Course descriptions for Spring 2009 now online.
Be sure to choose a course with a topic in which you're genuinely interested! See this for more.
Be sure to choose a course with a topic in which you're genuinely interested! See this for more.
Showing posts with label registration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label registration. Show all posts
Friday, November 14, 2008
Pick a UW20 Course By Topic, Not Time Slot
Nikki Rappaport, a graduating senior has this advice for first-year students registering for UW20: 
Ask any UW20 professor and s/he'll tell you--choosing a UW20 section solely because it fits into your schedule is a bad idea. Here's why.
It's true that all sections of UW20 are designed to improve students' abilities to read and think critically in preparation for a variety of analytical writing genres, as well as to explore emerging and traditional information resources, to frame sound questions or hypotheses, and to conduct university-level research. (Click here for more on common course goals, and the elements required in each course design.) But each faculty member designs her or his course around a stimulating topic of current intellectual interest. This spring over 40 different topics are being offered, ranging from Conspiracy Theory, Malcom X, and Comparative Masculinities to Legacies of the Holocaust, Textual Authority in Religion and Law, and Global Warming and the Problem of Global Governance.
Research in composition studies demonstrates that students learn to write more effectively when they are active participants in a well-defined field of inquiry, working with the goal of communicating with authentic audiences. Karen Spear explains that topics give students something interesting to write about, and save the teacher from having to invent "dummy" assignments. What's more, topics necessarily require students to recognize and participate in the "the particular academic disciplines or interest groups--discourse community has become the standard term" that produce them (Spear, "Controversy and Consensus in Freshman Writing," The Review of Higher Education 20 [3]). As GW Writing Professor Phyllis Ryder and Research Librarian Jennifer Nutefall report, many composition scholars agree that in order to enter the "discourse community--to learn to write and speak as a a participant there" students have to learn the conventions of the community. As David Bartholome puts it, they must learn the "commonplaces, the texts, the gestures, and the jargons--the interpretive schemes of a group" (qtd. in Ryder and Nutefall, "Teaching Research Rhetorically," Academic Exchange Quarterly Fall 2005).
So choosing a topic means choosing a discourse community and meeting the attendent expectations of that community--not just in terms of how that community thinks, speaks and writes, but also in terms of how it gets its work done.
Eve Deveau, a UW20 alumn, talks about her experience choosing a UW20 with a service learning component: "The UW20 Writing for Social Change is a class which uses service learning as a learning tool. As a student in the class I was able to go out into the community and experience parts of DC that I might otherwise not have the chance to get to know. Service learning also allowed me to become passionate about my writing. It was a very effective way of improving my writing because it allowed a lot of creativity, but the form of writing we were doing had strict guidelines which always kept us on task. The class was a lot of work. It's true, we had no class on Fridays! But we also had to dedicate multiple hours per week to a community service organization. Overall I think the class was very helpful and improved my writing skills, social skills, and my knowledge of D.C and society.
Taking this class especially taught me to chose a UW20 by subject and NOT only by time. Many students didn't know what they were signing up for at the beginning of the semester and later decided that they didn't want to do all of the work that was required for the class. UW20 is an opportunity to improve your writing skills through a topic or method that is specific to you. It can be a really helpful and eye opening experience and you shouldn't have to end up in a class that you hate because you picked it solely based on its time slot." "[Because] the UW course requires in depth conversation and analysis, freshman should definitely take a University Writing class based on their interests. [This is particularly important because] UW20 allows students, with their major research paper project, to dive into a topic of their choice based on the course theme. This is a fantastic personal and academic opportunity to engage yourself in an interesting topic as a beginning to your academic and writing career at GW. As a graduating senior I realized my UW course and research paper ended up mirroring my undergraduate career and matching my professional goals."
UW20 Faculty Do Not Sign Registration Overrides
By University Writing Program policy, the only way to get into a particular section is by using GW's online registration system.
The Writing Program strictly enforces its online registration only policy for good reasons. According to Dr. Carol Hayes, Director of First-Year Writing, "We do not sign students into our classes under any circumstances. What's more, we do not create 'wait lists.' We understand that's an unusual policy for GW; most professors at GW can and do sign students into their classes. The reason UW20 professors do not sign students into classes is that we're protecting the course cap. The classes are set at a maximum of 15 students -- and that's a hard cap. In the past, students have reported to us that the small class size is one of the things they really value about the course; additionally, student learning outcomes are significantly better when the course cap is set to 15. That's why the Writing Program faculty is working very hard to protect that small class size. The only way to ensure that extra students don't accidentally get added in is to have all of the registration for our courses handled by online registration."
It is true that many first-year students drop and add during the first week of classes. As a result, if you keep checking the online registration system throughout the semester and in the first week of classes, you should be able to enroll in a UW20 section that fits your schedule. That said, past experience teaches us that the fast pace of the course makes it very-extremely-highly not recommended to try to join a new UW20 class after the first week of classes.
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