Since I taught my first sections of college composition, English 101, Written Communication, whatever you want to call it, I have been trying to figure out what the class is and what purpose it serves. Of course, I know the official line. I’ve helped to write curriculum guidelines for the course at at least three different colleges. My students have long struggled with the purpose of the course and their questions and, at times, outright resistance, has led me, maybe forced me to take a second look. Around 2016, I joined up with some other community college composition teachers from across the state of Washington to try to say what the class was for in the Washington State Community College System. We decided that we needed to get at the work of (de)composing the composition course required at every college in the state. This text has its roots in those conversations.

I’m not sure that my Washington colleagues and I ever talked much about what we meant by decomposing. The word itself is interesting to me. Decompose. Decay or cause to decay (with reference to organic matter). To break down or cause to break down into component elements or simpler constituents (with reference to a chemical compound). The word “composition” has its roots in Latin com (together) + ponere (to put) maybe by way of French com (together) + poser (to put). Composition is putting things together. (de)Composition, as I use the phrase, is breaking down something already put together into simpler constituents and then putting those parts together, maybe with some other parts, to meet a shared object.

There were really three experiences that I had as a learner that set me on the road to (de)composing college composition.  The first came in June of 2006 when I was preparing to teach College Composition online for the first time.  That spring, I had been reading a bit about composing multimedia texts and studying with my composition students what was involved in learning what James Paul Gee calls a Discourse, not just the rules for writing some sort of text but a way of being and acting, an “identity kit.” I planned for that summer an interactive course that mirrored my face-to-face classes.  The students in my online course and I quickly figured out that this level of interaction, this invitation to participate actively in a network of learners worked for some but was for others not what “English” courses were about. I retooled activities so that all of my students could find their way in the course. Throughout the summer, I had to bug a number of folks about participating and continually clarify what participation involved and provide feedback on the ways in which folks were participating. I finished the course wondering what students need from “English” classes in college.

My second experience happened about a year later.  In spring 2007, I took an eleven-week online course with an all but invisible teacher—he never did respond to a posting.  I was teaching full-time while I took the course and quickly found myself doing the minimum, just turning in assignments.  About six weeks into the course, I realized that I needed to get more engaged or I was going to finish the course not having changed much, not having acquired much new knowledge or many new skills. I needed to do something in order not to be bitter about the whole experience. I started using a course journal on my own initiative.  I never did do a lot of posting because it was hard to see why anyone in the course would do that, but I began to identify a bunch of new ideas, and I had a record of the ideas that mattered to me. In turn, I was able to figure out what sort of online course I wanted to design. This experience helped me understand what it is like to take a class on top of living a life with too much going on and just how important it is for a class to meet the learning needs of students and for students to take responsibility for being involved.

My third experience unfolded between 2009 and 2011 when at almost 50, I became a full-time student again. My classes met face-to-face; we read lots of books and articles. I fear that I was the obnoxious student who did all the reading and came to class expecting my peers to have done the same and to be excited about it. While I enjoyed the reading and discussion, I struggled a bit with group projects and found myself a little bored in classes that rarely had a clear design and almost never had clear outcomes. My classmates and I worked through a lot of content but got inconsistent feedback on the ways in which we were achieving our goals or program goals.

These experiences changed how I thought about college composition and how I teach it now. Comp courses aren’t, at least for me, English courses. Most of my students already know more English than I can teach them in a semester or quarter. I have come to see these courses as immersion experiences in design thinking through which a group of people frame some real problems and work together on producing solutions that meet real human needs and capabilities. This approach means that I have to work to push my English teacher interests and identities off center stage. I’m a straight, white guy with lots of degrees. Comp courses, as I envision them, are spaces in which everyone in the class can see their identities and interests represented, so I work to share the center.

I still pick the real problem at the center of my courses. Here’s my working assumption: my students and I always share the problem of getting students through college. For sure, there are other other local issues. My students and I have written about about the circulation of fake news, the health of watersheds around Seattle, social divisions at Cascadia College. I’ll admit up front, that I drive the choice of the problem mostly so that I can have readings and activities designed ahead of time. I’ll also admit that I ask my classes to take on problems that are widely shared and without obvious solutions so that we are compelled to listen to one another.

