Faculty Pre-Workshop: Welcome and Getting Started

Welcome to Teaching ENG 1000: Writing and Rhetoric! 

I'm currently reading Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success by Wendy Laura Belcher, and I was struck by the following quote because it reflects so much of what we teach students about writing in first-year writing:  

Nothing is as collaborative as good writing. All texts depend on other texts, all writers stand on the shoulders of other writers, all prose demands an editor, and all writing needs an audience. Without community, writing is inconceivable. 

I believe we can say similar things about good teaching: our pedagogies and teaching are at their best when they're done in collaboration and community with other educators, those of us teaching here in the English Department and at MU and those educators whose pedagogical research and scholarship we read. As you begin teaching first year writing for the first time or perhaps after a decade or two away from the composition classroom, I hope you'll find it a rewarding opportunity to learn more about first year students at MU, to understand the experiences of graduate student instructors and teaching faculty in our department, and to reflect on and grow your own pedagogical practices. I'm grateful to have you bringing your expertise to the Composition Program and first-year writing and look forward to the conversations, collaboration, and community to come!  

To support your teaching, this module contains pages with materials to give you some some disciplinary and pedagogical grounding for the course and projects. Most of the materials in this module are teacher-facing (rather than for student-facing). There are more materials here than you'll have time to read and review. And in addition to the materials on these pages, you'll find more resources throughout this ENG 1000 Canvas Resource Site, especially lesson ideas and more readings and models for students.  

One note on the ENG 1000 curriculum: We do have a suggested set of four major writing projects that most instructors teach—a literacy or learning narrative, rhetorical analysis, problem-solving essay, and a remediated rhetoric project—but there’s certainly room for adapting them to suit your own expertise, interests, and teaching practices. All of the major projects are supported by lots of peer feedback, drafts and low-stakes writing, revision planning, and reflective writing. It can be almost workshop-like in some ways, with the emphasis on teaching writers how to talk to each other about writing and centering the work and texts of the writers in the course. 

In the context of a course in which we teach students to be attentive to historical, cultural, and social contexts and in the context of teaching at time when many of us are increasingly committed to antiracist and other liberatory pedagogies and we're seeing a backlash against those same pedagogies, I would like to offer an acknowledgement of the Indigenous Peoples of the sacred and ancestral lands we occupy and teach on, of those who have connections to this place, and of those who passed through this areas during forced removals: the Wahzhazhe (Osage), Illini, Jiwere (Otoe), Nutachi (Missouria), Chikasha (Chickasaw), Báxoǰe (Ioway), and Ogáxpa (Quapaw) Peoples of Turtle Island. Although no federally recognized tribal nations remain in Missouri, the Indigenous peoples who live, study, and work here represent many tribes. Acknowledging that the presence of a university here is due to colonial policies and practices of genocide and erasure is important. As a Land Grant university, the University of Missouri is a beneficiary of land allotted through the Morrill Act of 1862.  All of the land funding the University came from two Osage treaties in 1808 and 1825. (See also the recent report: "Land-grab Universities" by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone for High Country News Links to an external site.). I encourage us to continue to learn the complex and layered histories of this place and its people, to support the work being done here by Indigenous students and faculty, and to share our learning and amplify that work with the students in our classes so that we can all better understand and act on our responsibilities as people who live, work, teach, and research on occupied territory.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and thank you for taking on this work of teaching first-year writers here at MU. 

-Becca, on behalf of the Composition Program and staff (June 2021)

Resources for Getting Started 

The following resources are intended to be a foundation to get you started with some of the concepts, pedagogies, and contexts for teaching first-year writing here at MU: