Spring 2018 

Dr. Eric Drown

edrown@une.edu

The Student Academic Success Center, Rm. 4

The University of New England

MW 9:30-10:50 | Decary Hall 206

Office Hours: Tuesdays 9-11 (SASC Commons), most Wednesdays 2-3 (SASC Hills Beach Rd), and by appointment

Course Website: ericdrown.uneportfolio.com

 

Course Description

This course is the second part of a two-course sequence that is equivalent to English 110, English Composition. The course continues students’ introduction to writing as a conscious and developmental activity. Students learn to read, think, and write in response to a variety of texts, to integrate their ideas with those of others, and to treat writing as a recursive process. Through this work with texts, students are exposed to a range of reading and writing techniques they can employ in other courses and are introduced to fundamental skills of information literacy. Students work individually and collaboratively, participate in peer review, and learn to take more responsibility for their writing development. Prerequisites: ENG 122. 3.000 Credit Hours 3.000 Credit hours.  SAS 011 Writing Lab is optional, but recommended.

Required Texts

• Miller, Richard and Ann Jurecic. Habits of the Creative Mind. Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s. 2016. ISBN 978-1-4576-8181-3.
• Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say, I Say. 3rd ed. New York:  W.W. Norton & Company. 2014.  ISBN 978-0-393-93584-4.
• Bullock, Richard, Michal Brody, and Francine Weinberg. The Little Seagull Handbook, 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2014. ISBN 978-0-393-60264-7

Please note: students will be required to print designated articles for class and will be notified in advance. Print at the library or computer lab since most articles will be multiple pages.

Course Activities

In this course, students will

• Prepare both informal and formal texts, using a range of writing process elements.
• Complete a range of assignments that provide hands-on experience with various approaches to integrating their ideas with those of others.
• Engage in active, careful, critical reading of challenging texts.
• Complete a series of peer review activities to participate in a collaborative learning environment and practice a central feature of the writing process in academic and professional environments.
• Practice identifying types of sources commonly used in college-level writing and documenting source use through both in-text and end-of-text citation.
• Identify individualized patterns of sentence-level error and practice techniques for addressing those patterns.

English 123 Learning Outcomes

Students who complete English 123 should be able to

1. Demonstrate ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision)
2. Effectively integrate their ideas with those of others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources
3. Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking
4. Demonstrate their ability to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process
5. Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA)
6. Control individualized patterns of sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling)

Major Assignments

• Making Sense of Our Literacy Narratives Archive Draft – Wednesday, February 21
• Making Sense of Our Literacy Narrative Archive Revision – Monday, March 5
• Thinking about Food Draft – Monday, April 16
• Thinking about Food Revision – Wednesday, April 25
• Draft Eportfolio – Monday, April 30
• Polished Eportfolio –Final Progress Meeting Appointment
• Last Week Writing Assignment – Draft Monday, April 30; Revision – Wednesday, May 2

Course Schedule

See the Course Calendar page on the course website.

“Snow Day” Policy

Because larger paper assignments build from smaller homework assignments, all homework assignments are due when scheduled, even when classes are canceled unexpectedly. To earn homework completion points, be sure to submit all assignments due for a canceled class via your ePortfolio no later than the starting time of that class – 9:30 am.

Attendance

Much of this course is collaborative and workshop-based, and so it will be difficult for you to keep up if you miss more than three classes. Do not expect to pass the course if you miss more than four classes. Please be in touch with me right away if you encounter extenuating circumstances requiring you to miss class, so we can make a plan regarding your coursework.

Grading in the College Reading and Writing Sequence

You’re probably accustomed to earning a letter or number grade on your papers. In ENG 122 and ENG 123 that won’t happen.

Instead, you will be graded on the degree to which you achieve fluency on the course learning outcomes (55% of final grade) and the degree to which you are actively engaged in the work of the course (45% of the final grade).

In these courses, students write papers primarily to develop their reading, writing and thinking abilities, to develop their knowledge about effective writing processes, and to acquire creative and disciplined habits of mind. In other words, the process of writing the paper drives students’ learning.

We believe that students should be rewarded for this learning, even if their final paper shows that they haven’t yet mastered academic writing. Putting a letter grade on a final paper privileges the product over the process and doesn’t recognize the learning that students acquire through not quite being entirely successful on a challenging assignment.

This emphasis on process doesn’t mean that your performance in ENG 122 and ENG 123 isn’t being assessed and graded. In these courses, you are being graded on your developing ability to demonstrate competence on the course learning outcomes. Therefore, you should expect to earn grades for each of the six course learning outcomes.

In addition to assessing and providing feedback on papers, we examine the body of work that leads up to the final written project, looking for signs of developing competence on the course learning outcomes. In this process, the final paper is just one piece of evidence of learning among many. For each of the learning outcomes, we evaluate your developing competency on a continuum running from Novice to Master of first-year writing. For each of the Learning Outcomes, this continuum is carefully defined in the laminated Learning Outcomes Achievement Levels you receive in class.

Each major writing project involves a series of activities that, taken together, help you practice and develop an important set of skills, habits, and behaviors that give rise to stronger writing performances. At the conclusion of each significant writing project in the course, you will participate in an evaluation of your progress towards first-year mastery of the course’s six learning outcomes (see above). Using a continuum line running from Novice to Master and the markers of competence described in the laminated Learning Outcomes Achievement Levels, we will evaluate your work on each learning outcome. In addition, we evaluate your level of engagement with the work of the course (see below).

We don’t assign what you would think of as a traditional grade because we’re most interested in development. Think of yourself as needing to make progress moving from Novice to Master, and you’ll experience growth. Focus on the habits and practices associated with higher levels of mastery, and, in time, you’ll discover that you’re growing as a college-level reader, thinker, and writer.