Many of my students just want a course, of course. They want to pass a requirement and move on. While I have always tried to be clear about what passing means, I have noticed that many of the students who just (barely) pass college composition courses often do not finish the class or their degree. So, I design my “course” around a series of activities that require every student to practice defining shared problems and writing up texts that responded to those problems.  I let students know exactly what is due when and what makes each assignment complete. Passing means doing the work completely–I began using a grading contract. Making the minimum investment means engaging real problems and composing texts that help us all respond to those problems. The rest of this chapter describes how I am now seeing some important constituent parts of a required college composition course.

(de)Composition Course Content

Writers’ design processes are the central content of this course. Students’ design processes; my design processes. As designers, we don’t build electronic gadgets: we build texts–writings, videos, presentations, and other things that communicate–that put together ideas for others. My students and I read, and reread, challenging texts created by others, and we compose and revise a significant number of responses to and remixes of the ideas in those texts. This work–our readings and writings–are the content of the course. We focus on this kind of content because almost all college composing is in one way or another a response to texts. We write in response to what we have read, and we will expect others to read what we have written and to write in response to us. This means, among other things, that how we compose texts and what we produce by implementing our composing processes is core course content.

To produce our course content, together we

• read and compose different kinds of texts. Lots of texts circulate in a (de)composition course. We describe and share our strategies for reading and composing in lots of situations and using different technologies to compose for different sorts of readers. Our explanations of what make up much of the content of the course.
• recognize and practice applying accepted ways of composing. Together we study and decide how to use conventions of grammar, organization, format, citation. That means that writing handbooks and websites like the Purdue University Online Writing Center are content in the course.
• use strategies for inquiry, critical thinking, learning, and communicating to engage course content. Students and I regularly share share what we think about our course problem and ways to solve that problem. We also share our interpretations of the many texts that circulate in the classroom. We keep a record of our thinking and interpreting in journal entries, on whiteboards, and in discussions. More course content.
• pull off being recognized as a designer who can develop texts collaboratively and reflectively across time. This work often feels to me like faking it till I make it, almost like wearing a mask. I am continually working on collaborative projects, and that work seems to involve figuring out who I need to be and what I need to do so that I can contribute to the group. Sometimes it’s easy; sometimes it’s really not. We regularly stop and reflect on how we are participating in the course and how we are showing up in our texts. Even more course content.

Texts that record our composing practices along with texts we read make up the content of this course. Our writing contributes to our learning, our learning contributes to our writing, and our learning and writing helps us all work on a shared problem.

The (de)Composition Course Problem

While the core content of English 101 is your processes of reading and writing, I believe that people use content to solve problems. I think problems are good things. I like them because I don’t see them as . . . well . . . problems. I see problems as spaces where growth can happen whether that growth fixes something that is broken or fills in gaps in understanding or just satisfies a need someone has. Figuring out dark matter or the way the the brain works is a problem. So is leveling up in a video game.

As I look around me, I see lots of interesting, pressing, sometimes overwhelming problems. I suspect that you do too. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how to be an antiracist and how to improve food security in my local community. I am regularly trying to reduce my carbon footprint and get better at using the electronic media that fills up my days. As an educator, I wonder how to make college more engaging and meaningful for my students and how to ensure that all of the children in my community have a real opportunity to learn to read and do science. I am very interested in how education can contribute to people becoming able to talk across differences. I’m also constantly tinkering with my bikes. Lots of problems.

We could work together on lots of different problems. I’ve settled on the one seems particularly relevant to what brings us together, a college composition class. It’s in the syllabus. We will read selectively a few texts that I will provide at our course website in order to explore this problem; you will add to that set of texts. The reading we do together will not be content you have to memorize or exercises you have to complete.  Rather, our reading will offer us texts and ideas that we can use as work on solving our shared problem.

Think this is weird way to organize a college class? I believe it fits nicely with what college needs to be. Over the past decade, students and teachers in American colleges and universities have begun to be challenged to take on shared problems like ours. The American Association of Colleges & Universities calls on us to tackle “growing global economic inequalities, climate change and environmental degradation, lack of access to quality health care, economic volatility, and more” (A Crucible Moment, 2012, p. 19). The Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education (2017) argues that we–students and teachers–need to develop the knowledge and skills we need to address “persistent social inequalities, widening political divisions, prolonged international conflict, and intensifying environmental challenges” (p. v). The National Academy of Engineering has its list of Grand Challenges. The killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the public reflection that followed convinced me that a college education in the U.S. has to engage learners and teachers in building the communication resources they need to build and participate in a just society. I believe that together we can make progress on clarifying what communication resources “we” need from college, improving college education, and making college education more accessible to more people.

