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George Mason U
From: E Shelley Reid
At Mason, we have a junior-year WID course as our 2nd semester comp requirement. (We also have a WAC course requirement that students take within their major.) English 302 is taught by English faculty, in five versions: Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Business, and Technology. (See http://composition.gmu.edu/faculty/goals300.php ) I like lots of things about this arrangement, and I’d be happy to tell you more off-list. But you also asked about bumps in the road that may lie ahead of you, and since I’m interested in how others may have addressed similar issues, I’ll say more about them here. Two challenges we’ve been working with recently involve making the WID-focus as helpful as possible. The first comes in hiring and providing support for faculty so that they can design courses that are as discipline-oriented as is feasible. That is, someone who is teaching a 302-Business and a 302-Social Science course needs to know how to frame them differently, and to have resources to do so. (Textbooks that fit our courses, which have an advanced-research expectation and involve multiple majors within a large disciplinary grouping, turn out to be difficult to find.) We’ve been working on better goals-descriptions and faculty-development workshops to help with this differentiation. (See http://composition.gmu.edu/faculty/302facguides.htm ) The second, a more multifaceted problem, comes from the student- side. Students at Mason, coming from a strongly commuter culture, often choose gen-ed courses by what fits their schedule. In most cases, gen-ed requirements are in fact designed to give students a wide range of basically-equivalent options, so they can do this without much difficulty. English 302, on the other hand, breaks the pattern: it’s designed to work best for students just entering their junior year, and with students who take a version related to their major field or professional interest(s). With a few exceptions, departments/schools have not wanted to *require* students to take a particular version — and sure, it’s reasonable for them to want their students to have fewer gen-ed headaches. Advising can also be hit-or-miss on this issue, and may not often trump individual scheduling needs. So a 302-Humanities course section often enrolls 30–50% students from non-Humanities disciplines, and several who are seniors (who have already taken the WAC course for which 302 is supposed to prepare them). Requiring chemistry majors to write about film or dance won’t help them as much as we’d like; de-specifying the course so that it allows students to work on a range of disciplinary projects lessens the course’s effectiveness at preparing students to write in a particular discipline. I think there’s a chicken/egg thing here at this point: to intensify the WID-focus and really adapt it to, say, what upper-level social- science courses at Mason ask of students, we need departments to “buy in” and push their majors toward the relevant courses, so that we don’t underserve 1/3 - 1/2 of our students. But to get that support, we’d need to demonstrate that the courses already are very well-tuned to the disciplines, or we can’t argue that it makes a difference. (The kind of pilot program that Chris describes at UC Davis might be one way to build both kinds of support.) Other kinds of multiplicity in 2nd-sem. comp may not bring up these exact difficulties. But if your goal is to provide choices to students, I think that these two questions — “how different *is* each version (or how different does it *need* to be)?” and “how can you increase the likelihood that students will choose well and so appreciate and benefit from the variety?” — will probably come up at some point in your discussions. E Shelley Reid |