The Evolution of an Honors FYC

Anne-Marie Hall
University of Arizona

A History

In 1988-1989, I was asked by the Director of Composition at the University of Arizona to work with a committee of local high school AP English teachers, community members, and U of A composition program faculty to develop an honors composition course for students who received a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement English Exam (Literature or Language).   Previous to this year, we had received a sample of AP Exams from the College Board representing a variety of scores to enable us to read the and determine what the “cut off grade” would have to be to place into this new course.  Discovering a clear and distinct difference in critical thinking and writing skills between a score of 3 versus a 4 or 5, we determined our new honors course would require the 4 or 5 (or a 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Exam).

Having never exempted any students from a first-year composition course before, it was not our intention to totally exempt them now.  What we were going to offer is a one semester course rather than the usual two semester sequence as sufficient to satisfy our university’s 6 credit composition requirement. In other words, the score of 4 or 5 on the AP English Exam (or 5,6,7 on the IB exam) would place them in a new honors course and at the completion of that course, a C or better would exempt them from further composition requirements and apply their AP credit toward the remaining 3 credits of composition needed to graduate.

A little background.  In the late 1980s, the two semester composition sequence focused first on research, exposition, and argument followed by a course on close reading and literary analysis.  The current honors courses modeled this sequence, adding complexity and an “honors” flair.  For example, in the first honors course (English 103H), students read classical texts (Plato’s Gorgius, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Cicero’s De Oratore) as well as contemporary texts about rhetoric and wrote expository and argumentative papers with research components.  In the second honors course (English 104H), students read literary texts and practiced close reading and wrote literary analyses.  This new course would attempt to conflate the basic goals of both courses into one semester.

A Modest Proposal

The course that I proposed and that was accepted and implemented in fall of 1989 divided the course into three units with a parallel set of short response papers interwoven throughout.  The influence of classical rhetoric on our honors program is evident in the following curriculum.

     UNIT I. RHETORIC AS A MEANS OF PERSUASION

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. . . . Rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us; and that is why we say that in its technical character, it is not concerned with any special definite class of subjects.     Aristotle

Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstandings and its remedies. We struggle all our days with misunderstandings, and no apology is required for any study which can prevent or remove them.  I. A. Richards

. . . a beast that wants discourse of reason . . .   Hamlet

In this unit, students will be introduced to the elements of the rhetorical situation by reading classical and contemporary rhetoricians as well as essays representing a wide perspective on a topic.  Library research is a part of this unit. Students will work with theories of the ancient and modern rhetoricians.  In addition, they will experience diverse voices on one general topic.  After choosing a specific area of interest to write about, they will explore their topic in small groups. Eventually the exploratory writing will shift toward identifying an issue and persuading an audience to share their attitude toward the problem. Collaboration within small groups will assist each student in identifying a conflict, discussing probably answers and stances in relation to the problem, agreeing on potential strategies for  leading to an answer, and finally, examining the assumptions which make the strategies work. Unit concludes with a sustained, written, documented argument.

UNIT II. RHETORIC AS SPOKEN ART

And I must borrow every changing shape to fine expression. T.S. Eliot

Rhetoric is, like a harp, not perfect, unless with all its strings attached, it be in unison from the highest to the lowest notes.  Quintilian

Acting a role, realizing in a specially intense way one’s identity (in a sense) with someone who (in another sense) one is not, remains one of the most human things a man can do.  Walter J. Ong

Emphasis in this unit is on persona and style. Students will experience texts in more than one medium (oral and written, art and music, etc.) and observe stylistic differences between spoken and written art. They will learn to recognize different voices in different kinds of texts as well as different voices by one author interpreted in various mediums.

Texts include speeches, drama, letters, poetry,, nonfiction and fiction, films and theatre, music and verbal performance, Native American literature in the oral tradition and its written analogue. One sequence might have students read the sixteenth century Italian tale that inspired Shakespeare’s Othello, followed by reading Othello itself, then listening to Verdi’s Otello, and finally reading the libretto (written after the music).  Students could focus on the different styles and voices of the characters within each interpretation, analyze the different intended audiences, note changes in plot, etc. Visual art can also be woven into these units.

The goal here is to have students experience  a work of art interpreted in a variety of mediums and styles, for a variety of different audiences.  Culmination of this unit is a written analysis of some aspect of language in a speech or play and an oral presentation demonstrating the craftsmanship of language.

