Overview of Foundations for College Writing
Foundations for College Writing is a course for students whose writing has been identified as not yet college-ready. However, there are a wide range of reasons why a student’s writing might not be college-ready. The challenge of this course is meeting this diverse body of students where they are, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and providing them the foundations to be successful writers in their academic careers, as well as in their personal and future professional lives.
The purpose of this course is to serve as an introduction to the habits of mind, practices, and processes associated with reading, writing, and meaning-making, and to help students understand the conventions and expectations of college-level writing. At the end of this course, students still might not be able to perform college-level writing, but they can engage in the habits of mind, practices, and processes that are required for successful college-level writing. Students who successfully complete Foundations will move into our bridge course (Intensive College Composition I - ICCI) that provides them with more intensive support.
As Foundations for College Writing aims to introduce students to the “foundations” of college writing/composition, it should expose students to and provide opportunities to practice the reading and writing practices and processes that they will encounter in I/CCI. Instructors should therefore familiarize themselves with the curriculum of I/CCI. However, the course should be more than a scaled-down version of I/CCI; instead, this “extra” composition course students get to take should be a space to explore concepts in ways we often don’t have time for in other writing courses. More time could be spent on:
Habits of Mind
While we often think of “college-readiness” as measured in student performance of concrete skills (such as organizing a paragraph or introducing a source), “college-readiness” also is linked to habits of mind, or non-cognitive skills, that enable student learning. These habits of mind are outlined in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, and these should be considered a major part of the Foundations curriculum in addition to the FYWP Core Values. Instructors of Foundations should ground their students in these habits of mind through reading, writing, and analysis assignments and activities. According to The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, these habits of mind are:
Our Approach to “Basic Writing”
Basic writing means different things at different institutions. Here at Rowan, we approach teaching basic writing in the following ways:
rhetorical situation, and students must consider if their goal is to meet audience expectations for this dialect.
-- In response to patterns of error for individual students.
-- With the understanding that grammar/usage is linked to students’ understanding of ideas and comfort-level with what they want to express. Often, their writing has fewer errors when they have a firm understanding of what they want to say.
-- As a lower-order concern compared to higher-order concerns in writing (such as idea development and analysis). Primarily, we are concerned with grammar and mechanics insofar as they interfere with expression/reader comprehension. For example, regardless of what dialect of English a student writes in or what “accent” might appear in an English language learner’s writing, sentence fragments are worth attending to because they generally lead to incomplete thoughts in written prose.
-- As part of editing, and a later stage in the writing process. In doing so, they reinforce their own understanding of writing as a process and their sense of responsibility as writers to consider the reader’s needs for clarity.
Successful course readings, assignments, and class activities will promote students’ abilities to:
-- reading to understand/summarize ideas
-- reading to analyze
-- reading to question ideas
-- focus
-- structure
-- unity
-- linguistic clarity
Course Essays/Projects and Transforming the Five-Paragraph Essay
As in all of our courses, Foundations students are to encounter and engage in rhetorically meaningful writing that emerges from close and critical reading, analysis, and synthesis. Like many new college students, Foundations students need to be guided to rethink writing—from it being a limited performative act with prescriptive approaches (such as the five-paragraph essay) to it being evolving, active engagement with ideas, their lives, and others that is based on critical thinking and rhetorical awareness.
The Five-Paragraph Essay
From what we know about learning transfer, students will be poised to adapt to new genres, conventions, and rhetorical situations if 1) we directly address their pre-existing ideas about writing and 2) help them navigate how their new writing tasks relate to older ones (what is similar and what is different). Because many students will be familiar with the five-paragraph essay and because there are elements of it that do transfer to other types of essays (such as paragraph unity and the use of topic sentences), it can be useful to address and re-examine that genre early on in the semester, then explicitly discuss how new essay assignments deviate from and/or transform those basic elements of essay writing and how the differing features or compositional choices writers make relate to the rhetorical situation and purpose. It’s also worth noting that there are faculty in other disciplines who occasionally will expect students to produce five-paragraph essays, so treating this genre as if it never occurs in college would be inaccurate. It can be helpful to students to recognize what it is and that there are situations where they likely will work within its conventions.
Foundations students’ awareness of general “organization” of essays may or may not include even basic rudimentary understanding of introductions, body paragraphs and conclusions -- and may not include understanding of paragraph unity as critical to expressing coherent ideas. Therefore, instructors should assess the needs of the students through a writing sample that might indicate the general level of awareness of students, and particular strengths and weaknesses of individuals, as desired.
