COURSE AND TEACHER INFORMATION

Instructor: Kevaughn Hunter

Email: [email protected]

Office location: NAC 6/222

Office hours:

Class meeting time and location: NAC 6/136 We 3:30PM – 6:15PM

Class website: https://forthesciences.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

• Need to talk?: Send me a message on Slack, and I will meet on Zoom for anything.

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COURSE OVERVIEW

This FIQWS course are broken up into two equal parts: a topic seminar and a writing seminar. These two FIQWS seminars are closely linked. There will be interaction, both in class and online, between seminar instructors and students. You will receive individual grades for each section of the course, and they are worth three credits each (for a total of six credits.)

A description of the topic seminar will be included in a separate syllabus distributed by your topic section instructor. 

The writing seminar will introduce and hone skills that increase and ease the production of strong analytic writing. Structured classroom practices will work toward building a writing community that fosters the development of unique voices built around a set of shared values about writing and the work that writers do. Participation as a member of the writing community requires that your writing be public within the classroom. The purpose of sharing writing is to get a sense that academic writing is more than a matter of private student/instructor communication. Writing that has a real sense of audience, tends to have a real purpose, which in turn is the foundation for all effective writing.

The purpose of the writing seminar is to help invent, identify and/or develop a writing process that will sustain your work both in academic, professional, and personal settings. As such, the focus of every class period will be writing. There will be extensive in-class writing periods supplemented by assessment and peer review. The writing you produce will be the main texts for the class to use for review. 

Required texts for composition section only:  No textbook to buy, borrow or steal! All supplemental reading materials for the comp section will be open source and posted to the class website. 

PLATFORMS

In order to fully participate in the class activities, you will need to engage with several online platforms:

Class website:  The class website contains all content (assignments and extras) and the schedule required for the class. 

Blackboard: All work will be collected via Blackboard (and Blackboard is where completed presentations will be stored in our “Weeklies.” 

In addition, announcements will be sent via Blackboard. Please check your email address to make sure that Blackboard has a good address for you.

Slack (recommended, not required): Slack is my go-to for quick communication, and I use it a lot. If you want to contact me quickly, use Slack not email. If you have a quick question that needs a quick answer, use Slack not email. If you have a question over the weekend, use Slack not email. If you need quick answers or resources, email isn’t the best method of communication.  

Slack is also a great way to keep in contact with classmates and writing groups. You can post in the general channel to broadcast your question or idea to the class, form groups (DMs) to talk to specific people or communicate with me privately (DM). By our first class I will have already sent an email with our specific course invite. 

COURSE LEARNING OUTCOMES: 

Students successfully completing a FIQWS composition course will demonstrate ability to:

• Explore and analyze your own and others’ writing a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.
• Develop and use strategies for reading, drafting, revising, and editing.
• Practice systematic application of citation conventions (APA).
• Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.
• Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
• Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.
• Locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine, and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias; and
• Compose texts that integrate your stance and language with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation

CLASSROOM POLICIES AND PROCEDURES

My statement on grading: 

In my (researched) opinion, using conventional grading of essays and other work often leads people to think more about acquiring grades than about their writing or learning; to think more about how to please (or fool) the teacher than about how to effectively communicate a topic that interests you to a specific audience for a specific purpose.

In addition, conventional grading could make you reluctant to take risks with your ideas, writing, and communication styles. It doesn’t allow you to try and fail (without risk), and failure in writing—getting it wrong—is vital to learning how to write better.

Finally, conventional grading models assume that everyone is the same, that every student speaks and writes the same first language, develops at the same rate in the same way, has the same foundational education, and that variation in skills and literacies in the classroom is a bad thing. It is clear to me that none of these things is true.

For these reasons, I am incorporating a labor-based grading contract to calculate grades in our classroom. I will explain this during our first class.

Don’t worry! You’ll get a lot of assessment and feedback on your writing and other work throughout the semester—both from your peers and from me. Use the assessments (verbal and written) to rethink your ideas and improve your writing and research practices. In short, I encourage you to take risks, possibly fail, and learn from that failure.

I will read everything you write, shape our classroom assessment activities and discussions around your work, and provide resources for self and peer assessment, but you will not get grades from me. Sometimes, I won’t even comment on your homework/classwork, except during class when we use it or discuss it. I want you to rely more on your peers and yourself to build strategies for learning and assessment that function independently of a teacher’s approval.

That said, I will be the one assigning credit for your work. You can ALWAYS receive full credit for every on-time submission provided you revise the document if requested. If, after a draft, a peer review, and a revision, my evaluation is that your work doesn’t fulfill the requirements of the assignment or that you have not clearly taken those reviews seriously, I’m going to ask you to do another revision.  This will have no negative impact on the credit you can get for the assignment as long as (1) the revision request is honored, (2) its clear you worked to improve based on my or peer comments and (3) the final document fulfills the requirements of the assignment.

