Hi, this is Rachel, from the English Department.

OERs in writing classes are a little tricky because the “content” of Composition is a matter of significant disagreement. One school of thought is that “academic writing” means engaging with “academic reading,” which means students should read challenging material centered around some academic topic and develop thesis-driven essays using that material. But… many have challenged this definition of academic writing given that writing produced by people in the academy and by students in disciplines takes many different forms and often is not characterized by responding to and/or analyzing and/or synthesizing published texts.

An alternative has been to substitute scholarly texts about writing, so that students are learning about how writing is studied and developing an intellectual-grounded stance toward writing at the same time that they are practicing writing. But… students aren’t always interested in writing as a topic and it’s questionable that an introductory college writing class should also be this kind of introduction to a particular discipline.

Composition textbooks often take a kind of generic approach suggesting that there are discrete steps such as “brainstorming” and “developing a thesis” and “doing research,” but this doesn’t address the questions of what students should be reading and why, what kinds of genres they should be producing, who the audience or imagined audience is and so forth– all things that can vary from one institution to the next. Also, a lot of these basic ideas about writing processes can be presented and practiced within a given classroom by the teacher without directing students to a full-length textbook with standardized language on steps or sequences that might not be appropriate.

What I’m hoping to develop for my department is shared material that is really tailored to our newly revised Course Learning Outcomes for Comp I and II, so there are assignments and readings that clearly align with our common reading/writing/research goals.  These might be pre-existing open access materials as well as readings and assignments that instructors are willing to share, but the most important thing for me would be that it would be organized by outcome/goal rather than topic, say. It’s really easy for writing teachers to get focused on material– texts we like and think students might enjoy. But that can lead to a class that ends up being (or being perceived as) more about the topic or texts than it is about the particular writing outcomes. There will always be content, of course, but I see it as a problem if the main thing students remember is that they read a particular book, particularly if they don’t also remember something about what they did with writing and learned about themselves as readers and writers.