Content area
Full Text
This article explores the value of including creative assignments in the composition classroom. Specifically it demonstrates how a multimodal assignment can help struggling students develop the confidence to succeed on creative assignments and on subsequent more traditional academic assignments.
I have a friend whose daughter, Simone2, was a mediocre student in high school. It's not as though she couldn't do the work successfully; she was more than capable. She just . . . didn't. She managed to maintain decent grades, just like any other gifted but indifferent student-decent enough so that she was accepted into a film studies program at a prestigious university. However, her lackluster grades were not what gained her entrance; instead, it was her art/film portfolio that showed her extraordinary talent.
I tell this story because after Simone had been in college for about one year, I asked her about her college studies, and she told me she was thriving-not just getting by, but thriving. I asked her why she thought she was more successful in college, and she said the answer was simple: all her classes valued creativity-even her first-year composition class. I started thinking about my own composition students-both in developmental and first-year composition-and I realized Simone's story was probably much like their own. Let me explain.
I have been teaching composition for twenty years, the last eleven at Kingsborough Community College (KCC) of the City University of New York in a Learning Community Program that combines a cohort of entering first-year students into a Learning Community (LC), or "link," composed of three linked courses (taught by three different instructors): an English composition class, a general education class, and a student development class (a crucial course in study skills and orientation to college learning, where the instructor also serves as the student's adviser/case manager for one academic year). Students freely opt into this program.
Every semester for nine years, my class in the LC is has been a developmental course, a first-year composition course, or a first-year composition course that includes 30-40 percent developmental students (in an Accelerated Learning Program).3 For all those nine years, my linked general education course has been art history. From the 27,000-year time frame students cover in art history over a twelve-week semester, my...