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 is substantial diversity in 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 (ICCI) that provides them with more intensive support.
As the course aims to introduce students to the “foundations” of college writing/composition, Foundations 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.
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 many different things at many different institutions. Here at Rowan, we approach teaching basic writing in the following ways:
-- In context; that is, grammatical correctness is tied to audience expectations/the rhetorical situation.
-- 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.
-- As part of editing, and a later stage in the writing process.
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 correctness and clarity
Course Projects
Like 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.
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 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.
Non-essay projects 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 any course; it is also to show the students have come to understand and internalize the writing practices and processes that the Core Values/Outcomes represent, and to better understand themselves as writers. The reflective statement also, in itself, initiates a practice—reflection–which writers need when faced with new writing problems.
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. Students cannot include projects in their portfolio that the instructor has not previously seen and commented on. See more about grading portfolios on the Instructor Support Website.
Final Grades in the Course
Foundations is a pass/fail course. Because the primary purpose is to get students ready for their credit-bearing college writing courses, a portfolio of passing quality should equate to a passing grade in the course. While other non-portfolio components of the course are not graded per se, it is critical that students recognize the role that attendance, class discussion, course activities, pre-writing assignments, etc. play in their success in the course. In order to prevent students from sabotaging their own success by thinking they can just write everything at the end of the semester, it is important to avoid advertising this policy, and to address issues like attendance and late work during conferences and via the Rowan Success Network. Likewise, a passing portfolio must contain the required drafts of student work to ensure that the instructor can evaluate students’ ability to engage in writing as a process. See the sample syllabus for language to use to talk to students about grading and evaluation.
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 (ICCI) that provides them with more intensive support.
As the course aims to introduce students to the “foundations” of college writing/composition, Foundations 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.
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 many different things at many 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:
-- In context; that is, grammatical correctness is tied to audience expectations/the rhetorical situation.
-- 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.
-- As part of editing, and a later stage in the writing process.
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 expectation 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 correctness and clarity
Course Projects
Like 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.
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 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.
Non-essay projects 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 any course; it is also to show the students have come to understand and internalize the writing practices and processes that the Core Values/Outcomes represent, and to better understand themselves as writers. The reflective statement also, in itself, initiates a practice—reflection–which writers need when faced with new writing problems.
The Portfolio
The Foundations student portfolio contains the following items:
- Two written “projects” (which may take the form of an essay or another genre) and any related parts the instructor feels are necessary to include to assess student learning.
- Project guidelines/requirements for written portions:
- 1-3 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 works cited 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.
- At least one instructor-commented draft for the written portion of each portfolio project.
- 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. Students cannot include projects in their portfolio that the instructor has not previously seen and commented on. See more about grading portfolios on the Instructor Support Website.
Final Grades in the Course
Foundations is a pass/fail course. Because the primary purpose is to get students ready for their credit-bearing college writing courses, a portfolio of passing quality should equate to a passing grade in the course. While other non-portfolio components of the course are not graded per se, it is critical that students recognize the role that attendance, class discussion, course activities, pre-writing assignments, etc. play in their success in the course. In order to prevent students from sabotaging their own success by thinking they can just write everything at the end of the semester, it is important to avoid advertising this policy, and to address issues like attendance and late work during conferences and via the Rowan Success Network. Likewise, a passing portfolio must contain the required drafts of student work to ensure that the instructor can evaluate students’ ability to engage in writing as a process. See the sample syllabus for language to use to talk to students about grading and evaluation.