The Program

From Elsa Auerbach, Director of Freshman English and
Vivian Zamel, Director of English as a Second Language

A number of years ago, a transfer student from another university in Boston told her writing instructor that the standard advice to someone heading for UMass Boston was, “Buy a lot of pens.” We love this story for a number of reasons. First, in a city famous for its private universities, UMass Boston, it seems, has developed a reputation for being particularly passionate about teaching all its students to write at a very high level of academic competency.

Another reason we love this story is that it accurately reflects how we approach the teaching of writing—not by lectures or workbooks—but by students putting pen to paper (or, more often, fingers to keyboard), writing and rewriting.

The third reason we love this story is that it links writing to UMass Boston as a whole and not just to the Freshman English Program. Now this may seem an odd reason for the Directors of Freshman English to cite joyfully; however, the philosophy of Freshman English rests on the understanding that learning to write at a high level of academic capability requires sustained effort across the curriculum and across the college years if the good work begun in freshman composition courses is to take root and come to fruition.

And so, for these reasons, we embrace the story of the UMB transfer student whose friends told her to “buy a lot of pens.” We think it reflects our three core beliefs: that advanced writing ability is possible for every student; that learning to write is best accomplished by writing and rewriting in contexts of support; that everything students learn in Freshman English about the writing process and themselves as writers needs to be reinforced and continued across the curriculum.

Now, when you come to UMass Boston with all those pens, we in Freshman English are prepared to help you use them productively in a carefully organized sequence of two required freshman writing courses--101 and 102. These two courses teach critical reading and writing as interconnected and interpretive activities and prepare you to undertake the reading, writing, and research you will encounter across your academic courses. We also offer parallel freshman writing courses—101E and 102E—designed expressly for multilingual students who benefit from explicit attention to their particular concerns about writing and who benefit as well by collaborating with other students who share their concerns. In addition, we offer a preparatory course, 099, which is required of some students whose writing placement essays show that they will benefit from a more extensive introduction to critical reading and writing before beginning the work of 101. (An intensive preparatory sequence of work for English language learners is also available, offered through the university’s Academic Support Office.)

Our core beliefs shape the methods and materials in all of these courses. Each one is designed as a sequence of reading and writing assignments that allow students to reach higher levels of articulation and conceptualization over time through a sustained process of inquiry. This process of inquiry involves an array of activities that continue throughout the semester. These include responding informally to readings, reflecting on personal experience, glossing and questioning texts, researching, rereading, discussing each other’s written responses, drafting, peer reviewing, rewriting, and synthesizing new readings into one’s thinking. Through sustained commitment to these kinds of sequenced inquiry activities, students emerge from our program with a stronger understanding of what it takes to see a writing project through at the college level and to make one’s mark on a subject.

While students will find that different sections of the same course may use different themes and texts, all sections share precise expectations that are articulated in the course descriptions. The Freshman English faculty meets regularly to discuss and compare their materials; in this way and others, we maintain a careful balance between instructional autonomy and programmatic consistency. The staff is largely comprised of tenured faculty and long-term part-time instructors. All are experienced teachers of writing and particularly gifted at making UMass Boston’s diverse freshman classes a source of knowledge for everyone to share. Students in our freshman classes, enabled by their teachers, learn to experience their diversity of perspective and background as rich sources of meaning for their papers.

Meaning—a word from the preceding paragraph that is easy to gloss over and take for granted—is actually the most important word in this statement of the Freshman English Program’s philosophy. Your meaning is what the reading and writing process that we teach makes possible. Constructing your own meaning in relation to what others have written, you will become a real writer (and not just a hack or someone merely filling assignments). And while everyone who teaches Freshman English values good organization, a well-turned phrase, and correct punctuation and spelling, we also know that a grasp of these things alone will never produce a real writer. New questions, new ideas—new meanings-- make writers. Our goal for all students who put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard is that they begin to acquire a deep sense of themselves as authors—an identity which we know has not always accompanied school writing instruction but which we believe, to our bones, should.