Composition Forum 49, Summer 2022
http://compositionforum.com/issue/49/

Negotiating Traditions and Charting a Different Future at an HBCU: The Composition and Speech Program at Delaware State University

Bhushan Aryal, Brody Bluemel, and A. Myrna Nurse

Abstract: This approach article describes the structure of the new Composition and Speech Program at Delaware State University, particularly in light of the use of discourse-based interview (DBI) methodology in the development process of the program. The program includes a 4-course sequence—three 2-credit hour composition courses and one 3-credit hour speech course designed to be offered in an 8-week format. The article demonstrates how the program is planned for continuous improvement, and how authors have adapted DBI for their context in at least three different ways—1) one-to-one interviews, 2) instructor surveys, and 3) professional development sessions—to articulate implicit ideas within the institution so as to use them for the programmatic refinement.

Introduction

We proposed this article for this discourse-based interview (Odell, Goswami, & Herrington) special issue because of our multi-year program building plan. Often programs are created and treated as past achievements; the newly redesigned Composition and Speech program at Delaware State University is future-oriented and our focus is on the transformation of the courses going forward based on the tacit knowledge that we develop and articulate within the institution as well in relation to the larger developments in composition studies scholarship at national and international levels. Among many methods to generate ideas for the program development, we have employed the discourse-based interview method (DBI), and in doing so, we have adapted the methodology to our context. As Neil Baird and Bradley Dilger have noted in their presentation at the 2019 Computers & Writing Conference, DBIs have undergone transformation because of “a range of approaches to developing questions and conducting interviews, many using technology not available in 1983” when Lee Odell, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington first articulated the DBI method. As Baird and Dilger’s review of the scholarship on DBIs summarized, it is not the exact form of the method but its spirit to “explore tacit knowledge: the practical, implicit, incompletely articulated knowledge” that has kept the methodology relevant. In adopting and adapting this ideas-foregrounding methodology, we have used DBI at least in three different ways: First, we deployed one-to-one discourse-based interviews mostly when the program re-design started; second, we conducted instructor surveys from the piloted sections of the new courses and used the results of those surveys for deep conversations with the department’s Composition and Speech committee, and third, we have converted professional development sessions into discourse-based interviews to articulate, foreground, and share the tacit understandings among faculty within our department.

This article describes the components of the new Composition and Speech Program at Delaware State University, particularly in light of the discourse-based interview method we used to generate ideas to develop the program. Delaware State University is officially a “diverse, contemporary, and unapologetically HBCU” that has seen expanding program offerings, research portfolios, and student enrollment in the last few years and has planned and projected its substantial growth for the next decade. Located in the Department of Languages and Literatures, the new composition and speech program was planned in the fall of 2019 after the English faculty expressed the need to revise the existing composition courses. The main impetus for the revision emerged because we wanted to (1) remove the existing remedial writing courses because of their ineffectiveness as well as associated stigma, (2) introduce Open Educational Resources for equitable learning, (3) enhance student writing, public speaking and digital literacy outcomes, (4) increase retention, and (5) incorporate anti-racist, inclusive pedagogical strategies. The new composition courses are intended to be more effective in preparing students for post-first year college and beyond in such a way that they could have standard composition content as taught regularly in colleges across the country while also blending Black literacy and rhetorical heritage. We piloted new courses for three semesters starting in spring 2019, and the program was approved in fall 2021.

Courses and Program Structure

The new program includes a four-course sequence of three 2-credit hour composition and one 3-credit hour speech course. The first class in the composition series is a 2-credit hour ENGL 121: Rhetoric and Composition I that focuses on the fundamentals of composition from basic grammar rules, sentence structure, paragraph formation, and the writing process to the composition of formal academic essays. ENGL 121 is themed on self-discovery and expression. Assignments include several small writing pieces, quizzes, weekly online discussion forums, and two major writing assignments—“Personal Narrative” and “This I Believe” papers that orient students to explore and express their ideas, experiences, and beliefs. ENGL 122: Rhetoric and Composition II is also a 2-credit hour course that covers a range of writing topics, including rhetorical analysis, critical thinking, exploratory essay, and engaged reading. Along with weekly discussion forums and quizzes, the class requires students to work on two major writing assignments—“Rhetorical Analysis” and “Multi-audience Research” papers. The multi-audience research paper asks students to take up a controversial issue, to collect, summarize and analyze at least four stakeholders’ arguments on the issue, and to develop their own theses in relationship to those positions. The midterm project in this course requires a multimodal project in which students convert the rhetorical analysis paper into a video presentation. English 124—the last in the composition series—is a 2-credit hour research writing course that leads students through the research process in which they propose and defend proposals, collect ideas using the genre of annotated bibliography, and write and present an 8-page research paper.

