ENG 101 Assignment Sequence
This memo overviews the assignment sequence New TAs for ASU’s Writing Programs can anticipate teaching in ENG 101—and, most importantly, the learning outcomes that sequence of assignments is designed to help students meet. If you are reading this prior to New TA orientation and have questions, please don’t worry. We’ll have plenty of time during orientation to address your questions together as we move from this general assignment sequence to specific project descriptions.
Assignment Sequence -> Project Descriptions
This assignment sequence works in tandem with another set of texts: project descriptions for the three main assignments in your section of ENG 101. Here’s the main difference between the two: On the one hand, the assignment sequence is a communications between ASU’s Writing Programs and writing instructors. (Its specific institutional purposes are described in more detail below.) In contrast, project descriptions contextualize and enliven an individual writing instructor’s projects for students in an individual writing class and, thus, is a communications between the individual writing instructor and the students in his or her section of ENG 101.
Here at ASU, this dynamic sequence and its attention to specific learning outcomes characterize ENG 101. That means that resources such as textbooks, library guides, sample daily plans, student sample essays are merely tools for instructors to use to create the impetus and scaffolding necessary for students to engage in the designated learning outcomes. In other words, no single textbook encompasses what we’re up to. We do not teach simply to implement a textbook or to produce a bunch of “exemplar” essays. Instead, instructors are invited to work with one another and from their own strengths, commitments, and interests to cultivate contexts where students thrive as writers and thinkers with real things to say to real readers.
This assignment sequence has been crafted with writing instructors in mind as the primary audience. The goal is threefold: 1) to indicate a relatively coherent set of intellectual practices for joining academic conversations—practices that allow students’ experiences in ENG 101 to hold relatively constant across sections in light of the distinct ways individual teachers teach the course and in light of differences between ENG 101 and ENG 102; 2) to identify the specific learning outcomes that direct students’ learning experiences in ENG 101; and 3) to unpack the logic or rationale for the individual projects and how they fit together.
As an instructor, you will be expected to circulate to your students not this assignment sequence but rather specific project descriptions. In days to come during TA orientation and the TA seminar, we’ll be giving more attention to those project descriptions. New TAs are welcome to use or to adapt versions of the project descriptions and daily plans that circulate during TA orientation. When adapting the curricula of other instructors, we ask that you somehow credit the creator within the materials you circulate to students—for instance, with a comment in an endnote.
Defining Text within FYC Curricula
The curricula for ENG 101 and 102 embrace text as a versatile concept—something certainly one can produce in print, yet a concept that holds for visual and digital media, as well. Many first-year students will come to ENG 101 assuming that text refers only to something written that shows up in conventional versions of print; others may grant that a text may be either visual, oral or written, but they might not immediately consider extending the concept much beyond that. These courses attempt to invigorate students’ experiences as college writers by invigorating, as well, the very concept of text to include places, people, and cultural artifacts, as well as written/visual media. In a nutshell, then, text in this curricula refers to that wide array of cultural products through which people organize meaning making and coordinate shared and distributed symbolic activity.
A Word about Innovation
For the first year that you teaching writing here at ASU, we ask you to teach within the broad framework we introduce during orientation, seminar, and practicum. This includes making extensive use of an assigned textbook (to be distributed the first day of New TA orientation), Blackboard, Digication, and the library modules, as well as the basic grading practices we’ll discuss during orientation and throughout the fall seminar. After a TA’s first year, Writing Programs welcomes proposals for innovative curricular design for possible use in subsequent years.
Project 1: An Analysis/Response Based on Primary Research
In the first project, students will read essays that prompt inquiry, and they will “join a conversation” regarding one line of that inquiry by conducting primary research (data collection via observation, interview, survey). For example, students might read essays about the impact of technology on our conceptions of “public versus private space” and then conduct observations to see how technology might be impacting such conceptions in a specific locale. Students will combine their experiences/beliefs with primary research, will develop an informed stance on the topic, and will through their writing offer a view of the subject that may be new or not immediately obvious to readers.
In terms of Writing Programs goals, students will:
●be able to focus on a specific rhetorical purpose
●use heuristics to analyze places, histories, and cultures
●use conventions of format, structure, and language appropriate to the purpose of the written texts
●engage in a variety of research methods to study and explore the topics, including fieldwork as well as library and Internet research
●conduct inquiry-based research and writing which is driven by the desire to study a cultural phenomenon and asks "what kind of research needs to be done in order to understand this issue?”
●use writing as a way of thinking through topics and ideas
●respond to their classmates' work and learn how to supply effective peer editing feedback. Peer response techniques include group workshops, class discussion and examination of content, organization, syntax and mechanics
●identify the kind of ideological work a text undertakes and how it serves to persuade readers to accept a particular account of an issue as accurate and effective
●write and revise drafts and integrate feedback into their writing
Project 2: Analysis Based on Assigned Class Reading(s)
In this second project, we ask students to “join a conversation” on the basis of something they’ve read in community with others in their ENG 101 classes. This project asks students to make contributions to specific conversations by offering insights that are responsive—in one way or another—to assigned class readings. Students will practice several different writing tasks in this project. They will learn to use secondary research to make “new knowledge”; they will learn to incorporate the ideas of others into their own writing using appropriate documentation; and they will also practice the important academic skills of analysis and development, thus continuing their introduction into the conventions of academic conversations.
In terms of Writing Programs goals, students will:
●use heuristics to analyze places, histories, and cultures
●be able to focus on a specific rhetorical purpose
●adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
●explore the multiple facets (ideological, social, cultural, political, economic, historical) of issues and use writing to construct informed, critical positions about these topics
●write empirical, historical and cultural analyses of issues of social relevance
●conduct inquiry-based research and writing which is driven by the desire to study a cultural phenomenon and asks "what kind of research needs to be done in order to understand this issue”?
