Course & Unit Planning (Blog 1)

Draft Teaching Philosophy:

Reading: Reading is a complex process where students interpret texts through an individual lens to generate meaning. Learning to read is a process by which the reader discovers avenues for interacting with a variety of texts, including pathways for choosing texts and different modes of response.

Students should read an array of college-level texts that includes multiple genres (short fiction, memoir or literary non-fiction, academic articles and social commentaries or editorials from Salon, The Huffington Post, New York Times, etc.). Students are given avenues for choice throughout the semester, such as selecting a longer text to read with a group of peers and the format for an associated reading/writing project.

Writing: Writing is the action of expressing one's ideas and understanding of the world through a socially constructed system of symbols. Learning to write requires both the mastery of specific cognitive skills and interpersonal skills as they relate to the larger human conversation. Furthermore, learning to write requires practice of multiple forms in varying contexts for writing. 

Writing situations for FYC build upon one another, leading students toward mid- to late- semester assignments meant to synthesize personal experience, classroom inquiry and outside texts. Through writing, students are introduced to the dialectical nature of the academic community and “real world” contexts for writing. Formal writing assignments for Developmental FYC can be categorized as: narrative, analysis, synthesis (with and without personal response), and an argument or proposal.

IRW: Reading is beneficial both for modeling modes of writing and as a launching point for writing topics. Writing in turn can benefit the understanding of reading by activating schema (pre-writing) and synthesizing/funneling reactions to texts (post-writing). 

Reading is accompanied by annotation and dialectical journals. Pre-writing activates schema prior to reading and post-writing moves students into class discussion. Writing takes place in response to texts. 

Cognition:  Students develop cognitive skills by interacting with texts and with each other in order to deepen their understanding of what they think, how they think and why they have come to think in those ways. 

Academic Community: Developmental students become members of the academic community by learning the expectations of college-level courses, the language of the community and the dialectical nature of the classroom. 

Students will develop academic, college-level skills in reading, writing and citizenship through exposure to academic-level reading and writing assignments and clear classroom expectations. Class time will be spent on a mix of individual writing (freewriting, journal responses), small and large group discussion stemming from the course inquiry, and collaborative reading and writing projects.