Curriculum

According to their student demographics website in September 2021, Salt Lake Community College had a student headcount of 20,484 and a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) count of 11,906 for the 2020-2021 academic year. In that same academic year, the median age of students was 22, 55% of students were female, and 32% of students were students of color, which the student demographics page of SLCC’s 2020-2021 Fact Book notes is the largest percentage of students of color enrolled at any of the Utah System of Higher Education institutions. According to U.S. News, whose information comes from the 2018-2019 academic year, the majority of SLCC students (about 74%) are enrolled part-time. We heard from our interview participants that a prevailing assumption on campus is that SLCC students will transfer to a university after leaving SLCC but that, in reality, many do not.

During our site visit in late March 2019, SLCC required all students to complete two English writing courses to satisfy Composition requirement of the general education curriculum. As their course catalog explained, “Most students will complete ENGL 1010 [Intro to Writing] and then either ENGL 2010 [Intermediate Writing] or ENGL 2100 [Technical Writing]. If a student has completed only ENGL 2010, they may meet the Composition (EN) requirement by choosing a second writing class from one of the following: ENGL 1010, ENGL 2100, BUS 2200, or take the English CLEP exam.”

In addition to having learning outcomes for individual courses, SLCC also has outcomes for the composition program, which are: 

• Students will exhibit their rhetorical awareness and flexibility as readers and writers through extended practice negotiating new and diverse reading and writing situations and tasks that require their adaptation to shifting expectations and demands.
• Students will demonstrate their critical thinking capacity as readers and writers through the ongoing practice of analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, and evaluating ideas, information, situations, and texts across diverse reading and writing tasks.
• Students will develop metacognition through the ongoing practice of reflecting on their own thinking and language use as writers and readers and theorizing, more generally, the work that language does in the world.
• Students will develop an ability and confidence to navigate writing processes through ongoing opportunities to write in diverse contexts, engage writing assignments in stages, and practice revision.

And then specifically for English 1010 (Intro to Writing), by the end of the semester, students should be able to recognize and use effectively:

• Rhetorical strategies: adapting to differences in purpose, audience, and genre
• Critical thinking processes: summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation
• Composing processes: inventing, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessing
• Conventions of writing: incorporating and citing other texts into their own writing

By the end of the semester in English 2010 (Intermediate Writing), students should be able to:

• Understand and respond critically to a civic conversation and become a legitimate participant in that conversation
• Adapt strategies of argumentation, style, and design for a given writing situation
• Conceive, draft, create, and revise texts in multiple genres, mediums, and modes
• Approach reading and research critically, rhetorically, and analytically, choosing appropriate research strategies for a particular writing task
• Cite sources appropriately for the writing situation
• Work collaboratively and creatively on writing tasks with other writers
• Edit your writing so that it contains a minimum of surface error

Digital writing has been part of the writing curriculum for several years now, and in fact, it was hard for our interviewees to identify a specific date when it was integrated. It predated the college’s requirement for ePortfolios (which became an official requirement for General Education in Summer 2010), and when speaking with Jen Courtney, she estimated the integration of digital assignments happened in 2006 or 2007. She also noted that English 2010 included digital writing assignments earlier than English 1010 did. When considering what caused SLCC to integrate digital writing, Courtney noted both the inclusion of visual rhetoric in textbooks as well as a move from their writing curriculum focusing on writing for academic purposes to focusing on writing for public audiences and for “the world” or “the community.”

While there are numerous resources, including assignment sheet templates, available to FYW educators at SLCC for both ENG 1010 and ENG 2010, they are also given flexibility to resequence and/or reimagine the final project for each unit of each course as long as they are teaching about the program-identified threshold concepts that each course and unit are meant to introduce to students, which can be found in the Instructor Guide that is also included on the Program Training & Professional Development page of this exhibit.

ENG 1010 “Civically-Engaged Text” Assignment Description

In the shared materials for ENG 1010, the third unit, “Rhetorically Informed Action/Response,” requires students to create a “civically-engaged text,” which is explicitly discussed as a digital project. According to the Open English @ SLCC Instructor Guide, “This unit asks students to identify a reason for action and respond through rhetorically informed and civically engaged textual production. A considerable amount of time is dedicated to studio sessions, in which students present works in progress and practice rhetorical thinking by offering and responding to feedback. Depending on the instructor’s comfort level, students may have more or fewer rhetorical decisions to make about their projects as they compose: purpose, audience, genre, mode, medium, method of delivery and circulation, etc. This project functions as a bridge to the ‘public work’ of English 2010.” The threshold concepts this unit focuses on are (1) Action: Writing is a form of action. Through writing people respond to problems and can create change in the world, and (2) Contingency: The meanings and the effects of writing are contingent on situation, on readers, and on a text’s purposes/uses.

