The essay suggests a model for the FYC course that would require students to do their own “fieldwork” toward discovering the specifics of “academic writing” for each of them. I’ve used for years a similar model in my teaching of advanced composition for business majors, in which I require each of several teams of students to select and study the “writing culture” of a local small business, corporate office, or government agency [web syllabus]. For a possible model for FYC, I’ve been influenced both by this experience and by such work as the pedagogy of Jim Henry [mason.gmu.edu/~jhenry], the critical thinking ideas of Richard Paul and Linda Elder (How to Study and Learn a Discipline, The Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2001), Stephen Toulmin’s definitions of disciplines in Human Understanding (Vol. I; Princeton, 1972), and the WID research that Terry Zawacki and I have been conducting.
Toward doing worthwhile fieldwork in the other courses and disciplines that FYC students will become familiar with in their first year, a rubric of questions and tasks is essential. While each FYC course that wants a genuine WAC orientation should develop most of its own rubric, as appropriate for local conditions, a very basic list might look like this:
1. How do the documents of the course you are studying help you understand the aims and the methods of learning that are most important in that environment?
2. Speak with the professor of the course. How does s/he describe the most important aims of the course and the most important skills students will practice in it?
3. Study all the ways in which students are expected to write in the course, including assignments and teacher comments.
What Should First-Year Composition Students Learn about Writing across the Curriculum?
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