Facts...Counterfacts/Blog 1

“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.