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Stephanie Jones
Dr. Irene Clark
ENGL 600B
Syllabus Rational
English 114B: The Road Less Traveled
My teaching goals for English 114B will be centered on creating an environment where
students can develop their multimodal writing skills in order to enhance their chance for
successes throughout their time at the university. My teaching philosophy is to help students
learn using skills and interests they already possess to aid in the academic writing process in
order for them to retain and enhance their abilities through a scaffolded process. This particular
syllabus is constructed to highlight the familiar plotline of a heros journey. I developed this
theme with the works of Joseph Campbell, Paulo Coelho, Sherman Alexie, Gerald Graff and
Cathy Birkenstein in order to cover the philosophical, narrative and academic aspects of a
personal journey and how it relates to American society today. The purpose of the course theme
is to have students use their own felt sense of their academic journey to understand the literature
and apply it to the three major project assignments. It is bolstered by the pedagogy of academics
Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi, Douglas Hesse, Mike Rose and Deborah Brandt who believe
in creating an environment for students to learn safely in order for them to develop academic
writing skills, examine the function and purpose of literary pieces, understand writing as a
recursive process and demonstrate its use through invention, drafting and revision and
demonstrate the ability to use rhetorical strategies that include the appeal to audience, logic, and

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emotion through the use of cultural diversity of literatures. My motivation for developing a
practice influenced by these particular academics comes from my own experience with writing. I
was very fortunate that early on in my college career I had instructors who loved what they do,
but I lacked confidence in my writing ability for many years. Their passion for teaching inspired
me, and still inspires me today, to create a pedagogical practice which instills academic selfassurance and life skills in my students. It is my hope that I'm taking my first year writing course
my students will learn discipline, drive and confidence in themselves.
The first way in which I addresses my students learning in building upon skills they
already know in order to first, maximize their chances of retaining the information from the
course and secondly, to allow for a deeper understanding of the text which can be applied to
other parts of their education. In the article Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use
Prior Genre Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition by Mary
Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi they explain: the multiple influences and complex processes
involved when students negotiate between prior and new genres as they traverse discursive
boundaries in FYC.(Reiff 316) are multifaceted and as educators we must create course and
chose materiel that will meet the student where they are at in terms of their education. This
means choosing material that are relatable to them in order to build upon the skills they already
have instead of feed into any fears they may have about their skills lacking in some way. As
Reiff and Bawarshi further describe confidence level seems to be one of the early indicators of
who will cross and who will guard boundaries. Almost all interviewed students identified the key
tasks of the preliminary essay with confidence.(Reiff 325). It is my belief the familiar structure
of the texts I have chosen and the relatability to their own personal journeys will make the

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course work more palatable to my students; therefore allowing me to focus more on boosting
their writing skills.
Additionally, Reiff and Bawarshi discuss what types of things our students need to be
versed in in order for them to make connections between texts an apply the strategies they have
learned outside of the first year writing course: the proliferation of strategies taken in
conjunction with other factors seems to help identify boundary crossers as those who engage in
high-road transfer by drawing on fewer whole genres but many strategies(Reiff 327). It is my
hope that in teaching a familiar genre it serves as a springboard for students to understand and
retain skills such as drafting, invention, thesis development and research strategies. With this
better understanding of how I believe students understand and use course materials through
Reiffs work, I have organize my classroom teaching time in a manner similar to that of
Douglass Hesses concept of an open classroom.
During the second semester of a freshmens first year writing course, according to the
CSUN writing department protocol, should have a multimodal focus. In order to properly
execute this learning modality I have employed elements of Ideas found in Douglas Hesses
The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies and Occasions, Sources, and
Strategies articles. Hesse believe that writing should involve a great deal of the students
creative expression and it is the instructors obligation to foster in them skills they need to
succeed in becoming well rounded writers as he explains here: While students having
knowledge about composing is eminently worthy, ignoring different kinds of writing for wider
audiences and purposes is marginalizing, especially when digital tools and networks expand the
production and circulation of texts.(Hesse 35). I totally agree with Hesses ideas for bring
technology into the classroom as can be seen here: multimodality to the extent composition