Of the three shared sample assignment sheets, one asks students to create an informative report accompanied by an infographic, while the other two specify that the genre is up to the students but that their choice needs to be “based on [their] purpose, audience, and context for composing” and specifies that they will need to explain those choices in a “statement of goals and choices” that accompanies their final project.

ENG 2010

In the shared materials for ENG 2010, the projects for three of the four units (units 2-4) explicitly encourage students to create digital projects. In this class, SLCC educators are encouraged to have students select a topic at the beginning of the semester to work with throughout the entire term. The shared materials also encouraged educators to consider “inviting their students to choose social justice issues or issues of social concern” (emphasis in original). 

Unit 2, “The Information Effect,” Assignment Description

As described in the shared assignment sheet for Unit 2, “The Information Effect assignment will give you an opportunity to explore an issue of personal importance to you through a genre that is publically directed and focused on information—data, statistics, along with some interpretation of that information—arranged in a way that helps the reader to understand both the details and the big picture of your researched topic. A piece of writing focused around an information purpose forwards or emphasizes a relatively neutral tone, strategies of objectivity and fairness, and organizational strategies that seek to clarify, sequence, and arrange in a way that helps a reader in the ways described above. Your information effect project can, depending on the medium you choose, have varying lengths: if you choose an infographic, the page count might be shorter than in a more text-based standard report, for instance. You should plan to make substantive use of 4-6 sources in the piece; a text-based piece should be between 4-6 pages long, with multimedia or heavily visual pieces perhaps somewhat shorter (in terms of page count).”

Unit 3, “The Persuasion Effect,” Assignment Description

The description of Unit 3 in the Open English @ SLCC Instructor Guide states, “Unit 3 emphasizes another important threshold concept: the meanings and the effects of writing are contingent on situation, on readers, and on a text’s purposes/uses. Students continue to research their issues, this time by exploring the range of viewpoints, opinions and arguments connected to their topic. They are challenged to imagine how they might once again enter an ongoing public conversation about their issue--this time through the lens of an explicitly persuasive genre--working rhetorically to craft a formal, timely argument and support it with evidence, logic, and storytelling. The essential move in Unit 3 is trying to persuade--sharing one’s point of view and marshalling evidence to support it.”

Students may complete various lower-stakes assignments leading up to the unit’s final project, which asks them to “work rhetorically to craft their own formal argument and support it with evidence, logic and storytelling. Students should choose both their own specific persuasive genre and an appropriate medium.” The shared materials also include a document titled “Seven Mediums You Should Definitely Try in This Class,”—video, audio, photo essay, infographic, comic, video game, and other—to help students “with ideas for moving beyond text-based compositions.”

Unit 4, “The Look-Back Effect: A Revision ePortfolio,” Assignment Description

As described in the shared assignment sheet for Unit 4, “The Look Back Effect assignment asks you to choose two of your writing projects for revision. In this context, you might choose to revise with an eye toward taking the thing you’ve already made, and revise to make it better as it is—that is, choose to polish, refine, and improve your report as a report, or your video as a video, etc. You might also choose to revise with an eye toward transformation: taking the thing you’ve already made and making it better by making it, in whole or in part, into something else.” 

The shared assignment sheet also describes the goals for the Unit 4 assignment: “Your goal as a writer for this project is twofold: you should demonstrate your ability to use feedback and reflection to improve your own writing, an ability that all good writers have in one way or another. In one sense, this first goal is self-directed: you’re taking your learning as a writer one step further, making your pieces that much better. The second goal is to demonstrate to your teacher what you know about writing, both by means of your revisions and by means of a reflective essay which will accompany and give context to your revisions. This goal, of course, is outwardly directed, to the person who will evaluate your work and what you’ve learned and accomplished as a writer.” 

Sharing of Student Work

SLCC maintains the Open Collection of Student Writing (OCSW), a collection of student writing that is publicly available. According to the OCSW website, “The SLCC Open Collection of Student Writing (OCSW) is an open education resource for all SLCC students and faculty. The OCSW contains original writing by SLCC students from across different subject areas and course levels that have earned ‘A’ grades from their instructors. Students can use the OCSW as a helpful guide for understanding different types of writing and writing assignments.  Faculty can use the OCSW to communicate expectations for student writing and to create effective writing assignments. Students may submit their writing for anonymous inclusion on the OCSW site. Upon acceptance, students will receive recognition that their work is being utilized as a resource for the SLCC community of learners. Such recognition may be an asset for portfolios, resumes, or job/scholarship applications.”

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.