(DOWNLOAD) "Building Community and Fostering Excellence Through the Writing Process (Curriculum and Instruction)" by Honors in Practice " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Building Community and Fostering Excellence Through the Writing Process (Curriculum and Instruction)
- Author : Honors in Practice
- Release Date : January 01, 2005
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 188 KB
Description
The purpose of this article is to share a successful model for incorporating community building and academic achievement into an honors program by creating a public forum for honors students to display their work. According to what Roger McCain has described as a fundamental humanistic view of a university honors education, each student possesses a hierarchy of needs, which includes the need for individual value to be "recognized and confirmed, so that the individual [student] develops a sense of his or her own unique identity" (2). I suggest that honors writing courses, in particular, can foster what McCain contends is the "central objective" of an honors program: "the academic challenge needed by students of excellent academic ability and motivation, and concurrently the recognition of their success in meeting that challenge" (McCain, my emphasis). Creating an academically challenging curriculum to meet the needs of university honors students is the charge of honors programs, but beyond good grades assigned to student work and the honors designation conferred upon graduation, how do we acknowledge student success in those programs? The following briefly outlines the symposia that our Honors Writing Program, which includes a core faculty of seven and a student population of approximately 150 first-year students, developed to recognize just such student success beyond the classroom. These symposia serve not only to expand our concept of the "writing process" but simultaneously redefine our Honors Program community and meet the specific humanistic needs of our honors students. Writing is a process, not a product. This is the mantra of college writing instructors whose intent is to cultivate a sense of both intent and capability on the part of the writing student. After all, we contend, a successful academic writer has developed skills that allow her to approach any writing assignment, evaluate its requirements, and compose and revise (and revise and revise) a paper that attends to and reflects those requirements. We spend precious course time discussing the various forms of writing--summary, expository, analytical--and the research methods within these differing genres. We offer rhetorical strategies for identifying key points of argumentation, which concurrently provide a historical trajectory of the writing process. We delineate the basic structure of composition, isolating thesis statements, transitional phrases, and introductory and concluding paragraphs, allowing students to see their work as moveable, alterable elements. We further provide tools for recognizing various writing forms and styles, and, most often, we measure the students' acquisition of such skills in, yes, their own writing products.