English III Writing and Reading Lab
Curriculum Guide

Course Description

Prerequisites: English II and department referral (see appendix for details)

Additional instruction in the Writing Center is required.

Students with demonstrated need to develop and strengthen individual writing and reading skills in a workshop environment are referred to this course. Students publish pieces on numerous topics demanding research, interviews, writing, and revising. As a capstone to their work, each student will write a feature piece profiling an adult who once attended Mt. Ararat. Students use desktop publishing technology and are responsible for virtually all aspects of the publication activities. Students also read and work with selected literary and and other texts (usually connected with their writing), and write on-demand. Students confer about their writing with Writing Center teachers as well as in class.

Course Overview

Students in this course are placed here based upon the following criteria:

Students who need to strengthen writing and reading skills in a workshop envi ronment are referred to this lab course. Daily writing, literary study, and independent reading are features of the instructional program, and are consistent with the out comes for English III and IV. Reading and Writing Lab is not an elective, nor is it a "general" level course. Referrals are made to help all students address individual deficiencies in a cooperative, workshop/laboratory environment. Work with comput ers and other technologies, as tools for developing literacy skills, is a continuing feature of the course.

Before a student is enrolled in Writing and Reading Lab, the approval of the English department head is required. Students enrolled must value this special learn ing environment, which is designed for cooperative, mutually supportive work. Thus, referrals made to address behavioral problems or to sort students for a variety of reasons other than those stated below will not be approved. The regular English courses (Academic English III or IV) are often viable, appropriate placement options for students prepared to enter mainstream classes.

Procedures and further considerations:

I. For students currently mainstreamed, referral is made by the current English teacher, and will be based upon observed and persistent deficiency in the student's fundamental literacy skills.

a) The student's reading is laborious, difficult, and slow, even when reading materials of personal interest. Comprehension is achieved only with significant work.

and/or

b) The student's writing shows profound and recurring deficiencies in correctness, problems with sentence sense, spelling, and other fundamentals of written expression.

II. For students currently receiving instruction through special services, a request for referral is made only after consultation with the English department head and appropriate special services personnel. If, following consultation, entry is approved by the English department head, he will monitor the student's progress (working in concert with the teacher) in order to ascertain the appropriateness of the instructional setting and mode.

How this course works:

Students enter this course demonstrate rudimentary proficiency at literacy tasks. As a lab course, the setting for addressing literacy tasks is altered from what students have previously experienced. The classroom becomes a workplace, a workplace where language is at the center of their work, and they are expected to be purposeful workers.

Students are asked to comprehend and contend with a range of reading, writing and viewing tasks. They are required to produce new texts of their own in response to what they have read, viewed, and considered. They must complete a profile project of authentic substance; in completing this task, they are responsible for a major piece of personal investigation and shaping their inquiry into text.

The population of this class is usually labeled as "non-college bound," "career-bound," or as "bound" for some sort of economically limited future. It's fair to say that the vision of the future associated with this "population" is not a positive one. "These" students do not have access to computers at home. "These" students are not scripted to go on to additional schooling. "These" students allegedly do not care about their futures. These notions of "who" our "general" students are led John Brassil and Leonard Krill to evolve the General English III course into this laboratory course, with the generous help of a grant from the VF Corporation and support from its CEO, Lawrence Pugh.

We want our students to ask and consider a simple question: "what will happen to me?" Authentic responses to that question come from self-awareness and awareness of the life conditions (and living situations) of peers who have preceded them on their often difficult road. By seeing others through a different lens and using language to investigate and express their world, students can begin to see themselves differently and transform their attitudes about learning. Through writing, research, reading, and publications projects, the students in this course can begin to testify to their own lives and their own potential.

We expect students to develop autonomy and responsibility. Teachers of this course coach and guide; lectures or presentations are rare. Because this is a laboratory course, reading, viewing and response occur in the context of the lab environment. Students complete their work on core assignments using the VF Grant computers, working with the assistance of the teacher and the Writing Center teacher. Work each week outside of class is expected. However, most work takes place in the context of the VF Grantroom.