     UNIT III. RHETORIC AND POETICS

They wholly mistake the nature of criticism who think its business is principally to find fault. Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is, to observe those excellences which should delight a reasonable reader.  John Dryden

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.  That – and no more, and it is everything.  Joseph Conrad

Students will read major work(s) of literature and write a critical, documented essay. They will contend with the problematic nature of interpretation as they are introduced to a variety of paradigms for “reading” a text (such as historical, sociological, biographical, formal, rhetorical, linguistic, psychological, archetypal, feminist, Marxist, reader0resonse, etc.). Student will also learn to sue the literary critics to support, extend, or argue against their own interpretations of the literature.

Secondary texts (related critical essay) will supplement the primary literary texts. Also, more than one work of literature will be used in this unit. Possible combinations include a short story or novella thematically linked to a novel or play; works of literature expressing similar themes but written during two different literary times periods and compared to the different social, moral conventions that shaped each artistic interpretation; two works form the same genre but from separate time periods or different cultural perspectives; two works of literature on similar themes but one written from a male and one from a female perspective. The goal  here is to experience competing interpretations (voices0 of the human condition as affected by the social, political, economic, moral, religious, geographical, and gender conventions and ideologies of a specific time.

          INVENTION RESPONSE PAPERS

. . . to seek out, hear, read, discuss, handle, and ponder everything that befalls in life . . . it is with this that the orator is concerned and this that forms the material with which he has to deal. . .  Quintilian

Students will write periodic invention response papers during the course. They will seek out experiences that will help them generate subject matter. The rationale is to interact actively with the texts they read, become keen observers of the world, and incorporate aesthetic experiences into their writing/lives. The accumulation of these papers will serve as invention for the essays during the course, and a record of the student’s experience with language over the semester.

Range of experiences might include interviewing experts in the field to engaging in dialogues with classmates, attending a photography exhibit to walking in the desert, viewing a piece of sculpture to attending a poetry reading, observing the litter on campus to reading graffiti in the halls, watching behavior in the student union to listening to rhetoric in the mall, reading a history to reading a poem, noticing how verbs function in a stanza to noticing how they function in a biology text, viewing an opera to attending a film.  These responses will be shared with the entire class from time to time so we can learn how different ways of conceptualizing the world modify the content we generate. These assignments are intended to emphasize knowledge as an activity or process, not a commodity or product.

Honors Students Then and Now

In 1988 when this new honors course (English 109H) was developed, the majority of students who placed in the course took the AP Literature Exam (about 80%).  Because AP scores arrive at our university in late July, almost all 109H students had already been placed in another composition course - about half place in regular composition and half place in honors composition (103H).  Furthermore, the placement mechanism in 1988 and into the 21st century consisted of a timed writing sample, written, administered, and graded by the composition instructors in our program.  In other words, good writing determined by our instructors was the sole criteria for placement into a basic writing, regular or honors composition.  [There is also an ESL sequence where placement is usually determined by other means.]  At any rate, what this means is that there is a wider range of writing abilities in English 109H versus in English 103H.  In the latter, students are placed solely on their writing ability while in the former, scores on a national exam are the sole determiner.

In 2001, the University of Arizona changed its placement procedures. Replacing our own writing exam was a placement matrice that included high school GPA, high school English grades and courses, SAT or ACT scores, and points for honors or AP English courses.  In other words, placement into honors English (103H) was based more on good studentness than on good writing alone. 

As a result of this placement change, we have reason to believe that the honors students in both our courses – 103H and 109H - are very similar in writing abilities.  Another change in the last 17 years has to do with the AP Exams themselves.  Today the number of students who take the AP Language Exam rather than the AP Literature Exam is about equal. Students in 109H are more balanced today between demonstrating the rhetorical skills that the Language Exam measures and the literary analyses skills the Literature Exam measures.  We have  begun gathering data to verify our observations, collecting essays from students in both courses to evaluate the range of abilities.  We may begin to merge the two courses if we find the students’ abilities and needs are similar.

Speaking of curriculum…..103H, 104H and 109H have changed very little in the 17 years since I first designed and proposed the curriculum for 109H.  It is time, we think, to take a look at who our honors students are in 2005, how well they write for different audiences and purposes, what their own career and education goals might be, and how we can best challenge them into the 21st century.

Modernist Subjectivities for Postmodern Students: Thoughts on the Future of Honors Composition

I have taught honors composition more than any other composition course in my career in higher education.  One of the most striking observations about those students, something that has stayed with me over the years, is how efficient many of them had become about language and its generative possibilities.  They were exceptionally anxious to please, earnest about grades, worried about keeping their scholarships, and more or less leery to taking any kind of risk (grades were more important).  They were often expert at a type of rote production of writing that made my life either easier or harder, depending on my mood. 

