Curriculum

Accordinging to their student enrollment website in September 2021, Purdue University had an undergraduate enrollment of 34,920 and a graduate and professional enrollment of 10,949 (total: 45,869). The class of 2024 included 8,250 undergraduate students. 40% of those students were from out of state, 12% were international students, 41% were female, and 59% were male. As WPA Dilger explained, however, these numbers from 2021 represent "a huge amount of recent growth," and explains that "from Fall 2009 to Fall 2015 the number of students admitted was between 6,200 and 7,000. Since then it has risen to over 10,000. Notably, this enrollment increase does NOT include our college; we are shrinking relative to Purdue at large."

Purdue students tend to be STEM focused with 56% of students enrolled in STEM-focused colleges. 30% of students are enrolled in the College of Engineering, 14% in the College of Science and 12% in the College of Health and Human Sciences. The remaining 44% of enrolled students are distributed among various colleges including Agriculture, Liberal Arts, the School of Management, Exploratory Studies, and the College of Education. In terms of writing and the writing requirement, approximately 25% of students transfer in credit for ENGL 10600 through AP or dual credit coursework. In our interviews, an administrator noted that students “were not just the best STEM students at their school; they were on the yearbook club, and they were in the band, and they were in Art club, and they were in French club, and they ran every club. These were the best students at their school.” [Joel Ebarb] 

During our site visit in November 2018, Purdue University required all students to complete one, four-credit course in writing as part of “The University Core Curriculum.” English 10600: First Year Composition fulfills the Written Communication component of the Core Curriculum. Students can also fulfill this requirement by taking SCLA 10100: Transformative Texts, Critical Thinking & Communication I: Antiquity to Modernity. This course is part of the Cornerstone Certificate program, which is administered by the College of Liberal Arts.

In English 10600: First Year Composition, students learn to:

• Demonstrate rhetorical awareness of diverse audiences, situations, and contexts.
• Compose a variety of texts in a range of forms, equaling at least 7,500-11,500 words of polished writing (or 15,000-22,000 words, including drafts).
• Critically think about writing and rhetoric through reading, analysis, and reflection.
• Provide constructive feedback to others and incorporate feedback into their writing.
• Perform research and evaluate sources to support claims.
• Engage multiple digital technologies to compose for different purposes.

When the curriculum shifted from a two-course sequence to a one-course sequence in Fall 2003, digital writing was considered an expected part of the course, but with significant variation between instructors as to how it was implemented. However, the role that digital writing played in the course has evolved over time to be more standard across the curriculum with the remediation assignment, in which students re-envision one of the two projects completed earlier in the term.

To maintain some consistency across sections, instructors must select one of the approved syllabus approaches for their course. Regardless of the syllabus approach, students complete the remediation project as part of the course.

Assignment Directions for Students

You will take your main argument from Inquiry 3 and remediate it (that is, adapt a message from its current page-based form to some other medium using digital technology) into a form that you think will capture your argument best. It could be a short video that you (hypothetically) embed into your proposal, a website, a Facebook page serving your cause, an audio essay, a presentation of some sort, a comic, a 3-D model, or something else entirely. The key is that it must include visuals and text, and (potentially) sound. You will ALSO compose a production/ reflection essay about your experience and final product (think: director’s commentary) that will be at least 3 pages in length. The key to this project is considering the ways that presentation in a different genre or medium can change how we form arguments.

Project Outcomes

• The ability to take previous projects and shift them into other forms, genres, and contexts
• Practice ethically and carefully keeping track of digital sources, including videos, links, and visuals
• An awareness of the importance in pinpointing audience, purpose, genre, and form in public, digital writing
• An understanding of the role that circulation and distribution play in the sharing and spreading of public texts
• An increased ability to make rhetorical design choices, and then explain those choices in written and verbal formats
• A heightened awareness of visual design principles and how they function in advertisements and other cultural artifacts 
• Practice in planning complex projects with multiple written and visual aspects

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.

ICaP makes many of its resources available publicly and a more extensive collection of these resources can be found on the Purdue ICap website and in the Purdue ICaP Google Drive.