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studies has, or whether many of its practitioners and apologists would see student videos as
manifestations of creative writing. I hope it might because the new media offer a complex (if
not altogether neutral) turf to which we might bring our different traditions, exploring more
commonalities even as we respect our dissimilar orientations and aspirations. (Hesse 49-50). I
like this concept of a classroom that is safe for everyone to learn and grow because of my own
experiences with learning coming from an impoverished background. I leaned that this was a
strength by reading the works of authors Mike Rose and Deborah Brandt.
As Mike Rose stresses in his case study Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the
Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared through his own
personal testimony and experiences with teaching first generation students and Deborah Brandt
exemplifies in her study Literacy in American Lives through detailed research of Americans and
their relationship to education throughout 1900s to now receiving a good education is what most
people believe will help you make it in this world, but the pressure of doing this at such a young
age has varying results. Yes, there is no question that if a person is given a fair chance at
receiving a good education there are really no limits to what they may achieve, but many
students have family issues to navigate that are much harder to solve than any homework
problems we can give them as educators. Reading stories, such as Brant and Roses, about how
literature and language connect people from all walks of life calls us who are going to be
teaching them to be mindful, compassionate and educated ourselves on the best way to teach in
this diverse population.
When considering the titles of both case studies readers can the idea both authors are
calling the readers attention to the movement the students of these diverse populations have
made towards loss of culture. Rose describes his home life having a great impact on his studies.

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What stands out to me most after reading it is how his parents lack of education stopped them
from getting the help he needed with classes, homework and teachers. This is a common thing
among students from impoverished neighborhoods as Brandt explains in a more didactic fashion:
Literacy learning is conditioned by economic changes and the implications they bring to regions
and communities in which the students live. Economic changes do you value once excepted
standards of literacy achievement but, more seriously, he stabilizes the social and cultural trade
routes over which families and communities once learned to preserve and pass on literature know
how.(Brandt 42). With this in mind it got me thinking about how our current political climate
makes these kinds of class divisions the norm rather than a bad thing. This seems like an
unsolvable uphill battle and what can educators do for students to help them process all the
information and new challenges they will be faced?
Both authors put a lot of emphasis in their works on the personal narrative. While Brant
focused on the literacy linage of one family, Rose explained the importance of the literacy
narrative assignment for his students. On page 111 when Rose states but it was striking how
often the testaments to their literacy were formed from the dark side of their dreams and from the
harsh events and troubling protective fantasies of their day-to-day lives and I believe it is
important to note that this reaction to the assignment is not shocking. Students really need a safe
way to process all the stress of being a first time/first generation college student can bring and
an assignment such as this can helpat least in a small wayhelp build their confidence and
development as writers. These studies reminded me a lot of my own journey with writing.
The 1964 film My Fair Lady is about a high society snobbish phonetics professor who
more or less takes a bet that he can take an unrefined low class flower girl and turn her into the
bell of the ball. Audrey Hepburn played the role of Eliza Doolittle perfectly. It is one of my

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favorite films of hers, but after watching it and reading the novel it is based on I cannot help but
wonder at how many immigrant people were upset by this Hollywood rendition of someone of
the dominate race striping away the culture of someone who they found to be inferior for sport.
Yes, the film does state that the only difference between a society lady and a flower girl is the
way we choses to treat them, but is this radical message about equality overshadowed by the love
story? I think so. So much of a persons life can be defined by one parent or teachers perception
of what they can accomplish or achieve and the whole process of being judged is stressful! For
example, right now I am trying to introduce my essay in the formulaic fashion for which I have
been taught, but I am not feeling very much like a writerI am a good texter; at best.
I think the best part of my literacy journey would be that I know it has prepared me to be
a great teacher, but in a lot of ways I am totally unprepared and I can see it is making me better
not to do things perfectly. I guess I do not know who I am as a writer because I am so much
more than just that. In the spirit of the film: I am French, but I care much more about what you
have done than if you can pronounce things properly. I may not be Audrey Hepburn, but I am not
Eliza Doolittle either. I am this unique hybrid of things and this literacy journey I am on is
defiantly the road less traveled.

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Works Cited
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.
Hesse, Douglas. "The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies." The National
Council of Teachers of English (2010): 31-52. JSTOR. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
Reiff, M. J., and A. Bawarshi. "Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use Prior Genre
Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition."
Written Communication 28.3 (2011): 312-37. Web.
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of
America's Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print.