I find today’s modernist subjectivity in composition problematic.  Looking back at the proposal I made in 1988, I see a modernist curriculum for today’s postmodern students (Faigley).  We need to continue to challenge these very fine students in multiple ways:

• Synthesize the expressive concern on creating self-aware individuals with an epistemic concern with social context and ideology that makes individuals agents, values individualism, yet does not exclude social concerns.  Sherry Gradin’s project politicizes expressivism by creating a “pedagogy of equity” that unites romanticism and expressivism (121).  This along with a concern for more collaborative learning repairs the split between individual and group, mind and body.
• Design hybrid assignments that rupture staid, familiar forms.  For example, I started coming up with forms of storytelling unknown to them in order to ease them out of usual ways of knowing. N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain offers a tripartite ways of knowing: essays/stories told in three voices – mythic, factual, reflective – all in dialogue with each other but only implicitly linked, and framed by a prologue and epilogue.  I even started asking students to perform part of their essay – not read it, mind you.  We saw films of various storytellers, read texts on verbal art as performance, and tried to rediscover the power of language.
•  Visual and spatial rhetorics are another way of knowing in the 21st century.  We should be exposing these students to multiple rhetorics, multiple ways to processing and delivering information, all the while remembering Plato’s declaration that ethos – good character – is a central concern of rhetoric.  Donna Haraway’s cyborg is another model for the kind of technologically advanced ways of generating texts that would benefit our honors students in FYC.  She writes that a cyborg is that “hybrid of machine and organism, a creative of social reality as well as a creative of fiction….the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled postmodern collection of personal self” (163).  We should think about multiple rhetorics, multiple ways of generating and communicating ideas rather than confining ourselves to logos and print media.
• Interdisciplinary projects – English Composition Honors Students need to work with other disciplines (biology, architecture, philosophy, etc.) to find more diverse ways of communicating, of building models for disseminating information, and of linking ways of knowing beyond the humanities into the disciplinary and global world.

Ihab Hassan writes about modernist versus postmodernist characteristics.  I recognize much in his modernist list that describes our 20th century honors first-year composition – romantic, closed forms, organized around purpose, a hierarchy of knowledge that is valued, an overemphasis on logos, and a product worthy of an artist’s gaze.  Postmodernism, however, is about antiforms, about play, chance, and anarchy.  Especially it is about multiple truths, multiple ways of knowing.  There is room for exhaustion and silence.  It’s all about the process, the performance, and the happening (qtd. in Faigley 14).  That seems like a good list to start from in preparing honors FYC students for the 21st century.

Works Cited (back to top)

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh, PA:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Gradin, Sherrie L. Romancing Rhetorics: Social Expressivist Perspepctive on the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1995.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technologoy, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.”  Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81.

Citation Format

Hall, Anne-Marie. "The Evolution of an Honors FYC." FYHC: First-year Honors Composition 1 (Spring 2006): http://fyhc.info/hall

A Writing Program Administrator discusses some economics and politics of FYHC…

English departments are being pressed to do more with less.  Some of us are involved in making decisions about where cuts are to be made, and many of us work in departments that are facing such decisions.  I just finished a third term as a writing program director, and I have served on departmental councils and other committees that have had to deal with looming budget cuts.  The upper administration has several times pressed our department to eliminate developmental writing courses and send those students to the local community college.  The math department has taken that route, and so have many of our peer institutions.  Here at the University of Arizona, we place eight percent of our incoming students into basic writing (and then take two more semesters of first-year composition), and eleven percent are placed into our two-semester honors sequence--based on their high school grades and test scores, or by submitting portfolios of their writings if they decide to appeal their placement.  We also offer a single course for students who receive Advanced Placement scores of 4 or 5.

We have resisted pressures to eliminate basic writing courses because basic writing students are much more likely to come from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds than the rest of our students.  We are committed to resisting efforts to track such “less prepared” students into community colleges because we want to make our university more representative of the communities it needs to serve if it is to be a public institution.  Basic writing is crucial to retaining students from underrepresented backgrounds.  Research has shown that basic writing students are much likelier to stick around if they work with instructors who know their names (see White), and unfortunately many instructors of general education courses have too many students to spend much time with them on an individual basis.  As at many research universities, general education courses at the University of Arizona often have sixty or more students, and lecture courses often enroll hundreds of students.

