Worried about the low literacy levels and poor writing skills of college graduates, composition professors have spent decades debating the question: Should college writing courses teach content (critical reading and in-class debates about social and cultural topics) or form (essay design, paragraph arrangement, and sentence-level syntax, grammar, and vocabulary)?
To my mind, they’re chasing a red herring. Once we’re actually in the composition classroom, we inevitably combine form with content, regardless of our theoretical pedagogical standpoint. Anti-content-ers like Stanley Fish pretend that content-rich composition courses rely on “the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow.” Of course, no one would base a curriculum on such an idiotic notion; rather, some instructors teach composition through thematic readings with the understanding that shared background knowledge will help students build more complex arguments; others use essays about “big ideas” as models students can emulate in their own writing. Few anti-content teachers would deny the importance of building a knowledge base or following good writing models. Conversely, even those pro-content composition instructors who strenuously declare, “I do NOT teach grammar,” ultimately are forced to attend to sentences in one way or another.
The Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar at City College of New York, profiled this month in Inside Higher Education, has provided a curricular counterpart to my claim that writing courses always combine form with content. The six-credit seminar links a content instructor from one of the disciplines with a writing instructor from the English department, often a Master’s or MFA student. So, the students learn about a subject–examples include “Energy” and “Comic Books and Conflict”–and they learn how to write about that subject. Form enriched by content, content supported by form.
Of course, I would prefer to see universities take the writing instruction side of such courses a little more seriously; as the article explains, the content instructor is often the “real” (full-time, tenured) professor and the writing instructor is a contingent laborer. But that’s a topic for another blog post.
Just a note from a erstwhile first-year composition instructor who definitely had the mix going on.
As you describe, I went with a theme to organize concepts and focus thinking, “Technology and/in Society”. But I also chose that theme because I found it particular useful for talking about complex interrelationships between entities (people, culture, specific technologies, etc.).
The point was always how to express complex relationships, and the readings and discussion at the content level did that fairly abstractly, to develop abstract thinking skills. At the form level, the game was the same: learning how to use grammar to express complex relationships between the parts of your argument. Grammar, after all, is basically how relationships between parts of a sentence are expressed.
So I found thinking about a continuum of expressing relationships to work fairly well. Same principle, studied at both content and form levels. This principle also worked well when we got to research papers. The weakest part of beginning writers’ thinking about research came down to the same issue: how to understand and express the relationships between different writers, yourself included, in complex ways.
Thanks for this thought–it’s an important one!
Patrick
Any thoughts about how the CCNY version (“real” + contingent instructors) compares with the Baruch learning community model, which frequently pairs two FTers, one of whom is teaching ENG 2100? This seems to be the theoretical ideal: is it in practice?
Talia,
Nice post. I a familiar with the Fish argument and although I agree with you that comp. courses inevitably must have a content component to them, I think Fish has a point (by the way I usually DON’T agree with Fish. People may not agree with the specifics he puts forward–I know his article caused a bit of an uproar–but I think the thrust of his argument is important. Since reading Fish I have found myself paying a lot more attention to the mechanics of writing in my comp. classes, making sure that students get the much needed training in rhetoric and basic revision techniques that they woudl not get otherwise. For instance, just yesterday I had a very productive class about concision, where it came to light that not one student knew what the subject of a sentence was. It only took five minutes to explain to them how Subjects, Verbs, and Objects work, but the fact that none of them knew this material, which is really vital to writing a well crafted sentence,seems like something we should be concerned about.
Hi Dennis: I do think that in theory, the Baruch Freshman Learning Communities offer the opportunity for richer and more egalitarian collaboration between the two cooperating professors. The LCs at Baruch are centered on two linked courses, taught by two professors who’ve committed to having their syllabi and assignments speak to one another in some way, and the students go on a couple field trips with both coordinating teachers. The linked courses don’t have to include an introductory writing class (although they often do), so it’s less writing-focused than FIQWS at City College. The focus of the Baruch LCs is partly to foster interdisciplinary study and demonstrate tangibly how different disciplines fit together, and partly to ease freshmen’s transitions into college and into NYC, so the students in the Learning Community take a full course schedule together for two semesters. In other words, a professor could have a LC block in a section of her class, without being directly involved in the interdisciplinary project of the two linked classes.
I know that in the FIQWS at CCNY, from semester to semester, the professor who designs and dictates the content of the course often stays the same, while the part-timers who teach the writing side often rotate according to availability, which definitely seems to relegate the writing aspect of the course to less-essential status. As the article mentions, and according to conversations I’ve had with English adjuncts at CCNY, the level of meaningful collaboration between the “content” and writing professor can vary drastically from experience to experience. By contrast, the coordinating profs at the Baruch LCs create a collaboration plan in advance. But, I haven’t actually spoken to anyone who teaches a Baruch LC to see how this plays out in practice: maybe someone who reads this blog can fill in the gaps for us?
Hi, James: Yes, I think Fish has an interesting take on teaching composition. The rest of his article lays out his ideas for teaching “form” in composition: he has his students create an imaginary language from scratch, with the idea that once they understand the mechanical elements necessary to make language function, they will be better able to attend to constructing what he calls “clean” English. I don’t necessarily object to this method, especially if it produces the impressive results he reports. I object to the straw-manning of all content-rich composition courses. Of course, a semester of mindless bickering over “issues,” followed by essays about said issues in which the students regurgitate tired ideas and are graded according to their conformity to the professor’s ideology, will not really help students learn how to write. I just don’t believe that’s actually happening in the composition classroom. Plus, while I too am alarmed when I encounter students who can’t write well, I seriously doubt that the main problem is college composition teachers who introduce too much content.
Also, I’m under the impression that most people (I mean, adults, professional writers, not students) who can write good sentences and paragraphs don’t know “grammar” per se. That is, syntax and mechanics are sort of internalized in people who read a lot, so they can write well without being able to distinguish a correlative conjunction from a preposition. The technical aspects of grammar are no longer regularly taught in primary and secondary schools, so it’s a little silly to ask composition teachers to try to graft grammar onto the intuitive writing skills that college students already have.