The Writing Program of John Jay College is the proud recipient of the 2013 Certificate of Excellence from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), a prestigious national award, recognized for “its consistent delivery of excellent, high quality education in writing, rhetoric and composition, particularly because it ‘models diversity and/or serves diverse communities’ and because the program implements the theory driven literacy practices in the field.”   Additionally, [insert info about second award.]

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Writing Program Rationale

 The John Jay Writing Program Curriculum guiding principles: 

• To serve a writing community largely comprised of English-as-second-language and English-as-second-dialect students who need extended periods of instruction and practice to master composition skills.
• To address the writing needs of a primarily sociologically and scientifically-oriented (mission-related) curriculum, while still providing the rhetorical sensibilities for a well-rounded liberal arts undergraduate.
• To approach writing as a means of inquiry and analytical thinking rather than mere tabulation of information.
• To present a scaffolded sequence of manageable, interrelated tasks.
• To incorporate resources (i.e., Center for English Language Support (for ELL students), Writing Center, and library orientation) to reinforce the activities that occur in the writing classroom
• To emphasize (and consistently reinforces) the habits, techniques, and strategies necessary to compose a college-level piece of writing.
• To introduce students to the cross-disciplinary aspects of writing which teaches them how to apply their writing skills in a variety of academic and rhetorical writing situations.
• To increase students understanding of their own writing ability and learning through reflective practice.   

The John Jay writing curriculum scaffolds large, complex, college-level writing projects (such as creative non-fiction, annotated bibliographies, research-based essays and rhetorical analysis) into manageable interrelated tasks.  Taken together, the courses act as an introduction to a college writing life, as students complete assignments across a variety of genres, strategies, and forms that provide opportunities to rehearse their composing skills so that they can be adapted to any number of rhetorical situations.

This curriculum works under the belief that a college-level writing program should offer students a sense of coherence and pertinence as they move from one course to another in the sequence, and as they face writing situations in courses outside of the writing program. Furthermore, while in content-based courses faculty may assign a research paper with very little guidance, these composition courses guide students through incremental steps of research and writing.  These composing strategies and research devices then help them negotiate the assignments that they encounter in other courses.  In this democratizing and familiarizing spirit, curriculum guidelines have been developed for specifically-prescribed assignments in its first-semester course and content guidelines for its second-semester course.  The assignments and guidelines ensure that all students receive a relatively consistent experience no matter what instructor they have or in what course section they enroll—what we deem an “equal opportunity composition curriculum.”  Additionally, the new curriculum allows instructors to choose the content of their course as not to squelch the pedagogical creativity and expertise they bring to the classroom.