Our department has been threatened with cuts of 10% percent because our college has seen budget reductions in that amount.  As in English departments in other institutions, the only area where such amounts can be cut is in the “temporary” funds that are not committed to permanent faculty lines.  Almost all of that money is committed to supporting instruction in the writing program.  The most obvious, and the most unacceptable, way to make such cuts would be to raise class size or course loads, which are already too high, with ceilings of twenty-five students in most classes.  Graduate teaching assistants often teach two classes a semester, and real progress has been made on changing that equation through concerted collaborations with the leaders and rank file membership of our graduate student organization.  We responded to our administrators with arguments about equity, about the quality of what we do, and about the important services we provide.  In the end we still faced a 10% budget cut which amounted to several hundred thousand dollars.  What would you propose if you were facing such a situation, as some of you likely are?

We proposed to reduce our honors sequence.  We have a two-course honors requirement for the 10-12% of our students with higher test scores and high school grades, and I proposed that we reduce the requirement to a single course, as we had for AP students years before. That proposal would save us twenty-four sections or about $100,000 a year. 

I proposed cutting from the top rather than the bottom because common sense suggests that honors students’ persistence rates will not likely be adversely affected by cutting one of their first-year composition courses, though I do not know of any research studies of this question.  I do know that such courses tend to be looked down upon by most honors students (and often their parents) because these students have often taken AP tests and dual enrollment courses to reduce their general educational coursework.  Given the fact that our peer institutions are more likely to require one than two courses for honors students, reducing our requirement seemed like the best way to mitigate the impact of the budget cuts while preserving  the Basic writing classes that research has shown can make a difference in whether basic writing students stay in college.  After all, honors students do not really “need” as much help with their writing.  They have generally been successful in school and so do not need to take a first-year composition course to introduce them to the university, help them find their way around the library, and figure out where the commas go and how to write a short theme on a general topic.  What difference does it really make whether honors students take one or two courses?

Making such a cutwould have made a lot of difference in our writing program.  Those of us who have worked in the program have resisted the general perception that composition courses are required of students who do not know how to write.  We responded that if students were good writers, we would help them become better writers.  That response did not satisfy students who thought that they were ready to proceed to more advanced coursework in their majors.  Honors students who transfer into our institution have often been placed out of composition elsewhere, and we do allow some students to “test out” of composition by taking the CLEP exam and then writing three essays that mirror the emphases of our courses.  Some students who enroll in our Honors College enter with enough credits to make them sophomores.  Such students are more likely to take first-year seminars, colloquia, and internships to prepare for graduate school, and so general education requirements often begin to look more and more like just another outmoded hurdle as universities replace seat-time requirements with proficiency tests that award credits by examination.

At first, the only people to oppose the proposal to reduce the honors requirement were the instructors of the honors courses.  They argued eloquently for the need to preserve a quality experience for highly qualified writers.  They noted that while FYHC students are sometimes annoyed by being required to take composition, they usually quit complaining once they got into the course because they value the experience. This assessment was also made by an administrator from outside our program who works closely with honors students.  The instructors’ perceptions were borne out by the fact that our first-year honors composition coursesconsistently receive even higher student evaluations than our regular composition courses, which are highly rated.  These instructors’ responses compounded our misgivings about giving in to the logic of the opposition by acceding to the argument that students who know how to write do not need to take writing courses.  

Such arguments were compelling, but we still had to face the issue of where to cut.  We decided to go forward with what we thought had to be done and proposed reducing the honors requirement to a single course.  We moved the proposal along through various curricular committees until an important administrator found out about the proposal.  The proposal was summarily quashed because it would have meant a reduction in the number of student credit hours that we generated.  In our university about the only place where funding follows student credit hours is in general education, because administrators want to make sure we have enough seats for entering students and have traditionally increased funding when the entering class has increased—at a level sufficient to hire adjuncts and TAs but not faculty, of course. 

We have had to go back to brainstorm on how we can balance the books without doing it on the backs of overworked teachers.  Our deliberations have thus far followed a line of reasoning that I suspect has been set out elsewhere.  In times when English departments are being asked to do more with less, doesn’t it make sense to cut at the top rather than the bottom to avoid hurting those who need the most help?  

Obviously, the issue is more complicated than that.  The assumption that writing courses are for students who do not know how to write is based on bottom-line thinking that has become increasingly pervasive in discussions of higher education.  The pressure to think in terms of dollars and cents is intensifying as the bottom line drops in our institutions.  In my institution, and many others, there is not generally a coherent relationship between student credit hours and funding except in general education—where administrators move “temporary” funding around to meet demand.  Such shifts in budgets and offerings can be particularly disruptive in writing programs because they tend to serve more entering students than any other unit on campus.  Traditionally we have been given additional funding to hire adjuncts for general education courses, while at the same time we have been denied funding to replace tenure-track faculty.  Of course adjuncts generate student-credit hours at a cheaper cost than faculty, but the logic at work is more insidious than just replacing tenured faculty with adjuncts, thought that is insidious enough in and of itself.  Temporary funding can be moved around, while tenure-track lines cannot be cut, except in a total budget meltdown.  Adjuncts do not have to be fired, just not rehired, and those who work under such conditions have a very real sense of what it means to speak out.