Near the end of the term, we will ask you to engage in a self-evaluation of your growth in the course and to provide evidence of that growth in an electronic portfolio of your work. Your instructor’s evaluations should help to inform your evaluation, but the focus at the end of the term will shift a bit because we will want to know what you see in your own work over the term. We will, of course, guide you in this self-evaluation.

Earning Points Towards Your Course Grade

We will keep track of your progress towards fluency in the course learning outcomes and arrive at a final grade in the course using a 200,000 point system allocated as follows:

Learning Outcomes – 55% of Final Grade

100,000 points | Points build up from 0 | Later Scores Replace Earlier Scores

✔ Writing as a Recursive Process – 20,000 points

• Embrace drafting and revision; learn how to develop your ideas through the writing process

✔ Integrating Ideas with Others’ – 20,000 points

• Use summary, paraphrase, and quotation effectively; make your own writing stronger by drawing on the works of other writers, effectively signal the connections you’re making

✔ Effective Active Reading Process – 20,000 points

• Use annotation and informal reading response independently and effectively; understand complex texts, use reading strategies to think critically about and respond to readings

✔ Critique Own Work and Others’ – 20,000 points

• Locate areas of strength and weakness in writing; make suggestions to improve the ideas, organization, and evidence in a paper; help address clarity and correctness.

✔ Effective Documentation/Citation Practices – 10,000 points

• Understand and use a citation system effectively; use effective signal phrases; format citations correctly

✔ Control Over Sentence-Level Errors – 10,000 points

• Know your typical errors; have a system for gaining control over stigmatizing errors; improve your sentence construction skills

Engagement – 45% of Final Grade

100,000 points | Points build up from 0 and accumulate throughout the semester

✔ Daily Engagement – 72,000 points

Earn up to 2,700 points per class by

• Completing all of your homework – up to 760 points per class over best 25 classes
• Caring about the quality of your homework – up to 1000 points per class over best 25 classes
• Participating actively in class – up to 1000 points per class over 28 classes

✔ Effective Learner Behaviors – 28,000 points

Earn up to 2,000 points per week by 

• Maintaining and improving your ePortfolio
• Getting help outside of class
• Being an effective and responsive communicator
• Planning ahead and taking initiative
• Displaying success habits
• Transferring your learning to other classes

Final Course Grade Formula

[(# LEARNING OBJECTIVE PTS EARNED x .55) + (# ENGAGEMENT PTS EARNED x .45)] ÷1,000

Final Grade Range

• A = 93-100
• A- = 90-92.9
• B+ = 87-89.9
• B = 83-86.9
• B- = 80-82.9
• C+ = 77-79.9
• C = 73-76.9
• C- = 70-72.9
• D = 60-69.9
• F = <60
• I = Nearly all work completed; fewer than 4 absences
• WP = Withdrawal while passing after first two-thirds of the term
• WF = Withdrawal while failing after first two-thirds of the term
• W = Withdrawal during first third of the term 

Academic Integrity (Including Plagiarism) Statement

This course is an important introduction to college-level reading and writing. As an emerging college-level writer, you will develop your ability to read responsibly and critically, to work with texts appropriately, and to write in ways that are valued and respected within the community. We will conduct ourselves with integrity by doing our own work, by acting as responsible peers in (and out of) class, and by working with sources in ways appropriate to the academic community of which we are a part. It is understood that we are learning to work within the norms of our community, and so we will work on these matters.

Students enrolled in English 110, 122 or 123 are strongly encouraged to take a few minutes to complete the nationally recognized Academic Integrity 101 Self Test (http://www.une.edu/studentlife/plagiarism/self-test) to familiarize themselves with the issue.

UNE has a clear policy on academic integrity and a multi-step procedure for addressing cases of suspected academic dishonesty. Both the policy and the procedure are distributed as a two-page handout at the beginning of the term. They are also available on the UNE website under the Academic Integrity Policy (Student Handbook, p. 47) and the Procedure for Reporting Alleged Academic Dishonesty.

In our class, the policy applies to all of our work, from homework to formal papers. The policy does not inhibit robust collaboration.

Midterm Academic Progress Reports

The University of New England is committed to the academic success of its students.  At the midterm of each semester, instructors will report the performance of each student as SATISFACTORY (S) or UNSATISFACTORY (U).  Instructors will announce when these midterm academic progress reports will be available for viewing via U-online.  This early alert system gives all students important information about progress in their courses. Students who receive an UNSATISFACTORY midterm report should take immediate action by speaking with their instructor to discuss suggestions for improvement such as utilizing the services of academic advising, the Student Academic Success Center, Counseling Services, and Residential Education.

Student Academic Success Center

The Student Academic Success Center offers a range of free services to support your academic achievement, including tutoring, writing support, test-prep and studying strategies, learning style consultations, and many online resources. To make an appointment for tutoring, writing support, or a learning specialist consultation, go to une.tutortrac.com or visit the SASC. To access our online resources, including links, guides, and video tutorials, visit https://sites.google.com/a/une.edu/student-academic-success-center.

Students with Disabilities

The University of New England will make reasonable accommodations for students with documented disabilities. Any student eligible for and needing academic adjustments or accommodations because of a disability is requested to speak with the professor at the beginning of the semester. Registration with Student Access Services, located across from the Alfond Health Center on the Biddeford Campus and the Lower Level of Ginn Hall (ext. 4418) on the Portland Campus, is required before accommodation requests can be granted.

• http://www.une.edu/student-access-center
• All student-access-related inquiries can be directed to bcstudentaccess@une.edu on the Biddeford campus or pcstudentaccess@une.edu on the Portland campus.