Prof. Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Program Director
Nathan Wood, Assistant Director
English 201 is a 3-credit, intermediate level, general education writing course that satisfies the university’s Communications B requirement for enhancing students’ literacy skills. Enrollment in English 201 assumes that a student has successfully completed or been exempted from the “Communication A” requirement.
English 201 is a low-enrollment course that depends on student participation, so each section is capped at 19 students. It is designed to develop skills in the four modes of literacy: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. This course places special attention on writing, requiring numerous assignments of multiple pages, each developed through extensive planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Most classes employ a workshop approach, meaning that students work in peer writing groups, reading and commenting on one another’s work in constructive ways that are taught to students early in the semester.
This course is couched at an intermediate skill level: it has more experienced students (not being open to freshmen and requiring 3 credits of introductory literature as a prerequisite) and more challenging assignments, typically involving sophisticated readings, complex writing tasks, and very high expectations for student inquiry. Each section of the course treats a single issue, problem, or theme (or set of issues, problems, or themes) in depth, giving students the opportunity not just to work on general processes of reading and writing but to be initiated into the complex discursive practices of a particular literate community struggling with particular intellectual, cultural, and practical problems. Consequently, despite their common satisfaction of Comm-B criteria, English 201 sections vary widely from teacher to teacher.