The studio courses introduce students to literacy in the university environment, which includes both liberal and professional discourse. The studios are intended to begin a "spiral curriculum" in which students repeatedly experience, practice, and critically examine both the commonality and differences in literacy practices among the subcommunities of the university and between the discourses of the university and others in the culture (e.g., minority, public media). This activity is highly specific to the particular context in which it takes place: not only the university in the abstract, but the particularity of Syracuse University as a heterogeneous community of multiple and sometimes conflicting discourses which are practiced, at best, "in view of" each other.

The spiral curriculum in literacy is designed to correlate with the events and problems that students experience sequentially as they move through the undergraduate curriculum and then leave the academic environment here for further schooling or work. For example, it assumes that students will move deeper into disciplinary discourse as they choose a major, undertake longer or more elaborate writing projects in the later years, face the problem of interdisciplinary discourse as they choose a major, face the problem of interdisciplinary reading and writing, encounter gradually higher expectations for correctness and conventionality (and some shifts in these from field to field), and so on. These assumptions are hypotheses that will be tested against the realities of this university.

Such contextual considerations are balanced by a developmental orientation to literacy in the spiral curriculum. This view rejects ideas of literacy as a set of limited skills that children learn in component steps and master once and for all. Instead we see written language as profoundly implicated in intellectual and social development; writing and reading abilities grow and adapt to new contexts and needs over the life span. Studio 1 and 2 are planned as a developmentally sound sequence and will focus attention on literacy growth as a long-term process that is not incremental but transformational. They will problematize in particular the tensions that writing creates for the adolescent and young adult because it is simultaneously an instrument for cultural assimilation and a means to define selfhood and subjectivity against the dominant discourse of the community.

A third principle of the spiral curriculum is that it is theory-based. I do not mean merely that it adopts a new model of writing, but that it asks teachers to teach writing in view of an evolving research base and to do so both critically and inventively. One implication is that the content of the writing curriculum is not fixed, but evolves (as in other disciplines) to reflect theory development and research finding in the field as well as the experiences of teachers in the Program. The curriculum is a conceptual framework, itself subject to revision, rather than a prescriptive content and method that determines every assignment and practice of the classroom. Teachers will develop a range of syllabi made coherent by common principles constantly being examined and tested. While this relation between pedagogy and research is taken for granted in other fields, it is a new phenomenon in teaching composition generally, and at Syracuse in particular.

In general, the spiral curriculum attempts to reconcile and relate two notions of writing that are normally opposed: (1) writing as a mode of learning (thinking, knowing, active engagement) that is deeply implicated in intellectual development; and (2) writing as a means of communication based on the conventions of a particular discourse community, located in a specific sociohistorical context, and addressed to a particular audience. The first view leads teachers to emphasize multimodal informal writing (notes, journals, reading logs, class minutes, etc.) by which students actively and critically examine ideas and information encountered in the academic environment: in texts, lectures, talk, systematic observations of the laboratory or field. The second view acknowledges social constraints and determinants of literacy and therefore stresses rhetorical considerations and the conventional expectations of particular discourses: everything from grammar and punctuation to disciplinary genres and modes of argumentation.

We argue that the two views are not incompatible, but do identify forces that come into tension within a student's academic writing experiences and literacy development. Our curriculum is concerned with the relationship between the two. However, we place different emphases on these two aspects of writing in Studios 1 and 2. We make here a developmental assumption: that the precursor to elaborated formal academic literacy (analysis and argument) is not the genre of personal narrative, but the practice of writing to think reflectively in various kinds of informal modes that record, observe, argue, and otherwise engage the student with subject matter (including his own experience). It is also a contextual assumption: that literate people read and write constantly, mostly in such informal modes (which in fact dominate the actual writing of college students and professors). Studio 1 is designed to reveal these practices to students as characteristic of academic and professional literacy and as the basis for fully-formed texts; and to give them multiple chances to try them out in unpressured situations where dialogues and constructive criticism can occur among peers. Studio 2 builds on these habits to construct longer academic texts, examine them as forms, and study them as rhetorical practices with audiences, generic constraints, and disciplinary conventions.

Despite this difference in emphasis, neither course excludes the concerns of the other. Form is not merely conventional, but heuristic, and the most private kinds of writing are conventionally shaped by cultural discourses. Students in Studio 1 therefore must try out the shapes of text in order to be able to reflect successfully in informal modes. Workshops and written dialogues introduce concepts and experiences of audience as an influence on thought. Conversely, Studio 2 builds on and carries forward all the informal writing practices of Studio 1 in order to contrast and write various forms of discourse and more elaborated, rhetorically sophisticated texts.

In their similarities, the two studios ultimately reintegrate the two aspects of written language that they stress differentially. They teach students that thought itself is social while texts are not merely conventional and imitative, but express the purposes and individuality of authors. Summaries below of the specific emphases and activities in Studios 1 and 2 clarify some other differences between them.

Studio 1 (WRT 105)

* Introduces notion and components of writing process, including planning and revision

*Introduces students to collaborative methods such as workshops (where they begin to learn constructive criticism of plans and drafts), written dialogues, collaborative projects

*Focuses heavily on critical reading of a range of complex texts ranging across the disciplines and genres ( literature is included but not privileged). Uses writing as a means of reading more flexibly and deeply, including strategies such as annotation, summary, paraphrase, outline, reading logs, microthemes

*Engages students in investigative projects that require observation, recording information in writing, analysis, and synthesis. The projects focus on language and literacy (e.g., literacy histories of individuals in the class, studies of note taking practices, comparisons of composing processes)

*Stresses commonalities of practices within a literate community while inquiring into differences, perhaps structured by such categories as race, gender, class, age cohort, culture (not discipline)

*Assigns a wide range of writing types, forms, genres, stressing informal writing and relatively short texts

*Introduces students to concepts of development and teaches them to criticize and evaluate their own work developmentally, taking into account their growth as writers over time along several dimensions.

Studio 2 (WRT 205)

*Continues discussions of writing processes, considering how they may vary according to individual, task, discipline, genre and how they may evolve over time

*Continues workshops and other collaborative teaching methods, with increased emphasis on rhetorical concepts (audience, style, form, genre)

*Extends reading of complex texts to longer pieces and focuses on differences among discourse communities. May draw on material students bring from other courses

*Assigns investigative projects that are more oriented to the ways that texts are related to contexts and to the close analysis of textual decisions and forms

*Stresses differences in discourse practices as they exhibit themselves in groups formed according to discipline and profession or work. Emphasis is on how forms of text reflect underlying differences in values, purposes, concepts of knowledge, habits of thought and action

*Assigns writing suggested by and related to readings, including practice of various genres and styles across disciplines and professions. Argument and analysis are stressed (although not exclusively) and analyzed as forms of thought and actions that may differ from one context to another

* Continues more advanced self-evaluation and criticism of others' texts, now viewed not only within the community of the classroom but against a more abstract social community and its demands. Teaches students to set their own developmental goals and to pursue them independent of writing classes and teachers, using a small community of readers as a workshop group.

The Writing Program intends, as facilities permit, to introduce and emphasize word processing and interactive use of computers by students and teachers in both studios.

The Writing Program also intends to develop a writing center that will deal with problems of language (acquisition, editing, and advanced stylistic concerns) through mini courses, workshops, and tutoring. Some versions of Studios 1 and 2 will be coordinated with specific courses in other departments and schools.