ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, Stephen Fox describes how the literacy course evolved as part of the UW-Madison first-year writing curriculum and explores the value of such a course for beginning writers. Linking the course materials to theories of a collaborative pedagogy, he argues that the course provides a way for students to use their own experiences to create knowledge in the classroom and he explores the decentralized role that teachers of the course adopt. But teachers do play a central role in mapping out the course’s broad outlines and creating the assignments that will structure the course. In this capacity, they can enhance the course’s goal of encouraging students to generate much of the content of the course. This chapter sets forth the details of the Wisconsin course to show how its overall structure reinforces the goal of helping students write with a sense of their own authority.
