Rebecca Moore Howard
Office: 237 HB Crouse
Office hours: Mondays 1-3; Thursdays 2:30-4; and by appointment
Telephone: 443-1620
FAX: 315-691-9821
E-mail: rehoward@syr.edu
Home page http://wrt-howard.syr.edu

CCR 607, Composition Pedagogy

Course description

This course introduces new teachers of college composition to techniques of pedagogy and the philosophies that inform them. Students in the class will observe experienced teachers in the classroom, in small-group conferences, and in individual conferences.

We'll begin the semester with a very pedagogically grounded philosophical book, Hillocks' Ways of Thinking, Ways of Teaching. Class members will do observations of and have conversations with experienced teachers, to describe what philosophies of teaching they see in operation.

Then we'll be doing some fairly practical reading, from Irene Clark's Concepts in Composition. While reading Clark, class members will do teacher conversations and classroom observations again, to see what can be learned from observation that enhances what's in the Clark chapters.

Then we go to Harris' Teaching One-on-One, while observing student-teacher conferences. We may also at this time have opportunities to work in the Writing Center.

Finally, we'll read essays from the Tate collection. Each class member will pick a topic from Tate that interests them and do some additional research on that topic. The "additional research" would involve reading secondary sources, but it might also involve primary classroom observation.

Throughout the semester, class members will write about what they are reading, observing, and doing, and will report to the rest of us.

Throughout the semester, class members will write about what they are reading, observing, and doing, and will report to the rest of us. I'll grade and respond to these, and as we go along, we'll talk together about how these might best be calculated into a final grade for the course.

If you are submitting work for a grade in CCR 607, it should not be work that has, in any substantial version, been submitted (or will be submitted) in another course. If your work for this course overlaps with something you have done or are doing elsewhere, you must alert me to that fact so that you and I (and perhaps the other professor, as well) can assure that you're not getting double credit for a single job but are instead building connections between courses.

When you submit summaries and overviews of sources, whether for your graded reports or for your weekly chapter summaries, they, too, should be work that you have yourself produced. If you're relying on secondary sources, you need to acknowledge your indebtedness in the customary academic manner, through quotations, citations, and lists of works cited.

Cite sources (with page references) of quotation and summary or paraphrase. Provide a list of works cited. Use the MLA style sheet.

Visible patchwriting (copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes) or excessive reliance on quotation is unacceptable in final-draft doctoral work in composition and rhetoric--and in publications in the field, as well.

Proofread your written work carefully. Mechanical and grammatical errors such as comma splices, sentence fragments, dangling modifiers, incorrect punctuation, and misspellings are also unacceptable in scholarly work. All of us make such errors from time to time, but none of us can afford to become known for them.

1. Clark, Irene L. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.
2. Harris, Muriel. Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference. Urbana: NCTE, 1986.
3. Hillocks, George. Teaching Writing as Reflexive Practice. New York: Columbia Teacher's College P, 1995.
4. Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick, eds. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.

Individual instruction

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