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This course is designed
to give students practice in reading a variety of challenging materials,
both written and visual. Many students in this class have highly developed
visual literacy skills but poorly applied alphabetic and information literacy
skills. Ask students to read the section "critical reading and viewing"
of The Brief Penguin Handbook and help them make connections between the
"reading" they do everyday in their lives and the reading skills
they can bring to a piece of literature or essay. You should then choose
some short stories, essays, poems, websites, and combinations of written
and visual materials (illustrations, comics, ads, magazine articles, brochures,
other design materials, etc.) to lead the class in reading exercises.
The reading should become increasingly challenging. Students need to learn
how to identify the textual organization of information and ideas, including:
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how to approach a difficult text by underlining, taking notes, and
asking questions of peers and instructors - how to practice questioning meaning and discussing interpretation - how to write and orally articulate summaries, creating a retrospective outline of an essay/piece of literature by summarizing the main idea of each paragraph and/or section - how to understand the organization of material in graphically designed writing (a website, for example) - how to make inferences based upon information given in a paragraph or section (make predictions and anticipate an author's logic, based on knowledge of writing conventions) - how to select key terms and ideas in an essay or themes that repeat in a piece of literature, looking up the meaning of the words and determining how they contribute to the whole work - how to distinguish between description and analysis in an essay, tone (word choice/conventions) and semantic (syntactic) meaning in literature - how an author uses evidence to make an argument, and constructs an audience with words (and/or images) - how an author, illustrator, even cartoonist, uses other sources and "intertexts" - how an essayist sets up oppositions - how parts of speech (rhetoric, syntax, and tone) indicate an author's position - how to identify the thesis, introduction, and conclusion of an essay - how to map structures of various pieces of writing - how to extrapolate meaning from complex syntactical units by practicing paraphrase and commentary in writing. |
Students should take a midterm and submit their written responses to the reading in a portfolio at the end of the semester. The midterm and portfolio should each be worth 15% of the grade. Portfolios need to be graded by two instructors so please pair up for this purpose. In case of wide discrepancy, consult a third instructor. Instructors may write the midterm in the format of multiple choice or short answer. For the midterm, choose a piece of writing that has already been assigned and create an exam in which students identify main ideas and draw inferences.
Students must be assigned to small groups within the class for continual practice discussing, questioning, and summarizing the meaning of readings. This develops speaking skills and discovery through collaboration. You can design many small group activities during the course of the semester (assigning groups discussion questions and then requiring them to present their answers to the whole class, having them write a collaborative summary or compare main ideas of paragraphs, etc.). These activities allow greater investment in the course, variety in the course structure, and greater ability for students to learn from one another. Tell students that their group work contributes to their abilities to pass the course.
The required texts include The Brief Penguin Handbook, Webster Dictionary, and for fall semester only, Laura Esquivol's Like Water for Chocolate, read by all freshmen during the summer and/or first weeks of fall semester. Students can also view the film in the library (several copies are on reserve) or in freshmen dorms (both discussion groups and film viewings will be organized for orientation week). The Writing Director, Holly Blackford, has several copies of a teaching guide with writing activities, which you can peruse and photocopy. Choices of short stories, essays, poems, and visual texts are your purview. Students achieve intellectual coherence and depth if you choose a broad theme for the course readings, which mimics the work they will need to do in topical courses. For example, our veteran reading teacher Eileen Radetich used aspects of Irish folklore with great success in her spring course (centered around St. Patrick's Day), both engaging and challenging them. We encourage the use of multicultural literature. Readings should be accessible but contain increasing levels of challenge. If you choose, you can assemble a small reader, selecting readings from the McGraw-Hill database. Readers cost students 10 cents/page and take 2 weeks to produce. You can also post readings on e-reserve, which students can print out from home.
Although the course is pass/fail, many instructors choose to assign grades to student work so that students will see how they compare with peers.
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Tel: (856) 225-6121, Fax: (856) 225-6602
