for sharing materials that informed this course design.
Summer 2012
This course used a modified version of a Writing about Writing curriculum to help students explore writing as a topic of study in itself, but also to think more particularly about the kinds of writing and research they will be asked to do in their academic major. This course also utilized blogging to create a more dynamic sense of audience for student responses (which can be accessed on the home page of this blog). Overall, the focus of this course was to develop rhetorical awareness and metacognition about students’ own writing processes through engaging with writing research. See course description and major assignments here.