“The course…demonstrates our belief that
students can learn to transform materials, structures and situations that seem
fixed or inevitable, and that in doing so they can move form the margins of the
university to establish a place for themselves on the inside” (p. 41).
Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Basic Reading and
Writing course presents an opportunity for students who have been kept on the
outside of the academic discourse community to become integrated into it. Through engaged and rigorous study of a
single subject, students experience “the subtle interaction between language
and experience” (p. 102) and can begin to see themselves and readers, writers,
more critical and reflective thinkers and “presenters” of well-formed,
articulated and complex ideas (situated within the language and ideas of
others).
I appreciate the rigorous nature of this
course. Students, from the start, are
treated as competent thinkers capable of carrying out intense and demanding
work. I found myself writing “wow” in
the margin next to the description of what students “who have been identified
as poor readers and writers” do in
this course. They spend “six hours a
week for 15 weeks in a discussion class that centers on a single subject. They read, on the average, 12 books and write
25 drafts and revisions” (p. 30). I
would imagine that any student, through this process of such extensive and
intensive reading and writing, must come to appreciate the value of their own
literate and increasingly academic work.
Students are required to keep up with the course. (They must attend,
participate, complete all the assignments on time etc. or they will be
dropped). There is appropriate scaffolding and support but no hand holding
going on here.
Most of this I read and found extremely
logical. When designing my own course, I
might particularly draw from Bartholomae and Petrosky’s trajectory of
assignments. Students here work toward
developing theories about a subject, but start by generalizing from their own
experiences, then move toward generalizing from a set of case studies, before
examining toward the end of the course, published academic studies. I also really like the fact that students must
prepare their writing to be published in the class "autobiography" book,
adding importance to their work, words and ideas. I have only e a few questions about what I
read:
-Students are instructed to mark the margins
or circle page numbers as they read, but are asked explicitly not to underline or write
notes. Why are they discouraged from
annotating more elaborately? Is this
about speed, fluency or flow of reading?
-It is stated that this course is modeled
after an advanced graduate seminar, which it clearly is in many ways. A primary difference that jumped out at me,
however, is the fact that in an advanced seminar, students chose their own
subjects to study (and are therefore presumably interested in their topics of
investigation). I would assume that some
students enrolling in undergraduate-level coursework might not be able to
sustain interest in some of the topics (i.e. adolescent development) chosen for them. I realize it is assumed they
will be interested since the subject relates to their owns lives; however, I’m wondering
if lack of interest is ever an issue and if so, how that is handled.
