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Colleagues,

Thank you for your responses to my inquiry about the feasibility of Brock
University's new first-year courses.  In a meeting this week, I conveyed
your responses to some of my English dept colleagues here, and your voices
were helpful in raising some difficult issues.  Brock's English dept took
on the project of creating a writing program with good will but without
being given much chance of preparation, and now it's learning the hard way
about how writing is taught and managed.

Given the vulnerable positions of many writing courses and programs,
perhaps especially those in Canada, I appreciate how a listserv such as
ours can act as a counterweight to some of the naivete out there about
writing.  Brock is the second Canadian university I've taught at in my
young career in which writing is managed or strongly influenced by people /
departments without comp/rhet backgrounds.  It can take much hard work,
especially for those of us in new positions isolated from other comp/rhet
colleagues, to bring around our more powerful, tenured bosses and
administrators (and, for that matter, even my TAs!).

I sometimes envy the strong American tradition of freshman comp--at least
it seems to give American administrators a workable (though underfunded)
model of how writing can be organized.  Canada could do with such a tradition.


All the best,
John

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John B. Killoran, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dept. of English Language and Literature
Brock University
St. Catharines, Ontario
L2S 3A1   Canada

(905) 688-5550 ext.3886
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