Download PDFProgrammatic Background
At the time of this writing, the FYW program I co-administered was in the middle of fully instituting sweeping changes to the form, structure, and content of its curriculum as the result of a multi-year, university-wide general education renewal process. Chief among those changes was a shift away from a traditional two-course, FYW sequence to a more vertical curriculum structure: a one-semester required writing course during students’ freshman year followed by a second, one-semester required course during their sophomore year (or after they complete at least 24 hours of college-level credit).
These programmatic changes are significant for several reasons. First, I believe the move to a two-year course sequence is beneficial for students because it stretches explicit writing instruction further into students’ academic careers. However, this same stretch is not without its own issues. Importantly, a student who enters our university with credit for WRIT 1301 (the first required, general education writing course) could conceivably not take a university writing course until the spring semester of sophomore year (or even last semester senior year) since the only temporal requirement for a student’s enrollment in WRIT 2302 is their completion of 24 credit hours. This represents a potential gap of at least one and half years before this student officially encounters our institution’s formal writing instruction if they enter with credit for WRIT 1301. Complicating the situation further is the closely aligned vertical structure and content of the new two-course sequence. The previous curricular progression between WRIT 1301 and 2302 was rather tenuous and there was little consistency of deliverable content across sections. As a program director, I joked, only half-heartedly, that on the continuum between teacher-proof curriculum and well-intentioned bedlam, the FYW program lived precariously close to the latter. The revised curriculum, however, directly addressed issues of consistency between courses by restructuring WRIT 1301 and 2302 (previously WRIT 2302) out of a horizontal relationship and into vertical alignment.
To explain, the former connection between the courses was largely skills-and-outcomes based, meaning WRIT 2302 was functionally an opportunity for students to continue fine-tuning many of the same types of skills introduced via WRIT 1301. There was not necessarily a scaffolded progression of ideas between the courses. Under the revised learning outcomes, the two courses are connected at deep structural levels, and WRIT 2302 builds from complex ideas about writing, not writing and researching skills, presented in WRIT 13012. In effect, students now move up the curriculum into new concepts instead of across it. Students’ ability to succeed in WRIT 2302 is more closely related to the conceptual foundations that constitute WRIT 1301. Moreover, the structural realignment also necessitated that the content of each course be revised. The skills-oriented writing construct that encouraged well-intentioned curricular bedlam would no longer hold water in a vertically aligned course sequence. Students from different sections needed to be able to bring reasonably similar foundations about writing constructs from WRIT 1301 into WRIT 2302. I therefore endeavored to bring the deliverable content of the courses more closely in line to each other. This is not to say that the programmatic pendulum swung completely over to teacher-proof curriculum, but I wanted a consistency of experience and content across sections and between courses. Moreover, my intention has not been to demean our prior curriculum, since I did administer and teach inside it myself after all. Instead, my intention has been to show how drastically our writing curriculum has changed as a matter of timing and content, both of which bear relevance to instruction as well as program administration.
These curricular changes, of course, affected pedagogy, but I was also worried about the impact of these changes on our administrative structures as well, particularly with regard to issues of student placement. Historically, placement procedures for FYW at our institution have depended on nationally normed standardized test scores, which is a polite way of admitting that we had no real placement instrument. Research in placement methodology suggests only a nominal correlation between standardized measures of assessment and student success in FYW courses, and the use of standardized tests for placement has likewise been critiqued for being inattentive to local particularities. Therefore, the lack of a real placement instrument was concerning even under the old curriculum, but these anxieties were exacerbated once I began implementing the new, revised writing curriculum. Anecdotal evidence from our pilot courses of the new FYW curriculum suggested that students found the new WRIT 1301 content to be unlike anything they had experienced before.
However, students who entered with credit for WRIT 1301, like Caitlyn, appeared to be highly resistant, adverse even, to the idea that WRIT 1301 or even WRIT 2302 had something of value to offer them because it was unlike their previous coursework. This resistance to the curriculum was disconcerting because these same students seemed often to be the ones struggling the most with the new course content. My experience as an instructor suggested that these students’ prior dispositions about writing were a factor in how they received, or resisted, our course content and pedagogy. As a program administrator, however, I likewise began to wonder if these dispositions might also bear relevance on students’ potential placement decisions. The ways the new course content was being received by students combined with the delay of WRIT 2302 until students’ sophomore year prompted us to consider whether students dispositions did affect their placement decisions, and how, if at all, a placement instrument could be designed to account for those dispositions. Again, as my review of the literature indicates, there was a theoretical connection between placement and students’ dispositions, but I wanted concrete evidence of this relationship.
[2] Specifically, the content of our new writing curriculum pulls from threshold concepts about writing as articulated in Naming What I Know, writing about writing pedagogy (WAW), and Teaching for Transfer (TFT) theories of writing developed by Kathleen B. Yancey, Kara Taczak, and Liane Robertson.