Whether you’re completely new to teaching writing or just want to learn more about doing it at the college level, WRD 540: Teaching Writing with Dr. Jason Schneider is a great place to start. This course allows students to explore the topic from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. You’ll also need to take this course if you’re interested in applying for the Teaching Apprenticeship Program (TAP) next year.
This is Professor Schneider’s second year teaching this class. He’s taught a variety of courses on pedagogy, rhetoric, and applied linguistics to both grad students and undergrads, so he looks forward to sharing his experiences and working with grad students entering the field.
Major assignments
Professor Schneider describes the class as a mixture of theory and practice. The fields of writing studies and composition pedagogy have undergone a number of changes over the last several decades, and this history influences the state of the field today. Students will explore theory and history through readings, papers and a book discussion, and will learn about assignment design, assessments, and feedback.
But that’s not all: students will also learn how those theoretical approaches work in practice. Assignments in this course include writing a literacy narrative and compiling an online portfolio, two assignments that are now common in first-year college-level writing classes. This gives grad students a chance to put themselves in the shoes of the students they will go on to teach. Students will also get a chance to observe a day of class with a first-year writing instructor and draw connections between the work being done there and the things they’ve been learning in class.
Course modality
This course is held via hybrid modality. In this case, that means that all classes will be taught synchronously, but about half the classes will be held in-person at Lincoln Park, and half will be on Zoom, depending on the week.
What you’ll take away
If students take away one thing from this course, Professor Schneider hopes it is the ability to be a flexible and responsive teacher. “I think there’s a lot of different great ways to be a teacher. So I want students to leave with a range of ideas, practices, perspectives, and approaches, and they can then enter new teaching situations, whatever those might be. It might be they’re going to teach a college writing class. It might be they’re a high school teacher of English. In any case, they can sort of figure out, ‘Okay, I have all this stuff to work with. What can I draw on that I think will work well to support my students in this class?’”
He emphasizes that teaching is a series of choices with no clear right or wrong answers. If you’re curious about pedagogy but have no immediate plans to teach, this course may still provide an interesting perspective. “[As a student], you’re trying to do your best and sometimes just do what you’re told. But a class like this is a chance to step back, start to think about all that goes into the work of teaching and sort of reflect on, okay, everything that happens in a classroom is a bunch of choices. And those choices are informed by a bunch of beliefs about what’s good for teaching, what’s bad for teaching, what I should do for students, what I shouldn’t do. So it’s a chance to learn about teaching and learning from a different point of view if you’ve mainly experienced that as a student, which is how most people experience the classroom.”
Conclusion
No matter what your background is, WRD 540 will be a valuable experience for anyone with an interest in education. Add it to your course cart to get ready for registration!