Course Learning Goals and Assessments

Throughout our work on the course problem, we will pursue a set of learning outcomes. These outcomes are set by our institution. Here’s what MATC wants you to be able to do.

1. Establish document purpose
2. Apply audience analysis techniques
3. Employ rhetorical strategies
4. Generate ideas for writing
5. Research outside sources
6. Synthesize information from sources
7. Organize document content
8. Write final text from drafts
9. Design document format
10. Assess document for revision
11. Edit document based on conventions of Standard English
12. Demonstrate oral communication strategies

We will know how well we are achieving these learning goals in part because we will remain doggedly focused on doing what college composers do and judging the effectiveness of our work. The syllabus describes these activities in some detail. All I’ll say here is that what we do–our course activities–are always designed to give you information on your composing so that you can continue to understand what you are learning and learn more. Feedback on each assessment will not be accompanied by a grade. Grading in this course may be quite different from the kind of grading to which you are accustomed. Most of your course grade will be determined by how completely you complete all our activities. Do all the work the contract requires, and you are guaranteed a B. Do more, you can earn an A. Do less, you will earn less than a B. We will spend time in our first weeks discussing the contract and will come back to it throughout the term.

MATC Career Essentials

MATC’s Career Essentials are career readiness or soft skills highly desired by employers. Career Essentials consist of seven (7) competencies that all students are to demonstrate by the time they complete a program. In this course you will be given opportunities to demonstrate or apply Effective Communication in Writing. Career Essentials will be assessed in Blackboard. The results of this assessment will indicate where students are at any point in their progress throughout their time at MATC.  Note-Career Essential assessments are not part of your regular grade.

Course Process*

This course is intended to operate like a workshop. We will work together to explore and solve a problem through reading, composing, and discussing what we have read and composed about that problem and then revising our ideas in light of what others have said. Our primary focus will always be on your composing and reading, and we use some keywords like audience, rhetorical situation, genre, conventions, critical analysis, circulation, and reflection to help us make sense of how to compose and read more effectively. At the beginning of the course, these words may seem really complex and even strange. That’s okay. We will read, talk, and write a little about these words for two reasons. First, you will draw on these words to explain and transform your own reading and writing practices. Second, you will draw on these words to break down our course problem and build solutions.

My bet is that learning to use our keywords will empower us to design meanings for critical audiences. My written and oral comments on your writing are intended to help you use your writing to keep the process going. This means that my role will be not to give you answers but to help you formulate better questions in your reading and writing to enable you to arrive at better answers for yourself. In other words, to help you learn, I will try not to do your learning for you; I will almost never tell you which of your ideas I believe are “right” or “wrong.” Instead, I will focus on helping you to consider how and why you have made sense of a text in a particular way; what habits of reading or writing, attitudes, and beliefs are shaping your responses; why different readers (I but also other members of the class) have constructed different meanings from the text; how different readers might respond to the meanings that you design; and how to continue to develop your designs in light of these differences.

On final word on course process. Many of the texts we will read together are meant to be difficult: they do not present simple arguments with which you are to “agree” or “disagree,” and I will ask you not to make such arguments in response to them. I assign difficult texts in composition classes for two reasons. First, these texts are real contributions to solving our course problem. By interacting with these texts, I believe that our class can contribute to responding to a real problem. Second, I believe that beginning college writers can learn to make good sense of such texts and that they need to become good at doing so. The difficulties you encounter in reading and responding to our readings will not disappear. In fact, you may well find by the end of the term that reading and writing are more complicated for you than they seemed at the beginning. That is in part because the texts you will be reading are challenging to all readers, novice or experienced, who are interested in responding to our course problem. As we move through our course process, I believe that you will discover strategies for successfully tackling the difficulties the readings present, grow more confident in your ability to handle them, and experience the learning that comes from doing so.

Notes

*I am deeply indebted to Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu and composition teachers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee between 2000 and 2003 for this approach and much of the language in this section.