Proposal for new English course
Name: Writing Across The Curriculum: Learning With a Journal
Number: 1XX
Prerequisite: ENG 101 recommended
Department: English
Resources: Web CT
Catalog Description: ENG 1XX is a non-synchronous online course offered to students in conjunction with their technologies. They will keep online journals open to their technology instructors as a tool to improve and deepen their technical knowledge. Over the semester the journals will move from descriptive through metacognitive, analytic, evaluative, to evaluative writing.
Partial online course—one hour lecture a week OR
Online course—no lab, no lecture
3 Credit hours
Distribution Area: EMCC AD, Ron Turner, says: “Distribution area is for within EMCC. Right now there are these areas where your courses might fall:
| General Elective for programs that have them. (Ie. Liberal studies) |
| English/Social Science/Humanities etc. elective for programs that restrict their electives to these. (Ie. Nursing, Automotive, etc.) |
| Substitutes for other existing English courses, perhaps ENG101 or ENG215, etc. for programs that don’t have to be so prescriptive, but would want to limit their choice to an English course….” |
If I understand this correctly, the proposed course falls into the second bullet.
Core Competencies: See attached core competencies list
Major Objectives: In order to develop the core competencies this course targets, the students will:
| start and maintain an online weblog |
| post to the weblog a minimum of three times a week, approximately 750 words a week, on technical issues and technology class and lab work |
| interview their technology instructors at least once during the semester and post material about the interview |
| research teaching or industry issues relating to technology classes |
| learn and use Kerka’s journal writing taxonomy |
Proposed Audience: proposed audience is students in technologies; it will meet the need, never complete, to improve student writing, especially about technical matters, and help students improve their work in their technology
Transferablity: Husson, UM, USM have nothing similar or comparable; UMA offers:
ENG150 WRITING WORKSHOP
A writing laboratory course extending the skills which students acquire in ENG101 through their application in other disciplines. Students will take the course in conjunction with content courses. The primary instructor and the writing instructor will collaborate on assignments, which emphasize the centrality of revision in the writing process. Prequisite: ENG101. May be taken multiple times. CR 1
This proposed course certainly ought to be transferable for ENG 150, though this would be a 3 credit course, not a 1 credit.
Challenge Exam: None feasible or offered.
Difficulty and rigor: the course would ask for ten to twelve thousand words of journal writing over the semester. ENG 101, by contrast, typically asks for ten essays of 300 to 500 words each (three to five thousand words) and a long research paper of, perhaps, another five or seven thousand words.
ENG 101 asks students to master different types of five paragraph essay and to write a long paper. This course looks at developing writing fitting into Kerka’s taxonomy.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Rationale: for as long as I’ve been at EM, 17 years, we’ve talked about somehow putting writing right into the classrooms of non-related courses. Scheduling problems always have made that an impossibility. This course allows across-the-curriculum-writing in a non-synchronous on-line setting.
The rationale behind the rationale is that writing, journal-writing in particular, improves student success in traditionally non-writing courses. For a study of this, see http://www.ntlf.com/html/sf/journal.htm.
The study abstract reads: “Numerous studies have shown no effect of journal writing on objective test scores. Most of these studies have used overall test scores as measures of journal-writing effectiveness. This paper reports the results of two studies that examined performance on specific test questions and related journal entries. We found that students who wrote journal entries on topics related to specific test questions were more likely to correctly answer those objective test questions than students who did not write on the topic. [emphasis added]”(“Journal Writing,” Croxton, Berger)
Why not offer a course, an elective, to technology students, where they write about what they’re studying in class?
Sandra Kerka (“Journal Writing as an Adult Learning Tool,” http://ericacve.org/docgen.asp?tbl=pab&ID=112 ) offers this taxonomy of journal development:
| Descriptive—What happened? |
| Metacognitive—What were your thoughts, feelings, assumptions, beliefs, values, attitudes? |
| Analytic—What were the reasoning and thinking behind actions and practices? |
| Evaluative—What was good or bad? What are the implications? |
| Reconstructive—What changes might be made? What are plans for future actions? |
(“Journal Writing,” Kerka)
That sounds like the core of a technology coursework journal which would enhance student learning.
What and where: The course would be given online, the students would be posting in on an internet weblog whose maintenance and upkeep would be their responsibility, a weblog open to their writing and technology instructors, fellow students, and, for that matter, anyone in the world with an internet hookup. They would also use the internet and interviews to do mini-research on their posted topics.
Proposed assignments--these are adapted from Kerka's work, cited above:
Week 1: what is a journal? Your technology, how you see it; your learning, how you see it, your learning style.
Week 2: Descriptive—What happened? What did it look like? What did you do?
Week 3: researching topics on the web
Week 4: linking to material
Week 4: researching topics with listserv newsgroups
Week 5: Metacognitive—What were your thoughts, feelings, assumptions, beliefs, values, attitudes about topics, labs, class activities?
Week 7: further metacognitive
Week 8: Analytic—What were the instructor’s reasoning and thinking behind actions and practices?
Week 9: Technical instructor interviews
Week 10: Evaluative—What was good or bad? What are the implications for your learning and your particular style of learning?
Week 11: further evaluative
Week 12: Reconstructive—What changes might be made? What are your plans for future actions—school or industry? Differences in future?
Week 13: further reconstructive
Week 14: Wider research into related technical and industry issues
Week 15: Self, course, journal evaluation