English 1006T: An Introduction

Up front:

English 1006T is first of all, a first course in university English. At St. Thomas that means a course which accepts the department's statement of goals for first year English courses. It's worth considering this document, because it suggests some things we might be doing, and not doing, that will probably surprise you.

At the same time, since it's part of the Aquinas Program, this is a course in making connections with other disciplines and other ways of thinking. Some of our time this year will be spent in working particularly on ideas and activities specifically relevant to the study of English; some of it will be spent working on more general issues, as all of us investigate some important ideas and issues and events.

This document includes some general things you'll probably need to remind yourself of fairly often in this course. You might want to read it fairly carefully now and keep it for later reference. (If you're reading it online, you might want to bookmark it or add it to your list of favorites.)

What it's all about:

Maybe the most important thing I can say about this course here at the beginning is to explain that -- besides being a section of the introductory course in English, and a course linked to courses in Sociology and Religious Studies, as part of the Aquinas Program -- this is a course about learning itself. Besides helping you change some of your ideas, and practices, and abilities at dealing with written texts of various kinds, I'm also hoping to help you become an even better learner than you are now, and to think differently about what learning is than you probably do now.

Most of the things you do in connection with this class will be aimed at getting some particular task done -- finding an article, story, or book; explaining an idea or an experience or a reading to others in the class; persuading other people to do something you want to do; getting an electronic mail message onto the computer network -- but they'll also be occasions for learning about the process itself. They'll be designed to help you learn things like how to find things in the library, how t o read more critically and responsively, how to explain things more clearly (in writing and orally), how to use the computer network effectively.

It's important to remember that learning can happen even if you don't succeed at the main task itself. When you come back from the library empty-handed, or when your reader says "I don't get it," or when nobody receives your email message, that can be just as valuable a learning experience as it would have been if you'd succeeded. In fact, we usually learn more from failures than successes.

In other words, even if you "fail" to achieve the particular job you were trying to accomplish, you're almost certainly learning something -- and the more open you are to taking a risk that might lead to that kind of failure, the more you're likely to learn. Thus, in this course, I try to create an environment in which it's safe to take risks. I try to attend to what people learn, and know they learn, rather than to whether they fail or succeed at tasks. Centrally important is whether people get a ctively involved in the process. And for me, being involved means taking initiative, asking questions, starting things -- not waiting passively for orders to carry out, and then carrying them out to the letter.

The rest of this document is set up as answers to questions you might have. If you have others that aren't asked here (and thus not answered), let me know. If I think they're of interest to lots of other people, I'll add them to this document.

What do you mean when you say "a first year English course"?

How does this fit with the Aquinas Program?

What are the textbooks?

I've heard there's a lot of work with computers in this course. What will we be doing, and why?

What will we actually be doing from day to day?

What about grades? How do I know how I'm doing?

At St. Thomas University, the English department has agreed on a set of goals that any section of English 1006 should strive to achieve. Those goals are listed in the document I mentioned, which you can read by clicking on that link. The goals include attention to things like this: how students read and deal with texts (poems, stories, plays, nonfiction), how they write, how they use libraries, computer resources, and the Internet, and how they learn. How any individual section does that -- what people read, what kinds of writing assignments there are, whether there are group assignments, class discussions, or lectures -- is up to each professor. Sometimes that involves a course in which you read and discuss poems and plays drawn from a collection assembled for that purpose; sometimes it doesn't. You may find that English 1006 isn't much like what you expect, on the basis of previous English classes. Whether part of Truth in Society or no t, my English courses tend to emphasize independent reading and writing and exploration, and a much wider than usual range of reading material and writing assignments.

Some questions you might have now, or might have later, about this course as compared to other English courses, I deal with in separate documents, which either already exist or will soon. If you're concerned about grammar and mechanics, or term paper and essay formats, or analyzing literature, or covering the range of English literature, click on that phrase to find what I've got to say abou that (or ask me for a copy of the document). These are all things that are approached rather differently in this class than in most, and though you may not see them as issues now, you might later.

How this fits with the Aquinas Program:

The Aquinas Program also has a set of goals, which are outlined in the university senate document (you won't have this one, but it's accessible, like everything else in this course, on the course Web site) which first set the program up in 1994. These include offering students opportunities to make the transition to the ways of thinking and working appropriate to the university situation, entering into the intellectual and cultural life of the campus, and making connections between different disciplines. All these are attended to in various ways throughout this course. The most important aspect of this, however, is that you are a member of a small group of students who are together taking the three courses which make up Truth in Society, and will have lots of opportunities to think about the connections between those three different ways of understanding the world. In English 1006T, you'll do this primarily through attending to examples of written documents: articles, stories, poems, plays. You'll already have seen the course description for this year's section of Truth in Society; what's said there applies here as well.

