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Sequential Writing Assignments in International Relations and American Government Survey Courses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2016

Wayne A. Selcher  and
E. Fletcher McClellan
Wayne A. Selcher
Affiliation:
Elizabethtown College
E. Fletcher McClellan
Affiliation:
Elizabethtown College
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Extract

Like many colleges and universities. Elizabethtown College has adopted a writing-across-the-curriculum program that attempts to establish writing as a principal means of communication and as a tool for the development of intellectual skills. Set to begin in Fall 1990 as part of a new core curriculum, the program requires that each core course provide writing assignments that “emphasize the process of writing or rewriting in response to critical evaluation by faculty and/or peers.” A major stimulus to the development of the program was an NEH Summer Seminar on Writing Across the Humanities, conducted on campus in 1985 by faculty in the College's Professional Writing Program.

The Department of Political Science, with four professors, has been an active promoter and participant in the campus writing program. Most of our own less formal conclusions about the role of writing in learning are congruent with those of the Harvard Assessment Seminars. We, too, find that close faculty-student interaction in assignments spread out sequentially provides the writer with directive and suggestive comments in a less threatening and more encouraging way. Such consultation leads to a higher quality final product and student mastery of more skills in style, organization, and analysis of substance. Two assignments that have worked particularly well for us at the introductory level are the foreign policy issue brief in the international relations course and the issue analysis project in American national government.

Type
For the Classroom
Information
The Political Science Teacher , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , Summer 1990 , pp. 14 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., is a four-year private comprehensive college of 1500 students and 105 full-time faculty members, with about ninety percent of the student body in Bachelor of Science programs. Admissions standards are highly competitive. About forty percent of the student's graduation requirements are taken in the liberal arts core curriculum.

2. Fiske, Edward B., “How to Learn in College: Little Groups, Many Tests,” New York Times, 03 5, 1990, p. 1 Google Scholar.

3. This follows the approach used in Lineberry, Robert L., Government in America: People, Politics, and Policies, 4th ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1989)Google Scholar. Other texts provide somewhat different answers to the question of who governs. James Q. Wilson, for instance, describes four kinds of politics: majoritarian, interest-group, entrepreneurial, and client [ American Government: Institutions and Policies, 4th ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1989)]Google ScholarPubMed. Lowi, Theodore and Ginsberg, Benjamin, in American Government: Freedom and Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990)Google Scholar, explain American public policy making in terms of patronage, pluralist, power elite, and bureaucratic elite politics. Any of these explanatory schemes can be applied in the fourth section.

4. Jones, Charles O., An Introduction to the Study of Public Policy, 3rd ed. (Monterey, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 1984), p. 245 Google Scholar.