Major Assignments/Essays
Ideally, projects in Foundations should present the opportunity for students to engage in rhetorically meaningful writing, which may not always culminate in a traditional college essay. When these projects do lead to an essay, it should be one that allows students to explore and wrestle with divergent ideas, particularly by raising a question from course texts and negotiating authors’ ideas using personal observations and examples from the world around them. This provides students with an opportunity to practice thinking about texts in a way that is meaningful, considering their own opinions and merging differing views to gain deeper understanding of texts and the world around them. This engagement is crucial for college writing in general, but for developmental writers, it is an essential building block to understanding how college writing differs from high school writing.
Considering the coursework students will face in college across varied disciplines, we encourage faculty to address the two general writing purposes students will encounter most often: analysis and argumentation. For both analysis and argumentation, students learn to make claims and support these claims with evidence. Analysis in particular works well for close reading and working with textual evidence, and rhetorical analysis in particular reinforces the learning goals of the course. Argumentation can widen the palette of evidence to anecdotes, observations, illustrations, and evidence from sources, and it provides the opportunity to handle more than one source text in a piece of writing and to practice acknowledging, conceding to, and responding to alternative points of view. The two sample assignments on the Instructor Support Site represent these two rhetorical purposes.
Multimodal Projects and Other Genres
Possibly, one major assignment for the course could be a non-essay project. Working in a genre other than an essay would create opportunities for students to practice course learning outcomes through exploring/creating genres and/or multi-modal texts. In fact, variations in projects’ genres and modes can foster flexible student writing processes. Multi-modal projects, however, should be accompanied by some sort of written rationale or analysis, which will provide students with additional practice writing and make creative work easier to evaluate.
Core Values and Reflection
Writers and learners reflect. The reflection statement that is required for all course portfolios is not only to demonstrate to the instructors that the students have engaged with the learning outcomes of a given course, but also to show the students that they have come to understand and internalize the writing practices and processes that the Core Values/Outcomes represent, and to help them better understand themselves as writers. The reflective statement also, in itself, initiates a practice—reflection–which writers need when faced with new writing problems.
Again, at the end of this course, students still might not be able to perform college-level writing, but they can engage in the habits of mind, practices, and processes that are required for successful college-level writing. The reflective statement helps faculty more accurately assess student learning and growth by providing a window into students’ awareness of the thought processes and values that guide a writer’s decision-making. This awareness is demonstrated through students supporting their own claims within reflections by providing key examples or offering analysis or motivations for their own creative decisions.
The Portfolio
The Foundations student portfolio contains the following items:
Grading Portfolios
Portfolios are graded holistically using the Foundations Portfolio Evaluation form. While graded holistically, certain elements carry more weight, as would be expected (such as the essays/major projects themselves). Instructors are not expected to make extensive comments in the portfolio. The Portfolio Evaluation form allows for comments and feedback.
Students are expected to turn in complete portfolios, which includes instructor-commented drafts since these are part of the writing process and revision is being evaluated. If a student includes projects in their portfolio that the instructor has not previously seen and commented on, this is cause for concern and will impact their evaluation. See more about grading portfolios on the Instructor Support Website.
The purpose of this course is to serve as an introduction to the habits of mind, practices, and processes associated with reading, writing, and meaning-making, and to help students understand the conventions and expectations of college-level writing. At the end of this course, students still might not be able to perform college-level writing, but they can engage in the habits of mind, practices, and processes that are required for successful college-level writing. Students who successfully complete Foundations will move into our bridge course (Intensive College Composition I - ICCI) that provides them with more intensive support.
As Foundations for College Writing aims to introduce students to the “foundations” of college writing/composition, it should expose students to and provide opportunities to practice the reading and writing practices and processes that they will encounter in I/CCI. Instructors should therefore familiarize themselves with the curriculum of I/CCI. However, the course should be more than a scaled-down version of I/CCI; instead, this “extra” composition course students get to take should be a space to explore concepts in ways we often don’t have time for in other writing courses. More time could be spent on:
- Learning to annotate texts for different reading purposes
- How to approach reading a text
- Activities for understanding rhetoric and the rhetorical situation
- Practicing close reading of texts that won’t necessarily lead to a major assignment
- Identifying and practicing appropriate paraphrasing; navigating working with source material ethically
- Providing feedback on meeting the conventions of summary writing and crafting an accurate summary
- Ways to generate ideas toward and focus for a piece of writing
- Exploring/examining multiple ways to structure and organize a text
- More frequent practice with “peer review,” offering evaluative feedback to sample texts
Habits of Mind
While we often think of “college-readiness” as measured in student performance of concrete skills (such as organizing a paragraph or introducing a source), “college-readiness” also is linked to habits of mind, or non-cognitive skills, that enable student learning. These habits of mind are outlined in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, and these should be considered a major part of the Foundations curriculum in addition to the FYWP Core Values. Instructors of Foundations should ground their students in these habits of mind through reading, writing, and analysis assignments and activities. According to The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, these habits of mind are:
- Curiosity – the desire to know more about the world.