"Texts":

We'll be using the word "texts" frequently, and in a variety of ways. When I talk about "texts," I do not mean textbooks. Rather, I'm referring to a wide range of written material -- magazine articles, research reports from scholarly journals, novels, poems, stories, plays, chapters from books, and so on. I also include "prompts" (like the document you're reading now), in which I explain in writing things that teachers usually talk about orally. Almost every time I organize an activity I'll do it through a prompt. Thus I'll be explaining what I want in writing, rather than by telling people by explaining it orally in class. That's deliberate. I do it for three reasons.

1. One is that I know that much of what I'm saying may seem pretty complicated and unfamiliar. So, I want everybody to have a chance to read it at her own speed. While there's only one speed to listen at -- the one the speaker chooses, regardless of what suits the listener best -- a piece of writing like this one can be read at whatever speed you like, quickly or slowly -- and it can be reread many times over.
2. This leads to my second reason: I want to make sure you have a chance to read it over -- and to file it away and keep it to check later (it's on the St. Thomas Web site, permanently. Any time you're in the lab or on a computer connected to the Internet you can come back to it). Often a document means a lot more after you've experienced some of what it's talking about.
3. And a third reason, perhaps the most important one, is that I take every opportunity I can to use writing where people are accustomed to talking -- particularly when written communication has advantages over oral communication. I believe that handling written language easily and skillfully -- writing it, reading it, working with it -- is not only the main thing an English course attends to; it's the main thing higher education is about. I want to get everyone accustomed to reading things that make a di fference. Reading this document carefully and reflecting on it, for example, will have consequences for you.

As well as reading a large variety of texts, you'll be writing lots of texts -- in most cases, texts unlike anything you've written before.Usually, for example, students write to take notes in lectures, in anticipation of writing tests and exams. Or they write essays, which, like tests and exams, are to be read by the professor only. In this course, by contrast, you'll never write for me (sometimes you will write to me, though), and never write texts which will be graded. (Tha t's not to say, by the way, that they won't be evaluated; the evaluation, though, will be the kind of evaluation you expect when you say something in a conversation. A joke works, or it doesn't, and you can tell by whether people laugh; people are persuaded, or they're not, and you can tell by what they do.) The "audience" for almost all the writing you do will be others in the class -- sometimes everybody in the room, sometimes others in a smaller group, occasionally one person. You'll be in situations whe re you'll want to design your texts so that they inform colleagues of what you have learned, persuade them to make a certain decision, explain how to do something, or co-ordinate and organize your joint activities.

Computers:

See the page on computers distributed with the Truth in Society description.

How all this will work:

During the first term's English meetings, we'll be looking at how we read texts and how they affect us. We'll spend some time finding and reading some texts -- for this first part they'll mostly be prose, and mostly nonfiction -- journalism, essays, etc. We'll be sharing them with others and persuading others to read them, and deciding on some to pay special attention to. Particularly, we'll be looking at how our reading of a text -- what we understand of it, how we value it, how we react to it -- ch anges from one reading to another, and after we've learned more about it. An important question we'll be keeping in mind is what kinds of roles our beliefs play in our reading -- how they shape what we understand and how we react, and feel about the texts. This question involves asking both how what we believe beforehand might influence how we read, and -- equally important -- how what we read might influence our beliefs.

We'll also spend a good part of these first few weeks getting comfortable with the St. Thomas computing systems. We'll do this -- as we do a lot of learning in this class -- not by taking lessons in the technology, but by using the technology to get things done, and learning as we go.

We'll spend the second half of the term with the three disciplines working together, finding and reading some texts in which issues of believing and assuming are dealt with, and sharing them with others and persuading others to read them, and deciding on some to pay special attention to. We'll focus on a limited number of texts and issues, and smaller groups will collaborate in preparing a publication (a printed book, or a site on the World Wide Web, or both) about one of these texts or issues, to te ach what they've learned to the rest of the class.

During second term we'll repeat the pattern, beginning by meeting as separate disciplines, and then coming together for a multi-disciplinary inquiry into how we and others come to believe what we do. During the English section of the second term we'll be reading more traditional literary texts and working toward a new understanding of the role beliefs play in this more "literary" reading.

Evaluation:

See the section on evaluation and marks distributed with the Truth in Society description. In this section, I'll be primarily looking for evidence of growth in your work in the areas outlined as goals by the English department statement on goals which I mentioned at the beginning, and will mainly be looking for that evidence in your regular reflections on your own learning.

Finally:

Every year, those of us who teach in the Truth in Society section redesign the course to incorporate what we've learned from previous years and to try new ideas. And every year, as we begin we're pretty excited about the possibilities. I hope you are, too.