In Friere for the Classroom, Ira Shor states:

Most students possess more language skills than they display in school. The turn towards student reality and student voices can release their hidden talents. Autobiography, memory, and the power to make mental images are concrete, initial resources for deepening literacy. (107)

Shor promotes classrooms which ease the alienation students often experience. He believes teachers need to help students get closer to themselves, so that they may learn from and value their own experience and the experience of others in their community. This course makes an effort to offer "these" students authentic, vital, and rich literacy and technological learning. We believe their learning in this course will help them get in touch with, and prepare them for, a different future.

Course Tasks / Units

See "Core Assignments" section for additional details on unit assignments and assessments.

Unit 1: Freewriting

A key element of this course is freeing students from previous language-restrictive learning. Using Peter Elbow's freewriting principles, students learn how to write in nonstop, almost automatic fashion, setting concerns about correctness aside while concentrating on the flow of thought and language. Content becomes a matter of effort and commitment, of time and dedication, of allowing associations to shape utterance. Prior to freewriting and focused freewriting on a daily basis (ten minutes per day for 40 days), students learn the biological basis for this strategy through a lecture on "How the Brain Works."

Unit 2: Stranger in the Photo paper

This is the same assignment students in Academic English III and AP English Language and Composition complete. Students read Don Murray's "Stranger" piece and use it as a springboard to discovering and writing their own pieces, based on their own photographs and memories. This assignment gives the student a chance to complete a serious piece of personal reflection, an appropriate starting point for students in this course. The paper is "long" and a great deal of conferencing is required. It is also an occasion when students learn to get comfortable with the computers and the computer routine.

Unit 2: "On Being..." paper

Another assignment common to Academic English III, but generally tackled earlier in this course. It forecasts the major profile piece by asking students to get outside themselves and develop interviewing skills they encountered during the I-Search work of English II. Again, conferencing is required.

Unit 3: Voices from the Past: Drama

All students taking English III study Macbeth. In this course, the Polanski/Tynan production is featured. Study of particular segments of text in concert with viewing leads to an lengthy and focused paper, in which students inquire into issues of good/evil and character. This segment of the course can either build upon or lead into the Little Mike and The Catcher in the Rye assignments.

Unit 4: Visible Voices: Little Mike and Inquiry into Character

Students view a film which presents a character whose actions often conflict with his words. The assignments associated with viewing this documentary demand careful attention to detail, to words, to action, and to the filmmaker's representation.

Unit 5: The Novel: The Catcher in the Rye

Students read the complete text of this novel which, like Little Mike, features a narrator busy with self-definition. Students can use tape players to follow along with a spoken version of the complete text. The major paper (several hundred words) asks students to base their judgments about the narrator's character on what is in the text.

Unit 6: Reading Nonfiction

Students read several non-fiction pieces which profile particular individuals. Among the pieces used are a Times Record profile of locally notorious police nemesis Calvin Osnoe and an extensive Jack Brian profile by Jon Katz ( The Prince of Wildwood) from Rolling Stone . In addition to these pieces, profiles taken from Casco Bay Weekly and other nonfiction sources are sometimes used. Students learn to appreciate how characters are drawn in text, how interviews result in information, and how authentic scenes are represented.

Unit 7: Writing on Demand

This unit runs from January through mid-March, prior to the MEA. Students complete the same battery of writing on demand tasks as students in Academic English III. These assignments allow students to plan and complete a draft then revise and edit their work into a finished piece. While they are not allowed to conference and are working under some time pressure, they must apply techniques of process writing (their knowledge of their own process) to their work. Students are made familiar with strategies for on-demand writing.

Unit 8: Profile project

This is the capstone assignment of the course. Students produce an interesting profile about a former Mt. Ararat student who was not in a college-bound program. The paper must be the result of substantive inquiry. Questions are planned and sequenced in advance, as students work with each other and the teacher to develop approaches to conversational interviews. Interviews with profile subjects must be taped and transcribed. Quotations are used in the final paper. Drafts are presented for multiple conferences. The final paper must be carefully prepared, spell checked, and mechanically correct. All parts of the process must be completed.

Core Assignments

Teachers select, revise, and invent particular core assignments in connection with the the above curriculum units. The following pages include examples of these core assignments and, when applicable, their rubrics.

www.mta75.org/curriculum/english/wrlab3.html

English III Writing and Reading Lab Curriculum Guide