Is a Writing-about-Writing Approach Appropriate for Community College Developmental Writers in a Corequisite Class

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore

Current developmental writing scholarship emphasizes corequisite support courses taken alongside college-level classes, yet the model also reshapes the curricular design demands of the college-level course when developmental writers are included. This article reports a qualitative research project assessing whether a writing-about-writing curriculum suits community-college developmental writers within an ALP corequisite structure, drawing on interviews with students about learning the readings and developing writing. Findings address how students interpret the course and its role in writing growth.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time50 min

AccessFree to download

Corequisite models and developmental writing context

Program implementation details (ALP and placement)

Writing about Writing (WAW): rationale and critiques

Teaching history and refined justification

Reading difficulty concerns for developmental writers

Qualitative study methods and participant interviews

Student experiences navigating WAW readings

Major themes emerging from the analysis

Is a Writing-about-Writing Approach Appropriate for Community College Developmental Writers in a Corequisite Class? Mark Blaauw-Hara, Carrie Strand Tebeau, Dominic Borowiak, and Jami Blaauw-Hara Current trends in developmental writing have focused on corequisite support courses that developmental writers take in conjunction with collegelevel courses. Much recent scholarship has focused on the design of the corequisite course, but a corequisite model also raises the stakes of the curricular design of the college-level course, since it now features developmental writers. In this article, we describe a qualitative research project designed to explore whether a writing-about-writing college-level curriculum is appropriate for community-college developmental writers in an ALP corequisite model. The rich scholarship on developmental tion means that departments seeking writing pedagogy in higher educato improve lackluster pass rates or poor student performance have many possible options. However, for community college writing programs, determining the best interventions can be difficult, as these are, arguably, among the most marginalized writers in higher education. Current trends in developmental writing have focused on corequisite “support” courses that developmental writers take in conjunction with college-level courses. A growing body of research suggests that corequisite courses can do a better job at helping students quickly improve their writing skills and pass college-level writing requirements than a sequence of stand-alone developmental writing courses (Belfield et al.; Daugherty et al.; Logue) . These corequisite courses can take many forms, including the one we use at our school, which is modeled on the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) pioneered by Peter Adams and others at the Community College of Baltimore County (Adams et al.) . At North Central Michigan College, ALP sections of English 111—the first course in our college-level writing sequence—can have up to twelve college-level students and ten developmental writers. The curriculum presented in the English 111 course is the same across all sections; for the ALP sections, the developmental writers also take a non-credit-bearing corequisite (English 095) that occurs immediately after the college-level section. That corequisite course, taught by the same instructor, is designed to support the developmental Composition Studies 48.2 (2020): 54–73 students’ success in the college-level course. North Central uses a multiplemeasures placement rubric that applies a combination of high-school GPA and SAT/ACT test scores to place students. The students placed in the corequisite must have below a 3.0 high-school GPA and low enough test scores to indicate that the corequisite class is the best fit. An unanticipated consequence of our implementation of the ALP model was that it complicated discussions ofthe English 111 curriculum with some writing-program faculty voicing concerns that if the curriculum became too difficult, developmental writers would not be successful even with the extra support of the ALP sections. These concerns became especially salient in recent years, after our program adopted Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs’s Writing about Writing as its default textbook (At North Central, all new instructors use the default textbook; experienced instructors have some discretion in choosing a textbook, although the writing program has recommended elements and course outcomes that should be included in every section of writing) . Ever since Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s 2007 article,“Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions,” suggested a WAW curriculum for first year composition, there has been both interest and concern regarding the approach. For example, Libby Miles et al. critiqued the WAW approach as reductive, putting too much emphasis on one course to provide an introduction to writing studies, a field that is “a more multifaceted ar

FAQs

What question does the study investigate about writing-about-writing in corequisite courses?

The study explores whether a writing-about-writing college-level curriculum is appropriate for community-college developmental writers in an ALP corequisite model.

How does the ALP corequisite structure work in the described setting?

ALP English 111 sections include both college-level students and developmental writers, who also take a non-credit corequisite (English 095) immediately after the college-level course, supported by the same instructor.

Why did some faculty express concerns about the WAW curriculum?

Concerns focused on whether the curriculum’s readings were too challenging and too removed from developmental writers’ concerns, potentially undermining success even with added support.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore