Up front:
English 1006T, is first of all, an introduction to university English. At St. Thomas that means a course which accepts the English department's statement of goals for first year courses. It's worth considering this document with some care, because it suggests some things we might be doing, and not doing, that will probably surprise you. "English" may not be quite what you think. We'll spend a little time when we begin meeting as an "English class" talking about that document, and what it means for how I organize the English portion of Truth in Society.
At the same time, since it's part of the Aquinas Program, this is a course designed to help you 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, and some of it working on more general issues, as all of us in Truth in Society investigate some important ideas and issues and events.
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 Criminology 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.
As in the general parts of Truth in Society, most of the things you do in connection with the "English" part of that larger course 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 a wiki page 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 to read more critically and responsively, how to explain things more clearly (in writing and orally), how to use tools for communicating, like computer networks, 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 your wiki page disappears without trace, 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. (One of my favorite writers, Louis Menand, says, "You can't learn when you're afraid of being wrong.")
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 likely you are to learn. In most educational situations, failures are "averaged in" with successes, which means every failure comes with a penalty, and you can never entirely escape it (once you have an "F," you can never have an "A" average).
In contrast, in Truth in Society, we try to create an environment in which it's okay to take risks. We 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 actively involved in the process. And 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. Here are the questions I'm anticipating. Since you're reading this online, you can click on them to take you to the relevant section of the document.
What do you mean when you say "a first year English course"?
How does this fit with the Aquinas Program?
What will we actually be doing from day to day?
At St. Thomas University, the English department agreed twenty years ago 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 and read; how they use libraries, computer resources, and the Internet; and how they learn. How any individual section of English 1006 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. For some teachers, English 1006 is a course in which you read and discuss poems and plays drawn from a collection assembled for that purpose; for others it isn't. You will probably find that this version of English 1006T isn't much like what you expect, on the basis of previous English classes. My English courses (whether they're part of Truth in Society or not) tend to emphasize independent reading and writing and exploration, and a much wider than usual range of reading material and writing tasks.
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 I've posted on my Web site. 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 about 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 or problems 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, from the course Web site) which first set the program up in 1994. These include offering students help in making 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. In English 1006T, you'll do this primarily through attending to examples of written documents: articles, stories, poems, plays. You've already seen the course description for this year's section of Truth in Society; what's said there applies here as well.
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. Much of the written material we use will be written by members of the class. One important kind of writing is found in the "prompts" we hand out at the beginning of class, outlining what we're going to be doing. These documents are important, in Truth in Society and in most of the classes those of us who participate in it teach. That's deliberate. I think we do it for at least three reasons:
As well as reading a large variety of texts, you'll be writing lots of texts, as you've already done in the first part of the term. Usually 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 texts which will be graded. (That'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 by something you write, 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 where 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.
During the first term's English disciplinary meetings, we'll be looking at how we read and write texts and how they affect us (and how our own texts, and those of others, are shaped by our fundamental values and convictions). We'll spend some time finding and reading some texts. In general, in the first term of English 1006 the texts we work with are prose, and mostly nonfiction. 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 -- changes from one person to another, and 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, and how texts affect those beliefs. 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, regularly without our being aware of it at all.
During second term we'll repeat the pattern of the first term, beginning by meeting as a multi-disciplinary inquiry into how we and others come to believe what we do, then turning to particular disciplinary perspectives, and finally coming back to our inquiries into episodes. During the English section of the second term we'll be reading some more traditional literary texts -- poems, drama, fiction -- and working toward a new understanding of the role beliefs play in this more "literary" reading.
Finally:
This is all supposed to be fun. And it can be, at least if you think working hard with others can be fun -- me, I think it's the main kind of fun people actually have.