News and Events
Features
New First Year Writing Curriculum Unveiled
Freshmen entering OSU this autumn will be experiencing a new and exciting way of learning how to write for college, according to Professor Scott Lloyd DeWitt, new Director of the First Year Writing Program. On August 15th Professor DeWitt met with faculty, Graduate Teaching Associates, librarians, advisors and administrators from across the campus to give an overview of the newly-revised First Year Writing Program. While the new curriculum will focus on academic research and will include the traditional academic research paper, it will integrate that work with computer technology and will also have students communicating their research findings in non-academic formats.
Professor DeWitt, who has been Director of the English Department’s Digital Media Project, told his audience that his goal as new Director of First Year Writing is to blend his work from DMP with First Year Writing to create a richer and more effective writing environment for our undergraduates. The biggest move in that direction is to have 64 of the 80 sections of English 110 (the First Year writing course) meet in a computer lab, as opposed to the previous allotment of 10 classes out of 80. This change was made possible by a shift from exclusively computer-based English 110 classes (which meet all the time in the labs) to the “hybrid” format of those classes, which meet only half the time (once a week) in those labs. There are three computer labs in Denney Hall that will be used exclusively for English 110 classes, and Professor DeWitt will be assisted in running the program by his First Year Writing Program team, which consists of Associate Director Eddie Singleton, Michael Harker, Aaron McKain, and Alexis Stern.
Inspired by OSU’s Undergraduate Research movement, the new First Year Writing curriculum will also be much more heavily based on research and will reverse the traditional First Year Writing model of ending the quarter with a research project. Students will be engaged with research from the first day of class and will be producing a fully-documented research paper by the seventh week of the quarter. To accomplish this goal, Professor DeWitt and his First Year Writing Program team have been partnering with the OSU Library staff, who will be making available newly-formulated online research tools and who will also be training English 110 instructors in the newest research methods, especially using online sources. OSU Librarians Anne Fields and Nancyanne O’Hanlon, along with graduate student liaison Kara Spaulding, will be on hand to train and assist instructors of the new curriculum.
Besides learning the rationale, best practices and writing techniques for academic research, students will also learn how to make their research findings intelligible and accessible to people outside their field of research by composing two other kinds of texts: a digital media “remix” and an article to be submitted to Commonplace, a newly-created online student journal. The digital media remix will involve taking a visual text that is related to the student’s research topic, analyzing it as a form of communication and then re-fashioning it to communicate what the student has concluded about that topic. Students will also be communicating their research findings in an essay that is aimed at a more general student audience, which the writers will be submitting for possible publication on line. The students themselves will also form the review board for publication, as they will be reading and evaluating each others’ essays, which will be distributed for judging without student names on them. By thus writing, reading, reviewing and publishing these essays, students will be further developing their analytical and writing skills. Also, “real world” publishing will give the students much stronger motivation for producing higher quality work and for taking responsibility for their own writing.
Professor DeWitt said that he and his team are very pleased and excited about these new developments in the English 110 curriculum (most of which have been pre-tested in pilot versions), and they look forward to training the 41 new Graduate Teaching Associates who will be teaching the new curriculum and who will be arriving on campus on August 27th for two and a half weeks of intensive workshops. Thus 41 of the GTAs will be assigned the new hybrid English 110 classes. The remaining sections will be taught by faculty and continuing Teaching Associates. Continuing teachers will also have the option this year of using the old curriculum or the new one. Workshops will be available for those teachers who do want to follow the new model. Next year all of the English 110 courses will follow the new curriculum.
