I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer and is getting geared up for another fun and fab academic year (while soaking up those final weeks of summer of course!). While things slow down over the summer, they certainly don’t stop.

June saw another round of Directed Self-Placement (DSP) as part of first-year student orientation, Connections. Despite projections that we were going to see a drop off in enrollment this fall, we are pretty close to the numbers of last year’s incoming class (especially if we factor in a make-up orientation session in late August). This year’s DSP saw some aberrations for which we’re not quite sure how to account. In particular, we’ve seen an almost 50% drop-off in enrollment in ENG 022 Introduction to College Composition. We know a few things may have contributed to this drop-off: the College of Education discouraging their students from taking ENG 022 because of a lack of elective space in their curriculum, for example. I expect what this means is that ENG 023 may be more challenging–for both students and faculty–this fall. We will be closely following our 023 courses this fall to see what the impact of this drop-off in ENG 022 may be.

At the end of last semester our composition group introduced a plan for a new concentration in what we’re calling Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies (CRLS). Over the summer, we continued developing courses and plans for slowly introducing this concentration into the broader English curriculum. As we develop courses and plan events related to CRLS we will post some of our discussions here.

As you may have read in a previous post, our tenure-track position in Composition and Rhetoric was approved and is officially posted. To our delight, we have already received several applications despite the fact that the deadline is not until November. We’ll have our first round of interviews at MLA in San Fransisco, December 27-30. This hire will bring the number of our tenure-track composition faculty to five. We are looking forward to bringing a new person on board as we begin to develop both our graduate and undergraduate offerings in composition and rhetoric.

On August 7 and 21 we will hold our first-ever “Composition Fairs.” We hope these fairs will be places where new and returning faculty can get ideas for their composition courses, peruse resources and sample assignments, and gain some insight into new developments in the field of composition and rhetoric. The August 21st date will be combined with an Introduction to Composition at Kutztown for New (and returning) Faculty.

We also began initial planning of the Fifth Composition Conference for Student Writers and other assorted composition events for the academic year. (For last year’s Composition Conference click here)

So, as you can see, we may have slowed down a bit but we have certainly not been idle! Stay tuned for more updates and information! Enjoy the final weeks of summer!