Re-figuring a Service Course to Serve Students, Instructors, and the Institution: First Year Composition at Longwood

Presented by Heather Lettner-Rust (Department of English & Modern Languages)

The introduction of Longwood’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP for SACSCOC) focused on undergraduate student research and lately the institutional initiative to revise general education have given impetus to reviewing our first-year composition course in a strategic and comprehensive manner.  These institutional shifts have afforded a sort of shared governance (Anson, 2014) and engaged involvement that signals a kiarotic moment for composition. With support from the QEP, select course instructors have re-tooled syllabi, assignments, and readings to develop a course situated squarely on students’ success in understanding the rhetorical and context knowledge necessary for their academic careers as they exit the course. With undergraduate student research as the lens, instructors’ foci have been to prepare students for the transfer of writing knowledge from one writing context to others (Taczak & Robertson, 2014). This presentation shares assessment results from courses using the new focus and the old, all completing a common final exam. This presentation concludes with recommendations to continue this renewed effort throughout a student’s writing career at Longwood University.

Presenter Bio:

Heather Lettner-Rust, assistant professor of English at Longwood University, teaches Professional and Technical Writing, Visual Rhetoric & Document Design, and Composition. She has taught first-year composition at Longwood for 15 years, before that 6 years in secondary education.  She has published on piloting a civic writing course at her home institution, the results of a student-directed project of having dinner with the local town council, and lately a chapter in an edited collection entitled Pedagogies of Public Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Archives, and Memorials.  In addition she has published in Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning; Computers & Composition; Across the Disciplines; Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society; and Interchanges in College Composition and Communication.