Course & Unit Planning (Blog 2)

1. ·       Develop an organized essay reflecting sentence variety, syntactic complexity, and paragraph efficiency using expository or argumentative rhetorical modes
2. ·       State a thesis and support it with evidence drawn from personal experience, observations, and readings
3. ·       Generate, plan, and write impromptu essays and other in-class writing assignments within a limited amount of time
4. ·       Edit compositions in order to remove mechanical errors such as punctuation, spelling, and capitalization
5. ·       Demonstrate the ability to read and comprehend beginning college level reading materials and to use them as a springboard for their own writing
6. ·       Review and practice rhetorical modes with an emphasis on the argumentative essay
7. ·       Demonstrate control of the sentence
8. ·       Display vocabulary appropriate to beginning college level English.

SLOs vs My Philsophy 

I have posted above the SLOs for Developmental Writing at San Jose City College, where I teach. I am using these SLOs for my course design because I am more likely to teach Developmental Writing at SJCC in the future (and I have taught it there in the past). 

There are some obvious disparities between SJCC and SFSU when it comes to the conception of FYC.

The biggest discrepancy between SJCC and SFSU is a lack of true IRW thinking at SJCC, and I think this holds true for many of the San Francisco Bay Area community colleges. Community college districts simply lag behind universities and current research in their practice of reading and writing instruction. In fact, at SJCC, the Reading Department mandates the use of workbooks to teach reading skills. I bring this up because the entrenched separation of Reading and Writing at my college results in a pretty big area of concern. Were my syllabus audited in any serious way by the administration, they would discover a heavy reading load and students practicing reading skills that have been otherwise relegated to a Reading Class. My wiggle-room lies in SLO #5, that students in Developmental Writing should leave the class able to comprehend beginning (posh!) college-level materials and use these readings to generate writing.

Another area of friction between myself at the SLOs comes up in #6, that the class should emphasize the argumentative essay. This beast called the “argumentative” essay is not, I think, the primary mode of discourse that students will actually be required to write in their other disciplines (does one write “argumentative essays” in Science, Philosophy, History, Psychology? An argument might be made, but the genre assigned is much more traditional-academic than that). For my conception of "the argumentative essay," my syllabus includes a unit in which students write a “proposal” for the new use of an old space, and we will necessarily discuss pathos, ethos, logos and kairos in this context. The final essay, also, asks students to craft and defend an argument surrounding their conception of “place and identity.” Although this is not an argumentative essay in that it does not lobby for gun control or the legalization of marijuana using a 5-paragraph format, it requires a more sophisticated use of argumentation and essay crafting that I hope the students will be able to translate into other argumentative-style writing in their future coursework.