●work with demanding, non-fiction readings and learn to interpret, incorporate, and evaluate these readings
●effectively integrate a variety of sources into their writings
●learn and use at least one system of documentation responsibly
●interact with texts as they read and re-read, by underlining, taking notes and commenting in the margins, in order to arrive at strong readings that supply a starting point for writing
Project 3: Analyzing a Concept or Complex Phenomenon
The third project asks a student to analyze a concept for the student’s purpose/s as a writer. Students often come to college assuming that concepts are definitive entities, anchored in some firm Reality “out there.” From this perspective, writers read to find pre-existing truths and then circulate these findings in a claim-driven (often five-paragraph) theme. Relatively speaking, that’s pretty easy work. In sharp contrast, this assignment engages students in a rhetorical framework that says the meaning of a concept resides in the consequences it creates. As Susan Horton writes: “[c]oncepts have no ‘real’ definitions; instead, they have uses. They are our ways of coming to understand the world and deciding how to behave within it” (qtd. in Muak and Metz 122). This shift in orientation positions the writer in a playful if demanding world where she or he is an active meaning maker whose analytical powers—particularly his or her ability to see a concept’s distinctive parts and how they work together in the world—who benefits from that interplay and how—afford her or his opportunities to participate in conversations that matter. As with the other assignments in this sequence, this one asks students to construct compelling purposes for their writing.
In terms of goals of ASU’s Writing Programs, students will:
●be able to focus on a specific rhetorical purpose
●adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
●explore the multiple facets (ideological, social, cultural, political, economic, historical) of issues and use writing to construct informed, critical positions about these topics
●write empirical, historical and cultural analyses of issues of social relevance
●conduct inquiry-based research and writing which is driven by the desire to study a cultural phenomenon and asks "what kind of research needs to be done in order to understand this issue?
●locate, interpret and incorporate demanding, non-fiction readings and learn to interpret, incorporate, and evaluate these readings
●effectively integrate a variety of sources into their writings
●learn and use at least one system of documentation responsibly
●interact with texts as they read and re-read, by underlining, taking notes and commenting in the margins, in order to arrive at strong readings that supply a starting point for writing
in one way or another—to assigned class readings. Joining the Conversation at ASU (2nd ed. Updated for 2015) frames such writing in the chapter entitled “Reading to Write,” especially the sections called “Read to respond” and “Read to make connections.”
Here at ASU, after discussing the key ideas in an article and various responses to the author’s ideas in class, students might choose to use the ideas in an assigned class reading to contribute to a conversation in any number of ways—for instance, by analyzing a specific phenomenon, extending the author’s ideas, challenging her conclusions, or otherwise significantly using the article’s key ideas in the rhetorical and visual analysis. The important point is that students will situate their own thinking and writing in order to join and to contribute to an existing conversation.
Students will practice several different writing tasks in this project. They will learn to use secondary research to make “new knowledge”; they will learn to incorporate the ideas of others into their own writing using appropriate documentation; and they will also practice the important academic skills of analysis and development, thus continuing their introduction into the conventions of academic conversations.
In terms of Writing Programs goals, students will:
●use heuristics to analyze places, histories, and cultures
●be able to focus on a specific rhetorical purpose
●adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
●explore the multiple facets (ideological, social, cultural, political, economic, historical) of issues and use writing to construct informed, critical positions about these topics
●write empirical, historical and cultural analyses of issues of social relevance
●conduct inquiry-based research and writing which is driven by the desire to study a cultural phenomenon and asks "what kind of research needs to be done in order to understand this issue”?
●work with demanding, non-fiction readings and learn to interpret, incorporate, and evaluate these readings
●effectively integrate a variety of sources into their writings
●learn and use at least one system of documentation responsibly
●interact with texts as they read and re-read, by underlining, taking notes and commenting in the margins, in order to arrive at strong readings that supply a starting point for writing
Project 3: Analyzing a Concept or Complex Phenomenon
The third project asks a student to analyze a concept for the student’s purpose/s as a writer. Students often come to college assuming that concepts are definitive entities, anchored in some firm Reality “out there.” From this perspective, writers read to find pre-existing truths and then circulate these findings in a claim-driven (often five-paragraph) theme. Relatively speaking, that’s pretty easy work. In sharp contrast, this assignment engages students in a rhetorical framework that says the meaning of a concept resides in the consequences it creates. As Susan Horton writes: “[c]oncepts have no ‘real’ definitions; instead, they have uses. They are our ways of coming to understand the world and deciding how to behave within it” (qtd. in Muak and Metz 122). This shift in orientation positions the writer in a playful if demanding world where she or he is an active meaning maker whose analytical powers—particularly his or her ability to see a concept’s distinctive parts and how they work together in the world—who benefits from that interplay and how—afford her or his opportunities to participate in conversations that matter.
In terms of goals of ASU’s Writing Programs, students will:
●be able to focus on a specific rhetorical purpose
●adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
●explore the multiple facets (ideological, social, cultural, political, economic, historical) of issues and use writing to construct informed, critical positions about these topics
●write empirical, historical and cultural analyses of issues of social relevance
●conduct inquiry-based research and writing which is driven by the desire to study a cultural phenomenon and asks "what kind of research needs to be done in order to understand this issue?
●locate, interpret and incorporate demanding, non-fiction readings and learn to interpret, incorporate, and evaluate these readings
●effectively integrate a variety of sources into their writings
●learn and use at least one system of documentation responsibly
●interact with texts as they read and re-read, by underlining, taking notes and commenting in the margins, in order to arrive at strong readings that supply a starting point for writing