2:30P-3:20P MWF (25) 3 cr

COAS INTENSIVE WRITING

TOPIC: ISSUES IN EDUCATION

This section of W350 has been designed for the Education major or
for those seeking secondary certification. It fulfills the
advanced writing requirements of both the School of Education and
the University.

The aims of this course are threefold: first, to help Education
students further develop their writing skills; second, the
explore key issues in teaching and learning; and third, to
provide a model of inquiry about education that prospective
teachers can bring to their future work. In short, this course is
designed to help Education students become reflective
practitioners of their craft.

Through a sequence of writing assignments, students will be asked
to analyze various viewpoints on teaching and learning with an
eye toward developing arguments about current issues such as
multiculturalism, bilingualism, literacy, and the ways in which
race, class and gender play out in the classroom. A repeated
theme in the readings for this course is that all students bring
a wealth of previously acquired cultural knowledge to bear on a
given learning situation: Freire would call this the larger
"narrative of education," that constantly plays out in
classrooms. The readings listed below explore and problematize
those narratives. Students will be asked to analyze them and
their attendant philosophies of education, and to contemplate how
these narratives might translate into pedagogical practices in
secondary education. Additionally, students will be asked to
explore their own compositional strategies, life experiences and
educational backgrounds in light of the experiences of others.
The end goal is to get students to consider the implications of
these personal and analytic explorations for their own
pedagogical concepts and classroom practices.

Course Texts: WAYS OF READING by Bartholomae and Pestrosky, A
LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest Gaines.