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How can a theme-based course structure provide the opportunity for basic writing students to engage in active dialogue with a text?

Active / Engaging

In a theme-based course, instructors often ask their students to read foundational, yet accessible works on the chosen topic at the beginning of the semester, to provide the students with basic knowledge of the topic and to immediately immerse them in the commonly-used language of the topic or discipline. As the course progresses, the students will encounter increasingly complex ideas in their reading, and they will be challenged to write more complex types of essays, to think more deeply about the subject’s undercurrents.

Armed with a growing body of knowledge, the students demonstrate that they can synthesize complicated texts; but more significantly, they feel capable of engaging in active discourse with these texts. They find ways to corroborate, rethink, or even challenge the ideas to which they are exposed, grounded in the information they have acquired since the first day of the course. Rather than mindlessly regurgitate the words of published texts, without heed to meaning, the students instead feel empowered to respond to the authors of professional works.

Questions for further study

1. Any other sources that support or challenge these ideas?
2. What other possibilities exist using theme-based coursework to teach students how to actively interact with texts?

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Annotated Bibliography

The foundational work in theme-based course construction specific to basic writing, this book outlines a course used by the authors, and then provides supporting studies from other voices in the field. Supporting articles deal with authority in the basic writing classroom, the discourse aspects of BRW, revision, and editing.

http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/basicbib/content/cd_cdut.html

Dickson presents an alternative approach to a theme-based course from Bartholomae and Petrosky, partly in response to challenges she sees with the course construction the latter authors employ. Dickson re-envisions the coursework through the lens of a different basic writing demographic than is typically examined.

http://www.boyntoncook.com/products/0351.aspx

A lecture presented at the CCCC Annual Convention in 1991, Salvatore advocates theme-based coursework for general composition on the grounds that students need to learn how to deal with topics, understand discourse methods, and establish contextual awareness. She places these elements, as goals for a composition course, alongside and equal to developing rhetorical skill.