WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM
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ike President Rose, close to a dozen new faculty members were teaching a first first-year seminar in the fall of 2016. To prepare them for what is expected of these intimate and intense introductions to intellectual life, Meredith McCarroll, who was hired last year as Bowdoin’s first full-time director of the First-Year Seminar Program, conducted a day-long workshop for new faculty in August. “What’s special at Bowdoin is that the seminars are taught by faculty across disciplines,” says McCarroll. “At many schools, writing is taught in the English department. Here it’s cross-discipline with a focus on teaching critical thinking and writing.” McCarroll, whose job it is to support faculty as they develop syllabi and create and conduct first-year seminars, drew on her own experience designing a seminar titled The South on Page and Screen. She says
veteran faculty asked to share best practices with her new colleagues. Muther advised using peer review to help students improve their writing. “The students always have the option of talking to me, of course,” says Muther, “but by having peer writing groups respond first, the papers are more polished by the time I get them. Then I give them my feedback.” Writing across the curriculum, emphasizing the importance of clear written communications in all disciplines from the humanities to social sciences and natural sciences, has been a fundamental part of the Bowdoin pedagogy since the 1980s. Until 1970, English composition was required of all students at Bowdoin. That requirement was dropped, along with many others, during that time of innovation and experimentation in society and in higher education. Students were “encouraged” to take elective freshman-
“THE FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR IS THE LAUNCHING POINT FOR ENGAGING WITH THE REST OF THE CURRICULUM AND THE INTELLECTUAL EXPERIENCE AT BOWDOIN.” she had to keep reminding herself that the seminars are not introductory survey courses. The challenge is to find the right balance between course content and teaching the reading, writing, and research skills that will be expected at Bowdoin and beyond. One key to meeting the challenge of balancing subject content and writing skills, McCarroll stresses, is having students write and revise, learning to build a finished piece of writing on a scaffolding of drafts. And several faculty workshop participants also suggested that assigning “low-stakes writing”—ungraded prompts, or preliminary drafts—was an effective way to get students to embrace the process of review and revision that is the hallmark of good writing. Maron Sorenson, a newly hired assistant professor of government, was a high school English teacher before teaching at St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota. She is teaching a seminar titled Supreme Court and Social Change. “Research shows writing feedback is most effective on ungraded pieces of work—if you grade a paper and write comments on it, students will not absorb the comments,” Sorenson explains. “This is why it’s so crucial that firstyear seminars emphasize the writing process—so students can get formative feedback on rough drafts before a piece of work is graded.” Associate English Professor Elizabeth Muther, who is teaching a seminar on Maine writers, was among the
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sophomore seminars offered through the English department in which writing skills were stressed. In the 1980s, Bowdoin adopted the national trend toward writing across the curriculum. “What drove Bowdoin toward this change, I would suspect,” says McCarroll, “is not a lack of ability to teach composition, but rather a mindfulness about the best ways to teach composition. . . . The dispersal of responsibility across departments similarly encourages growing writers to think about writing as a crossdisciplinary endeavor rather than a singular exercise. When a history professor and a biology professor agree that clear writing might have different forms but is always accessible and supported, the writing process is demystified for students.” In 1983, first-year students were offered seminars not just in English but also art, history, music, philosophy, psychology, and religion. “Freshman seminars” were rechristened “first-year seminars” in 1999. These elective seminar offerings continued to expand into the twentyfirst century and, in 2005, by which time most first-year students were enrolling in one anyway, first-year seminars became mandatory at Bowdoin.
GOVERNMENT AND GUIDELINES
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everal of the new faculty members at the first-year seminar workshop had questions about how much writing was expected. In the past, four papers were