English 1007 Course Description

 

In ENGL-1007, “Seminar in Academic Writing and Multimodal Composition,” students are introduced to different modes and approaches to composition and become aware of, and respond to, a variety of rhetorical situations. Our students compose through multiple forms of literacy, including rhetorical, digital, and information literacies necessary for twenty-first-century contexts. Students develop creatively intellectual inquiries through sustained engagement with texts, ideas, and problems.

The habits of mind and of composition students learn here transfer to writing in a variety of contexts and disciplines. ENGL-1007 encourages transfer through our course moves, which are specific composition moves writers make in many rhetorical situations or in many disciplines: collecting & curating, engaging, contextualizing, theorizing, and circulating. Our learning objectives describe the long-term habits our students will develop in ENGL-1007 and put to use in later coursework.

ENGL-1007 may be used to fulfill any course prerequisites satisfied by ENGL 1010 or 1011 or 2011. ENGL-1007 is a four-credit course.

"Seminar in Academic Writing and Multimodal Composition" has an attached and accompanying composition Studio through which students register for the course. More information is available on the Studio below. Students will receive one grade for the Seminar and Studio together.

Students enroll in the ENGL-1007 Studio (1 credit), which has 32 students, and auto-enroll in an ENGL-1007 Seminar (3 credits) with 16 students. The Studio and Seminar together total 4 credits. 1007 Studios meet every other week for one hour and fifty minutes (1 hour 50 minutes). The dates Studios meet are published in the "Notes" in StudentAdmin/PeopleSoft.

Role of ENGL-1007

  • Introduce students to the intellectual labor of the University.
  • Support and guide students’ contributions to communicating knowledge in thoughtful, meaningful, substantiated ways.
  • Develop students’ ethical practices.
  • Introduce students to multiple modes and genres of meaning-making.
  • Expand and enhance students’ skills and literacies. 

ENGL-1007 Studio

Photograph of handrawn sketch of User Design with title, "Composing Studio"

The ENGL-1007 Studio is a collaborative composing studio in which students develop a Digital Learning Portfolio. Students register for the Studio and are auto-enrolled in the Seminar. The Studio allows students and instructors to experiment with and apply the cognitive, creative, and technical skills needed for effective communication in a range of modes and through a number of traditional and emergent technologies. Students will also design a Digital Learning Portfolio to archive their work and showcase their skills from both their Seminar and Studio sections.

1007 Studios meet every other week for one hour and fifty minutes (1 hour 50 minutes). The dates Studios meet are published in the "Notes" in StudentAdmin/PeopleSoft.

Throughout the Studio course, students will engage in a hybrid learning model by completing online modules that will support the development of their Digital Learning Portfolios, as well as their digital and information literacy skills.

Studio Learning Goals

  • Employ habits and practices for creative use of space and tools available in the Studio. 
  • Demonstrate creative thinking by generating multiple concepts, designs, and drafts and communicating your design decisions.
  • Collaborate to identify concepts, practices, and tools best suited to individual project challenges.
  • Facilitate access for wide, varied audiences.
  • Negotiate feedback productively through the processes of revision and collaboration.
  • Use the affordances and limitations of composing tools or technologies to shape the project, mode, and genre. 
  • Shape a digital identity through your work.
  • Practice ethical engagement with a variety of digital and analog assets.

For more information about Studio pedagogy and our Active Learning classroom, please visit our page on Studio learning.

ENGL-1007 Course Moves

a graphic depiction of the five course moves

Collecting & Curating (includes collecting data; primary or experiential research; text-based research [e.g., curating an annotated bibliography]; creating a meaningful assemblage)

Engaging (includes active reading; unpacking assumptions & values; reading beyond ‘information’; arguing beyond reductive pro/con; terms of engagement [e.g., civility]; participating and contributing to public discussions & debates; appealing to audience)

Contextualizing (researching the field, discipline, or question; adapting to disciplinary conventions; finding and using historical and/or critical sources; recognizing how arguments take shape and participate in culture; using data ethically and effectively; tracing provenance; this move builds on “engaging” to add “juggling more than a single point of view," as well as synthesizing and using texts for different ends in moving an argument forward; problematizing and problem-solving with myriad factors/influences/impingements).

Theorizing (building new approaches, processes, methods; developing a new critical vocabulary; articulating new connections; contributing new knowledge; in Studio, reframe arguments in other modes; employ new ways of thinking to move work into new modes of meaning making).

Circulating (presenting, publishing, managing an identity as a thinker and scholar; creating interactivity with audience; examining the consequences of broad circulation of words and ideas; maintaining digital data and creations)

Click here to visit our resources on the course moves.

Writing Across Technology Learning Goals

The Writing Across Technology curriculum includes five major learning objectives  that students will develop throughout the course. In essence, these objectives are the things students should be able to do by the end of the course, and will affect the way students engage with composition broadly and long-term. There are many ways to achieve these outcomes, and individual FYW courses are structured differently and reach these goals in various ways. They are distinct from the course moves because these are long-term habits of thinking, whereas course moves are discrete actions students can do in particular rhetorical situations.

There are five major learning objectives:

Approach Composition as a Complex Process

  • Practice composing and writing as creative acts of inquiry and discovery through written, aural, visual, video, gestural, and spatial texts
  • Consider projects and problems from multiple ways of knowing
  • Develop new methods for all forms (including digital) of textual analysis, synthesis, and representation
  • Formulate strategies for the conceptual, investigative, practical, and reflective work of writing

Identify Yourself as a Writer

  • Contribute to others’ knowledge and understanding through your research and compositions
  • Practice ethical scholarship and develop a strong identity as a responsible maker of meaning

Engage with a Conversation

  • Discover, analyze, and engage with others’ ideas in productive ways through complex texts
  • Approach and use texts as ways to analyze, interpret, and reconsider ideas
  • Extend your ideas to new ground in the context of others’ work

Critically Examine Different Ways of Knowing

  • Identify and analyze conventions of disciplines
  • Interrogate genre expectations, including how knowledge is created and how evidence is used to forward work in academic disciplines
  • Evaluate the functional components of format, organization, document design, and citation

Use Technology Rhetorically

  • Recognize that technologies are not neutral tools for making meaning
  • Assess the context and mode of technology you are using to compose
  • Respond to situations with productive choices to deliver meaningful texts
  • Employ the principles of universal design to make your work accessible and legible to the widest possible audience

Developing a First-Year Writing Course

For more about our course, and for more specific discussion of designing these seminars including course concretes, please see our Instructor Resource Book.pdf.

You can also use our Course Development Tool to design your course according to the new WAT curriculum.