Here is another very EMU-centric and very long post, though not unlike the post I had in September about the EMU-AAUP 2027-29 contract, maybe there are those beyond EMU who might be interested in my efforts to explain my field and the course that is most associated with it, first year writing. Let me also make clear that I am speaking only for myself and not for my program or colleagues or whatever. So, with that disclaimer out of the way:
In August, Interim Provost David Schecter announced that General Education was going to be revised. The new requirements are going to be “launched” in the 2027-28 school year, and then fully implemented in 28-29. Every course in Gen Ed will apparently have to be re-evaluated to meet the new outcomes, though these outcomes have not yet been developed. Schecter and the faculty committee he set up for this released an outline of what the new Gen Ed will (likely) look like for faculty to review before the upcoming campus-wide town hall discussions. This is a link to the PDF that was widely circulated via email.
The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of Gen Ed requirements from 41 credits to around 31 by cutting the number of courses in each category and eliminating the Learning Beyond the Classroom requirement. I don’t disagree with either of these goals, actually. Reducing the number of required courses would put EMU’s Gen Ed is in line with the Michigan Transfer Agreement, which is 30 credits. And while Learning Beyond the Classroom was (and probably still is) a good idea, the logistics of running that program have always been challenging.
What concerns me is the language about potential changes to the Effective Communication Gen Ed requirements. Currently, students fulfill this area with a writing course (aka “WRTG 121: Composition II: Researching the Public Experience”; aka “freshman comp;” aka “English Composition”) and a speech course (aka “COMM 124: Foundations of Speech Communication”). My area of expertise is composition and rhetoric, so I’m focusing here on that.
The Gen Ed proposal still requires two courses in this category, but it doesn’t seem to specify a particular course. Here is how this category is described on page 3 and 4:
Inquiry, Expression, and Critical Thinking (6 credit hours total) – students will take two required foundational classes in which they will develop their writing, communication, and critical thinking skills in preparation for subsequent college course work and their careers. In these foundational courses (e.g., first-year writing, argumentative writing, speech, visual communication), students will develop their abilities to evaluate and build arguments, to evaluate and incorporate information and evidence from appropriate and diverse sources, and to communicate effectively to an audience to achieve their purpose(s).
Confusingly, there is a table on page 7 of the Gen Ed proposal that still calls this area “Effective Communication,” and the notation on the table reads “This category may contain more than two courses moving forward; however, the total number of courses will remain small.”
I don’t know what this means. I am willing to take the provost and members of Gen Ed committee at their words when they say this proposal is a work in progress, no decisions have been made yet, and the committee and provost really want to hear what others have to say during the upcoming town hall events. But the rumors I have heard and the wording in this proposal suggest that there are faculty from other programs and departments on this committee who think that there ought to be other courses in this category as well. I can only speculate on the reasoning behind this, but my guess is the reasoning is that everyone writes and everyone assigns writing, so why should this requirement be restricted to a specific course or a specific discipline?
I strongly disagree, but before I get to that, let me briefly describe my discipline, composition and rhetoric, and my experiences in it.
Freshman Composition emerged as a course in the late 19th century, and today, somewhere around 90% of all colleges and universities in the U.S. require students to take a composition course. But composition and rhetoric (aka writing studies, composition studies, rhetoric and writing, etc.) is a relatively new academic specialization, with the first PhD programs emerging in the 1970s. Broadly speaking, composition and rhetoric also includes specialists in technical writing, business writing, and rhetoric. Some of the PhD programs around the country also include/are aligned with English as a Second Language or Communications. During my PhD studies in the 1990s (at BGSU and in an English department), I took courses about rhetorical theory, writing pedagogy, writing program administration, and qualitative research methodologies.
Most of my scholarship focuses on the connections between technology and writing pedagogy. My teaching includes everything from WRTG 121 to the courses graduate students need to take in order to teach WRTG 121 as a graduate assistant, not to mention many different 300 and 400-level classes. I have done quasi-administrative/service work over my 28 years at EMU as the coordinator of the undergrad program and MA program in writing, and as the interim director and associate director of the first-year writing program as well. I also wrote and a textbook for teaching research writing, an online/open source textbook that is used by writing teachers all over the world.
In short, I think I know what I’m talking about.
My main objection to this (proposed, still hypothetical) move away from requiring WRTG 121 is that it assumes any course where writing is assigned can substitute. That is inaccurate because WRTG 121 is a composition course, one in which the subject of the course is the process of writing.
