As all Brandeis students come to know, in the summer before arriving on campus they must write a timed essay in order to be placed into a University Writing Seminar (UWS), a requirement for all students. However, some students must first take a Composition course before enrolling in a UWS their second semester.
Professor Marsha Nourse, an Adjunct Professor of English in the University Writing Program, is currently teaching COMP 1B: Eco-composition: Environmental Issues and Nature. This is her second year teaching at Brandeis, but she is well experienced in composition, having taught for 35 years, mostly at Dean College.
She also served on the executive committee for the CCCC (also known as the 4 C’s), which stands for the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a national organization for composition studies. “I got to look at composition programs at a lot of colleges, particularly two-year colleges,” said Professor Nourse of the position, who is clearly experienced in the field. She also looks forward to teaching a UWS course in the following semester at Brandeis.
The theme of Professor Nourse’s class is environmental literature and ecocritical theory. Eco-criticism, she explained, is a field of criticism that was developed and promoted in the 1990s but has roots in others decades. Essentially, “a group of scholars came together to study how they can analyze literature from an ecological viewpoint of the interaction of people with nature.” Students in the class are reading a variety of works, including poems, memoirs and research texts relating to environmental issues.
There are two different types of COMP: 1A and 1B. 1A is usually meant for international students who learned English as a second language, but not necessarily, and 1B is more of a mix of students. COMP students then take UWS the following semester. Nourse explained that while a professor who teaches both sections may use the same reading material, the 1A section may spend more time with learning to adapt to the challenges of writing in your second language, like expressions or syntax, and then focusing on the content. However, students can request to move into a different section of COMP if they so choose. Both types of COMP classes are capped at 12 students.
COMP is beneficial for those students who feel like they need some more experience writing a college-level paper; its the smaller class size and usually having a Brandeis faculty member as opposed to a graduate or Ph.D. students as the instructor give the students more individual attention on their writing skills.
Goals for the class are to prepare students for UWS, but there is also more emphasis on writing instruction and building confidence in their writing and research, because for many students, a majority of grades comes from writing papers so it is a vital skill to have.
Nourse explained that she really enjoys teaching and “encouraging students to write well… last year I saw a lot of improvement as the year went on.” According to the syllabus, the writing process includes three stages of drafts, peer review and conferencing which all lend to a stronger paper.
While some students may feel frustrated with being placed into Composition, Nourse said it is possible for students to switch their level, since the first day of class often involves a short writing exercise to gauge the writing level of each student. She also mentioned that taking a Composition class can really build skills and confidence in writing before a UWS, which assumes that students are ready to jump into the content quickly. Nourse said that students who took AP or IB classes have also been in Composition courses, and in an anonymous survey that she sent out to her students last year, almost all of them said that they found taking the class to be worthwhile.
