A New Beginning in College Writing

Abstract

Pedagogies for teaching high school English and college composition often divide between so-called student-centered approaches and their opposite, variously labeled teacher-centered, traditionalist, or product-based. Where students collaborate in the discovery of knowledge, learning is said to be student-centered. Where teachers impose their knowledge on students, as in the "banking model of education" described by Paulo Freire, the teacher-centered approach holds sway. 1 Implied in this distinction is good will on the part of those who take their students' side, and something less than good will on the part of those who impose their authority on them.Because teachers work for students, every instructor should take his or her students' side; every teacher should ask which assignments in which order will foster the best results; every educator should make the classroom a lively place where students learn to think for themselves. The claim that one approach to teaching is more student-centered than another therefore carries a polemical charge. It sets an educational philosophy that favors the advancement of students against another that holds them back. But what if a misunderstanding arose as to what "student-centered" means, and, as a result, a pedagogy passing for progressive actually inhibited progress? What if this misunderstanding unfolded, like the internally consistent logic of a bad dream, and became policy, ruling high school English and college composition programs across America, gaining dominance over the

Evaluation of sources: a new sustainable approach

“…These studies all addressed how to avoid myside bias in the writing and re-writing phase of the argument research paper. A widely accepted view (Prince, 2007) of how students create a research paper is that they do it through a recursive process. Students move from topic development to research, to evaluating sources, to outlining, to writing and back to modifying their topic.…”