reinventing the wheel

I’m teaching Comp 2 as a stand alone course for the first time in four or five years. I’ve taught Comp 2 regularly for the past four or five years, but always as part of a learning community. Learning communities are unofficially being phased out at RRCC because faculty are no longer willing to do teach them for the crappy compensation we get.

Preparing to teach Comp 2 this semester was like reinventing the wheel at first. It took me forever to feel like I had an actual plan or even a sense of what the course needed to accomplish. The official curriculum guide for the course is quite uninspiring, with lots of broad claims such as “students will plan, write, and revise assignments that demonstrate an ability to use research as support.” So exciting.

Then there was the textbook disconnect.

So I figured Comp 2 would feel awkward for at least the first half of the semester. Instead, my two sections of Comp 2 have been anything but awkward. From the very first class meetings, my classes have been lively and engaged, and I’ve felt quite comfortable.

I’m using slightly modified versions of many of the activities and assignments I use in Comp 1, such as blogs and response logs. I’m also putting a heavy emphasis on revision. I’ve divided the course into thirds, with the first third focusing on general research on a topic, culminating in a working bibliography, a review of literature, and a profile of someone interviewed, and the last two thirds focusing on the drafting and revising of elements of a multigenre research project on the same topic students worked with for the first third.

One thing I’ve done that has worked very well is that I have used one particular topic as an example for everything we’ve done in class, from critical reading (an article from Ms. Magazine on how privatization of Social Security would hit women particularly hard) to coming up with research questions to doing Internet research and using Ebsco Host to find peer-reviewed articles. Usually, I use random topics for each activity, using maybe social security for critical reading, the Electoral College for coming up with research questions, the digital divide for doing Internet research, etc. Using the same topic has given a sense of continuity and the class has seen me take a mini-research project through the same steps they themselves are taking their projects through.

links: del.icio.us    technorati