During the 2013-14 year, my main focus in my involvement with the Writing Across the Curriculum program was “How can I use writing to help students understand the course material, both within the context of the course and in relation to the broader social environment?”  In other words, I hoped to use writing as a way to facilitate learning for students.

The 2013-14 year was my first at Lehman College. Previously, I had taught at Louisiana State University, and had for the past several years worked mainly with graduate students and undergraduate honors students. My experiences with these students and their writing were largely positive. I was not sure what to expect upon coming to Lehman: Would the students be good writers? Would they be able to use writing in a way to show they understood the course material and could apply it to different examples? Would they be able to write a paper involving the reading and synthesis of academic articles?

By the end of the first semester, I realized that my goals had been too high and my requirements had been too difficult for the typical Lehman student in a 200-level course. Still, I believed that writing was of fundamental importance in helping students to learn the material and express themselves. I set about revising my assignments (explained more below).

The course that was my focus for Writing Across the Curriculum was Sociology 235, Education and Society. It is a required course for students who are in the Education concentration within the Sociology major, and is an elective for students who are in the General concentration in the Sociology major.  Over the course of the year, I also applied for it to be considered a Pathways course within the area of “U.S. Experience and its Diversity.”

Many of the students who take the course have just transferred to Lehman from a community college, while others are in their senior year. There are six objectives, listed below:

1. Gather, interpret, and assess information from a variety of sources and points of view.
2. Evaluate evidence and arguments critically or analytically.
3. Produce well-reasoned written or oral arguments using evidence to support conclusions.
4. Identify and apply the fundamental concepts and methods of a discipline or interdisciplinary field exploring the U.S. experience in its diversity, including, but not limited to, anthropology, communications, cultural studies, economics, history, political science, psychology, public affairs, sociology, and U.S. literature.
5. Analyze and explain one or more major themes of U.S. history from more than one informed perspective.
6. Analyze and discuss common institutions or patterns of life in contemporary U.S. society and how they influence, or are influenced by, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, belief, or other forms of social differentiation.

During the first semester of the course, I incorporated writing in a number of ways. Students had a midterm and a final that involved answering short-answer questions about the readings. Additionally, the final exam had a take-home essay component related to a book that the students read during the semester. Finally, students wrote a 6-8 page literature review in an area of the sociology of education of their choosing, using 5 academic articles. For this assignment, students submitted their topic and bibliography to me towards the beginning of the semester, and a rough draft in early November, which I returned with detailed feedback.

These assignments proved to be very challenging for the students and did not really help with the learning of the material (with the exception of the take-home essay exam). The literature review assignment was pretty much a disaster, with students having trouble reading the academic articles and synthesizing them. The midterm and final exams were also problematic for the students, who felt there were far too many topics and readings covered.

For spring 2014, I revised the syllabus. There will be a take-home essay for the final exam, since that was successful last semester.  The number of readings has been cut in half.  Students are now required to work in pairs as reading discussion leaders, which involves their writing a summary of the reading (the readings are usually 3-5 pages at most), coming up with discussion questions, and leading the class discussion about the reading. The other new writing assignment is a two-part educational autobiography, where students link the concepts from the class lectures and readings to experiences in their own educational trajectories. The first part of the autobiography focuses on school structure, personnel, and theoretical perspectives, while the second part focuses on experiences of inequality.