WRTG 121 is an introduction to writing with research in order to persuade an audience and argue a thesis. It’s called freshman composition because it is supposed to precede the more advanced writingiintensive course taken in a major. This is exactly the kind of course the Gen Ed proposal is calling for, and I would argue that it is a course that should be taken before students take a course in “argumentative writing,” “visual communication,” or any course in a subject area where writing is assigned. Unfortunately, a lot of students at EMU don’t take WRTG 121 until their junior or even senior year.
Students always need to have some topic to research and write about, and in 121, those topics vary quite a bit. But unlike a writing course in (for example) business or biology or philosophy, the subject of research is secondary to the focus on studying the process of writing.
Composition is a “how-to” type of course: how to get started with an idea by practicing invention strategies, how to develop a thesis, how to conduct research, and how to evaluate those sources. The course introduces students to rhetoric in terms of studying appeals to persuade audiences, how to develop an argument, and how to arrange an essay. This is all accomplished through a series of scaffolded writing assignments: that is, rather than assigning students one large “research paper,” composition courses typically ask students to complete a series of shorter essays that build to a larger essay. Finally, composition courses are “student-centered” in that the pedagogy focuses on discussion, small group interactions, and peer review where students discuss each others’ essays with the goal of helping each other improve their final drafts.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
My second and closely related objection is that the Michigan Transfer Agreement specifically requires a composition course. Eliminating that requirement will likely create unanticipated transfer problems. Here’s a long quote from the MTA website:
To fulfill the Michigan Transfer Agreement, students must successfully complete at least 30 credits, with at least a 2.0 in each course and at least one credit completed at the institution awarding the MTA. These credits should be met according to the following distribution:
-
One course in English Composition
-
A second course in English Composition or 1 course in Communications
-
One course in Mathematics from one of three pathways: College Algebra, Statistics or Quantitative Reasoning
-
Two courses in Social Sciences (from two disciplines)
-
Two courses in Humanities and Fine Arts (from two disciplines excluding studio and performance classes)
-
Two courses in Natural Sciences including one with laboratory experience (from two disciplines)
Again, the MTA specifically requires an English Composition course, not merely a course where writing is assigned. And based on my previous experience helping to administer the first-year writing program, that distinction between a composition course and a course that assigns writing matters.
One of the goals for revising the Gen Ed is to streamline the transfer process, in part by automating it. For the most part, this already happens with WRTG 121: when students transfer from the Michigan community colleges, public universities, and independent colleges and universities listed on the MTA website, the transfer is automated based on a specific composition course. For example, Central Michigan’s ENG 103, Oakland’s WRT 1060, and U of M Dearborn’s COMP 106 all automatically transfer to EMU as 121– and vice versa.
But remember how I mentioned earlier that it was “almost” every university/college in the U.S.? It is “almost” because a lot of the most elite universities in the U.S. (the Ivy league and similarly prestigious places) don’t have a specific freshman composition course. One such university is the University of Michigan– though that is not because they don’t have composition courses. Rather, those courses are distributed across the curriculum at UM-Ann Arbor. It is also worth mentioning that both UM-Dearborn and UM-Flint have a specifically required composition courses, and those are institutions more similar to EMU than UM-Ann Arbor.
Sometimes, students will transfer to EMU from UM or another university where we don’t have a transfer agreement (from another state, for example), and that student will want EMU to count a particular course as the same as WRTG 121. When that happens, the director of first-year writing asks the student to share the syllabus for the course. If it looks like a composition course, it counts as 121. If it was a course that just assigned writing, it doesn’t.
Now, I suppose that if EMU moves away from a specific composition course, it doesn’t make a lot of difference to the students transferring from someplace else to here. After all, if we’re not going to have a specific composition course and we’re going to open it up to multiple courses, I’m sure we’ll still accept a real composition course as well. But besides the fact that eliminating a specifically required composition course would make us an outlier in terms of both the MTA and 90+% of other universities around the country like us, it would likely make it harder for EMU students to transfer someplace else.
So no, we should not eliminate a specific composition course from the General Education, and we should not open up that category to just any class where there happens to be writing assignments. That’s a bad idea.
This is more than long enough, but let me end with two more general observations:
First, none of this is to say that WRTG 121 is a perfect course and shouldn’t be changed in any way. There are lots of different ways the outcomes and design of the course could be changed and improved. For example, maybe there is an opportunity for making WRTG 121 and COMM 124 into a more closely coordinated two course sequence. But EMU also might want to require FTIACs to take freshman composition in their freshman year and before any writing intensive course within a major, and maybe we should require transfer students to take the course when they first enroll at EMU.
Second, what is the motivation for this change in the proposal? Every other area of the current and proposed Gen ed presumes disciplinarity, and I don’t think that a writing course about the rhetoric of the sciences would be considered as a Gen Ed option for either the Social Sciences or Natural Sciences. What is different about my discipline?