When one considers such factors, then cutting from the top starts making less sense because it gives into the bottom line thinking that devalues the work we do.  The challenge is to sustain historic commitments without making structural changes that give into financial pressure.  If that sounds like a justification for preserving the status quo, I suppose it is, and I also suppose that such thinking is to be expected from those such as myself who have invested years in maintaining structures that enable teachers of writing to do their work (without disrupting the hierarchies that pay them so little for that work). 

When I stepped out of directing the program, my colleague Anne-Marie Hall became Director, and the budget problems were dropped into her lap.  She was presented within weeks of taking over with the prospect of closing the university-wide writing center.  People spoke out, with another of our colleagues, John Warnock, giving a pointed speech in the Faculty Senate on why cutting the Writing Program made no sense financially or educationally (because we generate credits at a very low cost with a high level of student satisfaction).  The student newspaper got involved, and administrators from across campus lined up support to keep open the Writing Center.

In retrospect, one can see that offering up a popular student support program was a very smart strategy, though the decision was in fact made for the same reason we focused on honors in our response to the proposed budget cuts: the writing center did not seem like an essential part of our basic services.  Offering to cut the hours of the Writing Center worked much like offering to close popular parks and recreation programs in response to threatened cuts in a city or state budget.  Such cuts will yield a public response and put pressure on those who are threatening to cut budgets because such programs serve those who will speak out and be heard.  Nobody wants to speak for cutting popular high profile programs because such cuts are indefensible, both in the sense that the cuts will seem unjustified, and in the end they will likely not be made.  That is of course the point of proposing them.  At such a juncture, if a writing program is doing its work well, people will speak up to defend its most popular services, and with some coaxing and coordinating, such responses can be used to secure additional funding, as Dr. Hall did quite effectively.

Experienced writing program administrators such as myself may be hesitant to respond in such a way.  We tend to work within channels to get things done.  We know how to do that, and with so many people depending on what writing programs do, we are hesitant to make high profile gestures that can end up creating hard feelings that can cost the program in deliberations behind the scenes on budgets, workloads, and a hundred other details that can make quite tangible differences in the lives of students and teachers.  We are experienced problem solvers who respond to pressures by figuring out practical strategies to make the best of a difficult situation.  In this way, we make even the most difficult situations manageable.  Sometimes that needs to be done, but sometimes a system has to be allowed to crash because its operating assumptions are so flawed.  It is hard to know when those times are, especially when you have invested years of your life in making the system work.

Budgetary pressures rise and fall because writing programs here as elsewhere are perennially under funded.  Writing program administrators such as myself try to make the best of what we have to work with, but we need to ask ourselves how bad of a situation we can make work.   Commentators on the field who are less invested in writing program administration such as Sharon Crowley have argued for abolishing all first-year composition requirements because, in her assessment, they have created indefensible labor conditions, forced students to take courses they have not chosen, and helped other faculty avoid taking responsibility for teaching writing.  When writing programs face pressures to cut, sometimes we administrators need to step back and see who will step up to take responsibility, with a little coaxing and coordinating.   Sometimes we should not respond in a reasonable problem-solving mode to manage the pressures that come to a head at such junctures.  It is hard to know when to try to limit the impact of such cuts and when to raise the stakes by threatening to cut high profile elements of a program, but a community that works well together can deliberate upon the challenges it faces more effectively than an individual administrator.  In the end, sharing the responsibility to deliberate upon such problems with those who will have to live with the outcomes is an essential part of creating a collaborative learning community that can respond effectively to the problems it faces.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998.

White, Ed.  “Reconsidering the Importance of Placement and Basic Studies: Helping Students Succeed Under the New Elitism.” In Mainstreaming Basic Writers: Politics and Pedagogies of Access.  Ed. Geraldine McNenny. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001.  19-28.

Citation Format

Miller, Thomas P. "Cutting from the Bottom, or the Top?" FYHC: First-year Honors Composition 1 (Spring 2006): http://fyhc.info/wpa-views.asp#miller

Home | Advisory Board | Lead Article | Pedagogy | History | Student Work(s) | WPA Views | Review(s) | Editorials | End Note

Copyyright 2006 FYHC | website by sological.net