English 123: Rhetoric and Speech—a 3 credit hour course—repurposes the classical canons of rhetoric in the context of current multimodal and digital approaches, and provides students training in the fundamentals of speech with a focus on a variety of speeches, job interviews, and group presentations. Using a semi-lab, experiential approach, students learn to plan, organize, research, critique, and deliver introductory, informative, and persuasive speeches. Besides the speeches, students collaborate for a group presentation, and also work on a job interview project for which they plan and record mock job interviews to further professionalize themselves in the digital environment. Together, the program is designed to achieve the learning objectives recommended by national organizations such as the CCCC and CWPA (Behm et al.), while localizing them to the context of the HBCU. Table 1 provides a brief description of the courses:

Table 1. Four course composition and speech sequence developed between 2020 and 2021.

Course Number and Title	Brief Description
ENGL 121: Rhetoric and Composition I (2 credits)	ENGL 121 focuses on the fundamentals of composition from basic grammar rules, sentence structure, and paragraph formation to critical literacy skills (such as audience analysis, recognition of genre conventions, and message-purpose alignment) needed for composing formal academic essays. This is a process-oriented writing course that leads students through the stages of prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. Assignments include several small writing pieces, quizzes, online discussion forums, and three formal academic essays using the rhetorical modes of narration, definition, and classification.
ENGL 122: Rhetoric and Composition II (2 credits)	In addition to continuing to emphasize the goals of ENGL 121, ENGL 122 teaches reading and writing strategies that are vital for students’ success in college and beyond. The course covers a range of writing topics, including rhetorical analysis, exploratory essays, argumentation, critical thinking, and engaged reading. Students will work on larger assignments, including three formal essays, a multimodal project, and a final presentation. Other assignments include two reader response papers, smaller writing tasks, and discussion forums that are designed to enhance students’ facility with writing and rhetoric.
ENGL 123: Rhetoric and Speech (3 credits)	ENGL 123 provides students training in the fundamentals of speech with a focus on a variety of speeches, job interviews, and group presentations. Using a semi-lab, experiential approach, students learn to plan, organize, research, critique, and deliver introductory, informative, and persuasive speeches. Besides the speeches, students collaborate for a group presentation, and plan and record mock job interviews to further professionalize themselves in the digital environment.
ENGL 124: Rhetoric, Research and Composition III (2 credits)	Building on the writing, reading, and critical thinking skills that students developed in English 121 and English 122, ENGL 124 focuses on rhetorical modes, argumentation, and research writing. The course is designed to introduce students to the conventions of argumentation and research-based composition. Over the term, students will complete several writing assignments (including a formal proposal and annotated bibliography) for the completion of an 8-page research paper.

One of the major changes in the new program compared to the one that it replaced has been the structure of the courses. Previously, the program offered three 3-credit hour courses—two focusing on composition and one concentrating on speech—in a 16-week conventional format. In the new design, there are four courses offered in an 8-week format, as recommended for gateway courses by Gates Foundation’s Frontier Set Program, of which Delaware State University is a participating institution. As the 2018 Frontier Set report stated, the completion of the gateway courses in a timely manner is critical to enhance student retention and graduation rates, and provides a more temporally focused approach helped to reduce dropout rate. This new 8-week format allows first-year students to complete the 9-credit hour full Composition and Speech series in one academic year, as they can take two composition courses in their first semester earning 4 credits. In the previous model, completing the same number of credits required three semesters unless the students also enrolled for the courses in summer or winter sessions. Notably, unlike in many comparable universities, the speech course at Delaware State University is housed within the English Program, in the Department of Languages and Literatures, and grouped with the composition courses because of its association with General Education Program, a combination that has become productive for us in the context of the recent multimodal turn in writing studies and composition’s intellectual connection with the history of rhetoric and oratory. This arrangement means that all entering undergrad students are required to complete nine-hour general education credits from the Composition and Speech Program for their graduation.

