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How can a theme-based course help basic writing students understand the unfamiliar activity of academic study?

Transition to college-level learning

Basic writing students may feel marginalized in the university setting. They might feel as though they will never fully be accepted in the academy. The Ivory Tower may seem impenetrable. Some of these feelings stem from resignation to the fact that they don’t really “get” what academic study entails. In any undergraduate program, students rarely engage in extended, concentrated study on a single idea. A theme-based course provides just this opportunity, in a moderately guided manner.

The instructor-guided progression of students digging further and further inside one idea causes them to transition from internal, original, often single-dimensional knowledge creation to external, dialectic, multi-dimensional knowledge development. In many of the models, early-semester writing assignments ask students to draw more from personal experiences and less from professional works. The students think through their own points of view with less influence from other voices on the subject. Then, as more readings of greater difficulty are introduced, students must grapple with new information, and negotiate how this information may defend or challenge the students’ own positions. Each subsequent writing assignment pushes the inquiry, as well as the difficulty of the writing task, a bit further, building on the previous work. So in an ongoing engagement with one topic, students deepen their thinking about the subject and work on increasingly more difficult writing tasks: they learn to think and write like those they have been reading.

Question for further study

1. What other methods might exist for helping basic writers engage in or understand the activity of academic study?

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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