Illinois State University Course Number: English 295, Section 1

Semester: Fall 2003

Instructor: Bob Broad, Associate Professor of English

Course meeting times:  M-W-F 1:00 p.m.

Course meeting places: Stevenson 221-A (and alternative rooms TBA)

Course Overview

This course invites participants to learn about how best to teach writing and literature in middle schools (grades 6-8). I have designed activities and assignments to provide a supportive and challenging environment within which participants collaboratively develop knowledge about many questions, issues, problems, innovations, possibilities, and joys of teaching literature and composition. The course may therefore productively be described as a teaching workshop. 

Important topics we will study include:

·        Reader response theories of literature and their applications in the classroom

·        Rhetorical processes (a.k.a. “the writing process”)

·        Interplay between reading and writing

·        Writing to learn and think (and discover and explore and reflect, etc.)

·        Motivating, structuring, and assigning writing

·        Responding to students’ writing (teacher response and peer response)

·        Assessment, grading, and testing

·        Grammar, linguistics, conventions, and correctness

·        Technology and teaching literature and composition

·        Whatever else we as a group agree is urgent for us to learn about

Several important features will shape our work together.

A Learning Team

I feel very strongly that you will learn best if we work as a learning team. This means that every member of this class should not only know the names and contact information (phone, e-mail, etc.) of every other member of the group, but also know everyone's:  topics for the various course projects; special resources and talents they bring to the group; special needs and areas of interest. The concept and practice of the learning team also places heavy value on class participation, including attendance, preparation, and a high level of professional engagement while in class. 

Our "Sourcebook"

We will collectively compose and publish a book. The book will be a "source book" whose chief audience will be prospective, new, and experienced teachers of writing and literature in the middle grades. Every student in the course is required to contribute a chapter to the book. Shortly after the end of the semester, the book should be available on the Web. (I will need some volunteer technical assistants to bring this plan to fruition.) 

Technology and Teaching Writing

Since we will meet in a networked (PC) classroom, we will attempt to make use of a wide range of electronic resources for teaching and learning, including the World Wide Web, a listserv and/or Webboard, web portfolios, electronic readings, on-line journals, etc. Participants will bring to the course varying levels of expertise in (and access to) these electronic tools, and so we will all need to exercise patience and creativity as teachers and learners of technology. All participants should arrive equipped with an e-mail address and knowledge of how to send and receive e-mail messages.

Course Format

Pedagogically, politically, and philosophically, I object to tests and lectures. Class meetings of this course will therefore primarily feature discussions of readings and issues, sharing of entries in your response journals, opportunities for you to practice your teaching craft, additional activities to spark further learning, and workshops in which you and your classmates seek responses to your own course projects and offer responses to others’. Practice teaching by students in this course will occupy another significant portion of our class time. Students will also present ten-minute Teaching Reports to the group to inform us about useful resources, activities, and techniques for teaching writing. Outside of class, students should expect to read and write quite a bit and to produce written teacher-research of two of the four following kinds: teaching materials, classroom research, textual research, or "something else." Evaluation of each student's performance will be based on class participation and a course portfolio submitted in the final weeks of the course. 

Check the links below for more information.

This web page is authored by Bob Broad. It was last updated on
September 05, 2003, and has enjoyed visits. 

The URL for this page is
http://lilt.ilstu.edu/rlbroad/teaching/295/295.htm

© 2003 Bob Broad