Curriculum

According to OSU’s “Statistical Summary 2018-2019,” the university’s total enrollment was 68,100, and enrollment at the Columbus campus, which we visited, was 61,170. At that time, the main Columbus campus’s enrollment was listed as the third largest among public U.S. Universities. Of OSU’s total enrollment, 53,734 were undergraduates, 11,113 were graduate students, and 3,253 were professional students. Within the total enrollment, 71.9% were Ohioans and 28.1% were Non-Ohioans, and 35.15% of the “Non-Ohioans” were international students. OSU’s 2018-2019 statistical summary only provided data for two genders and reported that 49.6% of their total student population were men and 50.4% were women. Additionally, 6.4% were African American, 6.5% were Asian American, 4.4% were HIspanic, 3.6% were two or more races, 0.1% were American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 0.04% were Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.

As then-WPA Edgar Singleton explained to us, about 4000 students enrolled in OSU’s first-year writing program each year. He characterized these students as “generally high-achieving and well prepared,” noting that many come from suburban school districts surrounding Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati and that there is also strong representation from rural areas, inner cities, and a growing number of out-of-state students, especially from Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. He also noted that international students are over-represented in these classes because nearly all of them take English 1110 while only about half of the native English-speaking students do.

At the time of our site visit in November 2018, the OSU faculty were in the process of revising their General Education (GE) curriculum. At that time, OSU required all students to complete two courses to satisfy the Writing requirement of the GE: (1) the first-level writing course, English 1110: First-Year English Composition, which was run and staffed by the First-Year Writing program, and (2) the second-level writing course, the “2367 course,” which was offered by twenty-six departments from across the university, many of which were developed in consultation with the Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) program so that the course would meet the GE-mandated curricular guidelines. 

The OSU English Department website explained English 1110 as “a course in analytical thinking and writing that asks students to compose a range of scaffolded writing assignments leading to a longer researched essay. That essay will demonstrate students’ capabilities of developing a compelling idea, using outside resources effectively and appropriately and honoring conventions of academic writing. In addition, students compose a multimodal presentation that grows from their research and engages a public—rather than an academic—audience.” The learning outcomes for English 1110 specified that students would build knowledge in four main areas:

1. Rhetorical knowledge: Throughout the first course, students should practice reading and writing in several genres. By the end of their first writing course, students should:
• Understand how genre conventions shaped the texts they read and should shape the texts they compose
• Understand the possibilities of electronic media/technologies for composing and publishing texts for a variety of audiences
• Compose texts that:
• Have a clear purpose
• Respond to the needs of intended audiences
• Assume an appropriate stance
• Adopt an appropriate voice, tone, style and level of formality
• Use appropriate conventions of format and structure
  
  
2. Critical thinking, reading and writing: By the end of their first writing course, students should be able to:
• Use reading and writing for inquiry, learning, thinking and communicating
• Locate and evaluate secondary research materials, including visual texts such as photographs, videos, or other materials
• Analyze relationships among writer, text, and audience in various kinds of texts
• Use various critical thinking strategies to analyze texts
  
  
3. Knowledge of composing processes: By the end of their first writing course, students should be able to:
• Recognize that writing is a flexible, recursive process that typically involves a series of activities, including generating ideas and text, drafting, revising and editing
• Understand that writing is often collaborative and social. To demonstrate that understanding, students should be able to:
• Work with others to improve their own and others’ texts
• Balance the advantages of relying on others with taking responsibility for their own work
• Apply this understanding and recognition to produce successive drafts of increasing quality
• Use electronic environments to support writing tasks such as drafting, reviewing, revising, editing and sharing texts.
  
  
4. Knowledge of conventions: By the end of their first writing course, students should be able to:
• Recognize genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, tone and mechanics employed in a variety of popular forms
• Learn to control syntax, grammar, punctuation and spelling through practice in composing and revising
• Select and employ appropriate conventions for structure, paragraphing, mechanics and format in their own writing
• Acknowledge the work of others when appropriate
• Use standard documentation format as needed

At the time of our visit, the digital assignment in English 1110 was the Symposium Presentation, an assignment that had undergone a few different iterations since its initial implementation six years prior. A digital remix assignment had been part of the curriculum since at least 2008, but no one we spoke with could point to a specific time when it became part of the curriculum. 

All English 1110 students were asked to create a Symposium Presentation. This assignment came toward the end of the course and built on previous work they had completed. Students were asked to take some aspect of the Analytical Research Project they worked on earlier in the class and to create a five-minute presentation using Adobe Spark. Their Adobe Spark presentation needed to include images and text and could be delivered to their classmembers as a pre-recorded script, a live reading they did themselves, or a live reading completed by someone other than the creator. Then-WPA Edgar Singleton emphasized the focus of the assignment was to get students to (a) think about how images and text worked together to convey and support claims, (b) consider what counted as evidence for public (as opposed to academic) audiences, and (c) consider questions of intellectual property and copyright. Over the course of two weeks of class time, students delivered their own Symposium Presentation and watched and responded to their classmates’ presentations.

The process of creating this presentation is broken into multiple stages that are described this way in Chapter 1 of The Writer’s Companion:

Preparing 

Process Posts: From time to time during the semester, you will find and write about images that connect to both your ARP and your Symposium Presentation. These short pieces of writing are called Process Posts. The images you will be asked to find are images that do not merely illustrate topics associated with your research or the course theme, but rather images that raise questions, suggest new ideas, or highlight tensions. The practice of finding these images will lead into image selection for your Symposium Presentation. 

The Process Posts will give you an opportunity to reflect on, discuss, and expand the ideas you are thinking about and the variety of images you have found. They will also prove important in allowing you to choose and refine a strong topic for your Symposium Presentation: a topic that is connected to the research for your Analytical Research Project, and that can also be effectively presented within the format and time limits of the project. 

The Symposium Presentation

Selection and Documentation of Appropriate Images: Over the course of the semester, you will work to find and choose the 15 images that will make up the visual part of your Symposium Presentation. You will select images that clearly and powerfully communicate ideas as part of a coherently structured presentation. You will also appropriately cite these images and demonstrate that you understand the rules of copyright that control how they may be used. 

Symposium Script: You will provide 50-60 words of text for each of the 15 images you select. This narration, which you will carefully script, will not simply describe or explain your images, but will work with them in order to effectively interest and educate your audience. 

Responding

Symposium Active Listening Response: During the Symposium, you will be required to respond to your classmates’ presentations in one of three ways depending on your assignment for a given day. You may be assigned to lead a discussion immediately following the presentations, to provide immediate written feedback, or to introduce a fellow student’s presentation. Your responses will allow you to demonstrate your thoughtfulness as an audience member, and your ability to provide focused, appropriate, and constructive feedback to your classmates.

Below, find direct links to teaching materials used to implement the curriculum for this particular institution. Note, you can also find all teaching materials for all institutions in the resource repository by clicking here.