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West Chester U of PA
From: Seth Kahn
6 different 2nd-semester comp courses—WRT 200: Critical Research Writing; WRT 204: Writing about Pop Culture; WRT 205: Investigating Experience; WRT 206: The Multidisciplinary Imagination; WRT 208: Writing for the Public Sphere; WRT 220: Special Topics (recent versions are Writing about Sports, Writing about the Apocalypse). All courses are research-writing courses. They’re designed to appeal to students’ specific interests; I teach the Public Sphere course and tend to draw heavily from Poli Sci, History, Communication. Institution, location: Medium-size (about 12,000), public, comprehensive, MA-granting. About 20 miles out of downtown Philly. Enrollment management: courses capped at 25; faculty no longer do drop/add procedures (students do it all on-line), so keeping at caps is easier. We used to place students into our 200-level courses with an SAT over 620 (I can’t remember the new score—somebody else handles placement); nobody places out of 200-level. Personnel: Dept of approx 45 full-time tenured or tenure-line faculty, 14 full-time comp/rhet. All faculty (in theory) teach two comp courses per semester; more common for comp/rhet faculty to teach 3 while lit and creative writing do one. We’re working that out. We also average about 20 adjuncts and full-time instructors/year.
Training: A substantial archive of sample syllabi and assignments. A day-long workshop usually about 10 days before the fall semester starts. Monthly (or thereabouts) workshops.
Publicizing: Magic. Or something we haven’t mastered yet. Hard to get advisors in other departments to understand that students only need one of the 200-level courses, that students can’t get credit for writing-emphasis courses (3 required beyond our comp courses) out of these, etc. It’s been about 5 years that these courses are in place.
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