FRESH COMPOSITION
New students are wanted for a birth approach to freshman composition courses with a new online course.
Written by Angela Loston
Fresh students are wanted for a bright approach to freshman composition courses. For more than 15 years, Fred Kemp, Ph.D., associate professor of the Department of English, has been searching for ways to improve the way composition is taught in English classes on college campuses. To him, English courses, especially for freshman college students, have been less engaging and more subjective for students. Rather than spending more time composing essays, Kemp said students have to endure listening to “how-to” lectures on writing. To help students play an active role in learning the art of writing, Kemp has created software that replaces the traditional lecture format with an interactive online class. This fall, first-year composition courses English 1301 and 1302 have evolved from a lecture-style writing seminar class to a Web-based, hands-on writing course that gives students the opportunity to practice the craft of writing instead of hearing lectures about the craft.
“Grading composition is inherently subjective,” he said. “Different readers can respond to the same piece of writing differently, especially readers with varying levels of grading experience as we have among our graduate students. The program we used for the first-year composition classes clarifies the criteria of effective writing and emphasizes consistency in applying those criteria.”
Under the new curriculum, students meet once a week with a classroom instructor. During the class, instructors coach students on their writing skills. For their assignments, Kemp said students submit papers via the Internet using his program, Interactive Composition Online or ICON. Essays that are submitted under ICON are edited and graded by document instructors who are graduate students who review students’ work. Unlike the classroom instructors, document instructors do not work closely with nor do they know the students personally, so the document instructors, therefore, are not compelled to grade the students based on their personalities, but on their performance, Kemp said. Because the document instructors anonymously evaluate the students’ work, Kemp said objectivity is restored in composition classes.
“This program is revolutionary in that it relieves teachers of the burden of grading and gives them the opportunity to coach students on their writing skills,” he said. During the 2002 spring and summer semesters, the Department of English pilot-tested the ICON program with several sections. For the spring semester, three classroom instructors and seven document instructors taught the courses while two classroom instructors and four document instructors taught sections for the summer session classes. Under the new course, Sam Dragga, Ph.D., professor and chairperson of the Department of English, said students were able to receive more immediate feedback on their papers from instructors. Dragga said students were very receptive to the revamped curriculum for the course.
“With the World Wide Web and wireless communications, you do not have to be necessarily in the classroom to receive instruction,” Dragga said. “By using the technology that is available to us in innovative ways, we are freeing students from having to be in a classroom.”
With the introduction of the new program, Kemp said he anticipates receiving some mixed responses to the revamped curriculum for the freshman-level classes. He said some students will embrace the changes to the course because they feel a sense of comfort in knowing that their papers are graded fairly by non-biased instructors. Other students may prefer their instructors to grade their compositions rather than an unknown reviewer. Under the new curriculum, Kemp said, some teachers will rejoice at the idea of not being overwhelmed with the responsibility of grading mounds of term papers while other instructors will dislike having their students’ essays evaluated by another instructor.
By having a more interactive composition class, Kathy Northcut, a doctoral student in technical communications and rhetoric, of Lubbock, said she was able to engage students in collaborative work efforts, such as group activities, because she spends less time presenting lectures to her students under the new English courses. Northcut, who first taught the class during the summer, said students can devote more outside time to reading and writing assignments because time was limited for in-class instruction for the course. While teaching the class, Northcut said she could give her students feedback that was consistent with textbook material and the criteria for the class.
“No one learns to write by listening to someone talk about writing,” Northcut said. “The students are able to practice working with ideas and concepts in small groups and individually a lot during the online class.”
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