Here are our guiding assumptions:

Collaboration and Peer Response: Learning is always collaborative, even when this mutuality is not voiced. The best environment for learning is an environment that recognizes the importance of collaboration, implementing mutual spaces of learning when possible. Peer response groups are the most obvious instance of such learning. However, collaboration also alludes to the work of Paolo Freire (The Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and should not exclude the creation of an active, dialogic classroom, or well-sequenced visits to the Academic Resource Center.

Process: In the past, product-based pedagogies enforced a notion that learning could be finished, punctuated, and filed away. Once an essay was submitted, it was done and need never be reexamined. A process-based pedagogy continually exhumes the “finished” work and recognizes that learning is perpetual. A student may submit a final essay, but the learning should never stop. Process implicitly and explicitly promotes this understanding of education. On a more practical level, we recognize that good writing comes from revision, from multiple rough drafts. We recognize that writing is revision, and we build process into our syllabus schedules.

Critical: To exist critically in the world requires that we recognize that the world is a creation, a textual creation to some extent, that is open to interpretation and thereby critique. Through the use of surprising texts (music, TV, and so on), we impress on students that everything—not just “academic texts—is worthy of interpretation.
Audience: We are devoted to creating authentic writing spaces that mirror or at least approach the complexity of on-the-job composition. Authentic writing spaces require serious consideration of audience because knowledge of one’s audience is a prerequisite for any writing that wants to achieve its purpose.

Reading: Good student writing depends on an intense engagement with written texts, including those written by other students. Models of good writing, both by professional and student writers, remain essential to the teaching of composition.

Reflection: No one knows better than a teacher of composition that college can be a stressful place, allowing precious spare time for reflection on work, let alone life. Reflection, allowing students space and time to think through their learning, is a key component of a process-based pedagogy.

Interdisciplinarity: “Majors” and disciplines implicitly make us think that the world is well-bordered—that the science of artificial intelligence can learn nothing from English, or that art and chemistry never touch on one another. The truth is that the world has fewer borders than it seems. Through an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, we attempt to show the world in all of its complexity. 

Information Literacy: However nuanced, we appear to live in an age defined by a glut of information. Our composition courses are devoted to instructing students in the assessment, retrieval, and proper use of information on the web and through library databases. We work closely with the Pilgrim Library in order to meet this important pedagogical assumption.