- Openness – the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.
- Engagement – a sense of investment and involvement in learning.
- Creativity – the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.
- Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
- Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.
- Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.
- Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.
Our Approach to “Basic Writing”
Basic writing means different things at different institutions. Here at Rowan, we approach teaching basic writing in the following ways:
- Students in the course should be given intellectually challenging work rather than “skill-and-drill” remediation.
- Additional support/resources, such as additional conference/one-on-one time and scaffolding, is essential.
- Reading instruction is critical, and time should be spent learning to annotate, to read for different purposes, and to observe textual and genre conventions.
- Writing should not be taught one “unit” at a time (sentences, then paragraphs, then essays); students deserve to engage in rhetorically meaningful writing from the start, and issues of sentence structure and paragraph organization can be addressed in the context of authentic writing assignments.
- While some grammar instruction may be necessary, it is best to treat and teach grammar:
rhetorical situation, and students must consider if their goal is to meet audience expectations for this dialect.
-- In response to patterns of error for individual students.
-- With the understanding that grammar/usage is linked to students’ understanding of ideas and comfort-level with what they want to express. Often, their writing has fewer errors when they have a firm understanding of what they want to say.
-- As a lower-order concern compared to higher-order concerns in writing (such as idea development and analysis). Primarily, we are concerned with grammar and mechanics insofar as they interfere with expression/reader comprehension. For example, regardless of what dialect of English a student writes in or what “accent” might appear in an English language learner’s writing, sentence fragments are worth attending to because they generally lead to incomplete thoughts in written prose.
-- As part of editing, and a later stage in the writing process. In doing so, they reinforce their own understanding of writing as a process and their sense of responsibility as writers to consider the reader’s needs for clarity.
Successful course readings, assignments, and class activities will promote students’ abilities to:
- understand the habits of mind associated with college, personal, and professional success
- closely and critically read texts, both their own and others’, for a variety of purposes, which include:
-- reading to understand/summarize ideas
-- reading to analyze
-- reading to question ideas
- understand writing as rhetorically situated and the importance of recognizing rhetorical contexts and the role audience and purpose in successful writing
- recognize conventions and expectations of writing based on genre and discourse communities and that these conventions and expectations are not universal
- see and make connections between texts (synthesize) so as to understand and develop their own ideas
- communicate ideas that balance the personal and the concrete with the conceptual and the abstract
- understand writing as a practice and a process
- recognize and understand textual coherence, which includes:
-- focus
-- structure
-- unity
-- linguistic clarity
Course Essays/Projects and Transforming the Five-Paragraph Essay
As in all of our courses, Foundations students are to encounter and engage in rhetorically meaningful writing that emerges from close and critical reading, analysis, and synthesis. Like many new college students, Foundations students need to be guided to rethink writing—from it being a limited performative act with prescriptive approaches (such as the five-paragraph essay) to it being evolving, active engagement with ideas, their lives, and others that is based on critical thinking and rhetorical awareness.
The Five-Paragraph Essay
From what we know about learning transfer, students will be poised to adapt to new genres, conventions, and rhetorical situations if 1) we directly address their pre-existing ideas about writing and 2) help them navigate how their new writing tasks relate to older ones (what is similar and what is different). Because many students will be familiar with the five-paragraph essay and because there are elements of it that do transfer to other types of essays (such as paragraph unity and the use of topic sentences), it can be useful to address and re-examine that genre early on in the semester, then explicitly discuss how new essay assignments deviate from and/or transform those basic elements of essay writing and how the differing features or compositional choices writers make relate to the rhetorical situation and purpose. It’s also worth noting that there are faculty in other disciplines who occasionally will expect students to produce five-paragraph essays, so treating this genre as if it never occurs in college would be inaccurate. It can be helpful to students to recognize what it is and that there are situations where they likely will work within its conventions.
