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Learning Communities Linking Basic Writing and Other Courses

One variation of learning communities involves two or more linked or paired courses. This often involves some level of interdisciplinary instruction and learning, though the level of integration between the classes may vary depending on the outcomes desired. For basic writing students, this usually means a BW course is grouped with one or more general education courses. The students usually remain in a cohort for these classes, and the instructors usually team teach and integrate anything from curricula to assessment.

For basic writing students, the integration of the courses may help them to develop a greater sense of the connectedness between disciplines that are often seen as very separate, especially at the university level. Integrated instruction, or team teaching, can be a crucial part of the linked courses model, since varying levels of integration at the instructional level can affect the learning outcomes. Within this model, basic writing students can begin to experience the connections between writing and creating knowledge in various disciplines.

A learning community that integrates courses may benefit BW students because “Students traditionally labeled ‘at-risk’ or ‘basic writers’ for an array of complex reasons often need a context for thesis-research projects that they find meaningful…” (Heaney 45). The Synergy Program offers one good example of this. This program is “…a cluster model learning community, in which two or more classes are linked thematically or by content, …students attend classes together, and faculty plan the program collaboratively” (28). The program links two writing and research-based courses and focuses on the students’ resistance toward academic writing through the use of ethnography as a theme, which leads to a sense of student ownership. The program works this way:

• Students take College Composition along with Critical Thinking in Intellectual Communities, two university-required, credit-bearing classes. The second class is designed to “…help students negotiate issues of identity and success that underlie many students’ past struggles with academic writing” (34).
• Curriculum helps students develop writing, reading and critical thinking skills.
• The year-long ethnographic research project allows faculty to include “more traditional reading and writing assignments” within a context that the students find “interesting and relevant” (34).
• Most readings focus on “…issues of marginalization, identity formation, and community study and reflection” (38). One text does that and illustrates the connections between speaking, thinking and writing is Our America: Life and Death on the Streets (Jones and Newman).

Interestingly, this program also tests the integration of a “…hybrid text/speech dynamic…” (39). In 2003, instructors asked students to take part in an “online threaded discussion of the reading with their peers” (39). This was basically an electronic, written discussion of the text they had been reading as opposed to an in-class, oral discussion. The instructors found that the online discussions:

• represented more careful and organized thinking.
• afforded students the opportunity to achieve some elements of critical thinking.
• gave students a chance to write without worrying about mechanics, “…but rather to simply experience how writing helps to shape and define their thinking” (39).
• allowed quiet students to participate more fully.
• utilized a familiar, discussion-based context as well as writing.

Use of technology is another area worthy of investigation in BW scholarship, especially as it pertains to the connections between reading, writing, thinking and speaking and the idea of community

Heaney, April. “The Synergy Program: Reframing Critical Reading and Writing for At-

Two other powerful integrated learning communities link BW with a reading course. San Francisco State University implements an integrated reading/writing program that explicitly connects reading and writing, lasts one year, and keeps the cohort of students with one teacher (Goen 93–4). A second program at Murray State University offers a seven-credit-hour block course including BW, reading and public speaking courses, and focuses on integrating reading, writing and speaking (Phillips 3). Both programs offer “at-risk” students a chance to earn university credit while completing remedial coursework, and they help the students to develop a sense of community and camaraderie, as well as an awareness of the connectedness of writing to other academic areas.

Goen, Sugie and Helen Gillotte Tropp. “Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to

Phillips, Nancy. “Integrating Speaking and Writing in the Developmental Program.”

The course integration within a learning community model seems to offer the most opportunities for BW students, but also the most challenges for universities and instructors. Restructuring the classes, minimizing the number of instructors that the students have for writing courses, and emphasizing the concept that writing is not just something one does for a composition course are all important factors to consider, though there are countless others.

Here are some possible challenges to implementing an LC with integrated courses:

• Increased workload for faculty. Instructors must meet regularly to design and monitor the integrated curricula and discuss student assessment, among other tasks.
• Instructors may feel a sense of lost autonomy in regard to instruction as well as the creation of course content and grading policies and/or practices (Abell 3).
• English and composition faculty may feel burdened by the need to be the one “always-required” portion of the team-teaching situation, while other departments may not face the same burden.
• Students may feel overwhelmed with a new way of experiencing learning. Team teaching may raise questions of “…who’s responsible for teaching what, whose voice is the authority on a given topic, to whom does a student turn for the best guidance…” and what the expectations are in each course (Leahy 4).
• It may be challenging for first-year students to work with new ways of thinking about and experiencing content if integrated courses focus on “both/and” thinking instead of relying on easy answers, as perhaps they are used to doing in high school.
• Institutional and departmental barriers may impede the development of an integrated LC.