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THE GRADING CONTRACT

All Work/Labor/ Writing needs to meet the following conditions:

Complete and on time-You agree to turn in assignments, writing, or other labor assigned that meet the contract expectations.

Revisions/Drafts: Drafts are an essential aspect of the writing process. When you improve a draft, your job is to revise your thinking or work, to reshape, extend, complicate, or substantially clarify your idea—or relate your ideas to new things. You won’t just correct or touch up. When asked to do a full revision, the revision must respond to or consider seriously my assessment and/or peer assessments in order to receive credit for the assignment.

Copy editing: When submitting the final draft, your work must be well copy edited—that is, you spend significant time in your labor process to look at spelling and grammar. It’s fine to seek my help or peer help in copy editing.

In addition to the Work/Labor and writing, there are attendance, lateness, and participation expectations that need to be met:

Attendance and participation: You agree to attend and fully participate in at least 86% (12 out of 14) of our scheduled classes, and their activities. That means you must be present during those classes as most class activities can’t be done outside of the class period w/o peer interaction. The allowed absences can be taken for any reason—illness, tiredness, crankiness, busyness…. whatever. I suggest you let me know if you’ll be absent so I can keep you informed, but that’s not required. Your third absence will result in a five-point deduction from your overall score. At four absences, an additional 5 points will be deducted from your overall grade. At five, we’ll need to have a conversation about what’s going on with your attendance. I’m really chill. Simply give me communication and a lot of things will be fine, even with these above rules. Let me know what’s happening and we can work around a lot of issues. I can help proactively but will not help retroactively.

***Documented illness will be considered independently of the above policy, as long as you provide written documentation as proof of illness and/or alert me ahead of time that classes will be missed. 

Lateness: You agree to come on time to class sessions. Arriving a few minutes late a couple of times or very late once is understandable. Arriving late often, however, will have a negative impact on your final grade. After three late arrivals, lateness will be counted as absence (each late arrival will be .5 absence whether it’s 2 minutes or 40 minutes late) and follow the rules in the attendance and participation policy (above). If there’s a reason that you’re arriving late regularly, please let me know right away. I know that there are some people that have obligations or commutes that make mornings difficult. If you have a solid reason, I’ll work with you (…but “the subway” only works a couple times, so heads up). 

Sharing and Collaboration: You agree to work cooperatively and carry your own weight during all group work. This includes peer review and all class activities. This may be the easiest of all the course expectations, but we should have some discussions on what we expect from each other.

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GENERAL CCNY POLICIES
Student Code of Conduct
All student members of the College community are expected to conduct themselves in a manner that demonstrates mutual respect for the rights and personal/academic well-being of others, preserves the integrity of the social and academic environment, and supports the mission of the College. The College has an inherent right to address behavior that impedes, obstructs, or threatens the maintenance of order and attainment of the aforementioned goals by violating the standards of conduct set forth in the University student conduct policies noted below as well as other policies that may established by the respective Schools, Global Sites, and administrative offices of the University.
The goals of the CCNY Community Standards are:

1. To promote a campus environment that supports the overall educational mission of the University
2. To protect the University community from disruption and harm
3. To encourage appropriate standards of individual and group behavior
4. To foster ethical values and civic virtues
5. To foster personal learning and growth while at the same time holding individuals and groups accountable to the standards of expectations established by the Code of Conduct
   Plagiarism and Academic Integrity
   Plagiarism is copying and using other people’s words without proper acknowledgment or citation as it is indicated in the CUNY Policy on Academic Integrity. All writing submitted for this course is understood to be your original work written. Plagiarism is unacceptable and has serious consequences that can include a failing grade. In cases where I detect academic dishonesty (the fraudulent submission of another’s work, in whole or part, as your own), you may be subject to a failing grade for the project or the course, and in the worst case, to academic probation or expulsion. You are expected to read, understand, and adhere to CCNY’s Policy on Academic Integrity.

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STUDENT RESOURCES 

There are a number of support services available for CCNY students: 

Gateway Academic Center (GAC), 1/219– advises freshmen and transfer students in their first year at City College who have not yet decided on a major or are fulfilling requirements to apply to one of the College’s professional schools. 

Samuel Rudin Writing Center, NAC 3rd floor plaza – offers writing assistance to all CCNY students through one-on-one tutoring and group workshops (ESL tutoring is also available through the Writing Center). 

AccessAbility Center Tutoring Services, NAC 1/218 – provides one-on-one tutoring and workshops to all registered students with learning or physical disabilities. 

SEEK Peer Academic Learning Center, Location: NAC 4/224–offers counseling and peer tutoring for students in need of academic and financial support who have registered for the SEEK Program. 

SSSP Academic Resource Center, Harris 03 – offers tutoring in most core subjects and group workshops in Math and Biology for students who meet financial qualifications and have interviewed for the program. 

Visit https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/academics/tutoring for a complete list