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Goals for English 1006
[As Adopted by the English Department, 1993]

As members of the English Department, we share goals for the students who enrol in our first year course. We strive to design and conduct individual sections of English 1006 so that the students who successfully complete the course will have opportunities to achieve the following abilities, knowledge, and dispositions, and we evaluate their success in the course in part on their progress in these areas. We agree that the opportunities afforded by a year-long course include the possibility for both teachers and students to spend time with texts, and to hope for substantial growth and change. We believe that this is best achieved by working together to reflect on and challenge our own assumptions, dispositions and habits.

We acknowledge that the statements below are goals, and that they must be adjusted to the differences in students, teachers, and situations, and that no one will achieve growth in all these areas; still, we believe that the success of our courses is appropriately judged by our success in achieving them.

With respect to reading and dealing with texts, our students should:

• Be able, and disposed, to read and value literary texts from a wide variety of genres and periods
• Have increased, and growing, ability to read and derive pleasure from texts
• Be accustomed to reading texts in circumstances which foster seeing them as human voices in social dialogue, and attributing social intentions to them, and thus to recognize that the social contexts in which reading and writing occur are important
• Recognize that initial responses to texts are often different from responses made after reflection, or in different circumstances, and that reflection is valuable -- and pleasurable
• Know that what they and others think and feel in response to a literary text is important
• Be encouraged to view texts as vital parts of the intellectual-aesthetic culture of communities or nations, and to see them as expressions of their hopes, struggles, limitations, assumptions, expectations and preoccupations.
• Be disposed to attend, and attend to, public realizations of texts (for example, the theatre, movies, readings, lectures, and able to be engaged with them in a reflective and responsive manner.
• Be increasingly disposed, and accustomed, to value diversity in cultural, social, and political matters

With respect to writing, our students should:

• Be aware that writing is a powerful and necessary means of discovering what one thinks and making sense of it
• Be aware that writing is a means of communication, and be disposed to share ideas by means of it
• Be accustomed to the experience of having their writing make a difference to the actions, thinking and feeling of others, and thus to be able, and disposed, and accustomed to use writing as a means of informing, persuading, and involving others
• Be able, and disposed, under appropriate circumstances to produce texts of mechanical acceptability in terms of conventions of usage -- grammar, mechanics, diction, tone, generic conventions, and so forth -- and to understand and use capably the conventions of the forms of writing which literate people use for sharing ideas and values

With respect to library, information and knowledge sources, our students should:

• have a growing ability to understand and use the resources of the library
• be disposed to use the library in appropriate circumstances, and be able to make informed decisions about such circumstances
• understand that books and journals are not repositories of information but rather are statements of ideas and views by people engaging in the processes of scholarship and research
• value the processes by which we move toward agreement on truths
• be disposed and increasingly able to use information technology (including the computer catalogue and other databases) to find and use resources

With respect to the processes of learning, our students should:

• understand that learning is not something which happens to them, but something they do
• more deeply understand the role of evaluation in the learning process
• be increasingly likely to continue to learn actively and more likely to see learning as their own responsibility than they would have without the course