Forming a Philosophy

During my master’s program, I was as an editor with an economic development branch of New Mexico State University, the Arrowhead Center. The Arrowhead Center worked with local small businesses and employed graduate students to conduct a number of studies for clients, including business plans, feasibility studies, and marketing plans. In the process of working with clients, the students would have to engage in a large number of email correspondence, write a proposal, create timeline documents, write weekly progress reports, write the report, and create a formal presentation of their findings. These students represented a cross-section of disciplines, including business, accounting, finance, education, English, communications, and engineering grad students. In addition, they were required to work with middle and high school teams in a business plan competition across the state, responding via online interface to student questions as these secondary students developed their own writing and presentation skills in the business area. They were tasked with a high level of writing at a professional level, and yet for many of them, their education had hardly developed these skills.

I worked with many intelligent students well equipped in their specializations that could not adequately communicate their knowledge to clients without vast revisions on a basic composition level. And they did not always consider the writing they did other than reports to be serious writing, especially email correspondences. The students outside of English, communication, and education did not think that composition would be an important skill for the types of jobs they would be taking and they saw composition only in terms of the more formal writing, reports but not emails, presentations, timelines, or written responses to competition students. Their programs did not require them to take anything beyond freshman composition for one semester and a possibly one additional English course. Far removed as graduate students from their sophomore English classes, it was clear that these skills were actually required of them when they attained these highly coveted graduate positions obtaining 'real-world' job experience. They did not have the skill set for the composition of their reports or the variety of texts that they would be creating and the frequency that they would be asked to write.

This experience frames something I want to develop in my teaching philosophy. I believe that there has to be way to teach composition that somehow both transcends and connects to momentary interest and specific field. Composition is a social tool that is always in use, even outside of writing, and to develop composition skills through the writing process can create an awareness of the various ‘texts’ composed in different contexts. The question remains of how to frame composition in a way that will be useful to most students under any one subject matter description so they don't immediately dismiss is as irrelevant. Do you lose some students just by having the categorization of composition within the English department? Reflecting on the variety of writing skills asked of the Arrowhead students to a range of audiences leads me towards developing assignments for my syllabus project that will look at writing as a diversified skill set that is formulated not exclusively by the five paragraph essay, but by reception contexts as well.