Foundations students’ awareness of general “organization” of essays may or may not include even basic rudimentary understanding of introductions, body paragraphs and conclusions -- and may not include understanding of paragraph unity as critical to expressing coherent ideas. Therefore, instructors should assess the needs of the students through a writing sample that might indicate the general level of awareness of students, and particular strengths and weaknesses of individuals, as desired.
Major Assignments/Essays
Ideally, projects in Foundations should present the opportunity for students to engage in rhetorically meaningful writing, which may not always culminate in a traditional college essay. When these projects do lead to an essay, it should be one that allows students to explore and wrestle with divergent ideas, particularly by raising a question from course texts and negotiating authors’ ideas using personal observations and examples from the world around them. This provides students with an opportunity to practice thinking about texts in a way that is meaningful, considering their own opinions and merging differing views to gain deeper understanding of texts and the world around them. This engagement is crucial for college writing in general, but for developmental writers, it is an essential building block to understanding how college writing differs from high school writing.
Considering the coursework students will face in college across varied disciplines, we encourage faculty to address the two general writing purposes students will encounter most often: analysis and argumentation. For both analysis and argumentation, students learn to make claims and support these claims with evidence. Analysis in particular works well for close reading and working with textual evidence, and rhetorical analysis in particular reinforces the learning goals of the course. Argumentation can widen the palette of evidence to anecdotes, observations, illustrations, and evidence from sources, and it provides the opportunity to handle more than one source text in a piece of writing and to practice acknowledging, conceding to, and responding to alternative points of view. The two sample assignments on the Instructor Support Site represent these two rhetorical purposes.
Multimodal Projects and Other Genres
Possibly, one major assignment for the course could be a non-essay project. Working in a genre other than an essay would create opportunities for students to practice course learning outcomes through exploring/creating genres and/or multi-modal texts. In fact, variations in projects’ genres and modes can foster flexible student writing processes. Multi-modal projects, however, should be accompanied by some sort of written rationale or analysis, which will provide students with additional practice writing and make creative work easier to evaluate.
Core Values and Reflection
Writers and learners reflect. The reflection statement that is required for all course portfolios is not only to demonstrate to the instructors that the students have engaged with the learning outcomes of a given course, but also to show the students that they have come to understand and internalize the writing practices and processes that the Core Values/Outcomes represent, and to help them better understand themselves as writers. The reflective statement also, in itself, initiates a practice—reflection–which writers need when faced with new writing problems.
Again, at the end of this course, students still might not be able to perform college-level writing, but they can engage in the habits of mind, practices, and processes that are required for successful college-level writing. The reflective statement helps faculty more accurately assess student learning and growth by providing a window into students’ awareness of the thought processes and values that guide a writer’s decision-making. This awareness is demonstrated through students supporting their own claims within reflections by providing key examples or offering analysis or motivations for their own creative decisions.
The Portfolio
The Foundations student portfolio contains the following items:
- Two written “projects” (which may take the form of two essay or an essay and another genre) and any related parts the instructor feels are necessary to include to assess student learning.
- Project guidelines/requirements for written portions:
- 2-3 pages in length (depends on whether or not the written portion is the major part of the project)
- minimum of 1 source (used for contextualization, illustration, or explanation)
- informal citation (and possibly a references page if requested by the instructor)
- At least one of these projects should require that students work with two sources (in order to demonstrate synthesis), which can occur at any point in the writing process.
- Project guidelines/requirements for written portions:
- At least one instructor-commented draft for the written portion of each portfolio project.
- Two source analyses/responses. This requirement is meant to give more weight to and presence of the important, ongoing work that leads up to projects and that helps assess students' ability to read, summarize, analyze, and work with sources. The guidelines are very loose, but instructors should consult the portfolio evaluation form to see the learning outcomes these items are used to evaluate.
- A reflective statement that engages with the course learning outcomes.
Grading Portfolios
Portfolios are graded holistically using the Foundations Portfolio Evaluation form. While graded holistically, certain elements carry more weight, as would be expected (such as the essays/major projects themselves). Instructors are not expected to make extensive comments in the portfolio. The Portfolio Evaluation form allows for comments and feedback.
Students are expected to turn in complete portfolios, which includes instructor-commented drafts since these are part of the writing process and revision is being evaluated. If a student includes projects in their portfolio that the instructor has not previously seen and commented on, this is cause for concern and will impact their evaluation. See more about grading portfolios on the Instructor Support Website.