While successful students can complete the program in a shorter time, the major target of the new program has been the students who would struggle with the composition courses in their first attempt. In the new format, students can repeat a course within the same semester, allowing them a second chance, which is important both from the early institutional intervention and retention perspectives. As a number of studies have suggested, students who complete first-year general education courses are more likely to graduate from college (Garrett et al., Goodman et al., Porter et al.), indicating better life outcomes for students as well as providing a positive outlook for the society at large when the student is a first-generation college graduate from a low income, marginalized background. Given that the courses are now more focused both in terms of time and subject matter, our expectation was that the redesign would yield a better pass rate. While the program has run merely for three semesters and a consistent picture would emerge later, the data from fall 2020 affirmed our expectation with higher pass rates for English 121 and English 122 compared to the pass rates of their counterparts English 101 and English 102 from previous years. We have been analyzing the data for the subsequent semesters and found that the new delivery format made a significant positive difference for those students who had to repeat the class could complete it successfully within the same semester.

While the 8-week format provides the advantages described above, there are a few challenges as well. First, it is labor-intensive from the administrative perspective: compared to the previous three-class model, having four courses automatically increases the administrative burden. Furthermore, enrolling students who cannot complete the course in their first attempt in a new class immediately in the second 8-week term within the same semester requires close coordination among instructors, department, advisors, the Registrar’s office, and students themselves. To facilitate this process, we survey instructors early in 8-week terms to identify potential repeat students to determine the number of new sections as well as to contact the students’ advisors for swift action. A second challenge could be student workload. We seek to address this during the class enrollment process. Since students have to take 4 or 5 credits of composition and speech courses within the same semester, the compressed design also demands more work from students in a shorter period, which demands a need to educate students and their advisors in terms of students’ overall class enrollment so that students can manage time to complete the work in our courses.

Another major change in the redesigned program is the adoption of Open Educational Resources. Previously, the program used a textbook for all classes, and the courses were taught based on the textbook, offering alignment with other composition courses across the country. For the new program, we decided to opt for Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support our effort in creating a more equitable, accessible, and inclusive educational opportunity for all students. Such adoption has not only reduced the need for students to purchase a textbook but also has smoothened the classes from the first day of the term as students in the new courses have reading and other resources already built in their online course shells and can access them automatically because of their enrollment in the class. The adoption of OERs are even more important in our HBCU context because the mainstream textbooks and even OERs do not necessarily address the needs of our student demographics and Black literary heritage. The non-textbook approach has allowed us creative potential because we can use the open access material while also developing resources within the institution to meet our expectations for a rhetoric and composition program as it should be in an HBCU. Down the road, our plan is to develop our own open access resources that provide the features of a textbook and share them online with other HBCUs and institutions that would benefit from our approach.

Multi-Year Program Building Plan and the Use of Discourse-Based Interviews

As stated in the introduction, we have used DBI mainly in three different ways. The first one was used in Fall 2020, when we started creating the content for the redesigned courses with the one-to-one interviews with veteran professors within the department—both those who would teach the courses directly and those who regularly offer literature and other upper division English courses and wished composition courses to be designed a certain way so that students in their classes were prepared to accomplish more focused course objectives. We conducted approximately 7 interviews over 4 weeks, meaning we were able to have conversations with about 50% of the full-time faculty of the English program. While the back-and-forth dialogic nature of the interviews veered into different directions based on how the discourse proceeded, the interviewer based the discussion on the following set of questions:

1. If you were given a free rein, what would you teach in composition courses?

2. What should the composition courses must have to meet our student needs?

3. How would the composition courses better prepare students for your literature and other English classes?

We describe these interviews as “dialogic” because interviewees directed the discussions to free-floating ideas that ranged in topics from Delaware State University’s academic culture to how composition courses had to be in the context of HBCUs. Since the interviewer was a new hire principally tasked for the course development and administration, interviewees also used the opportunity to educate him on the history of composition at the university. What the interviews demonstrated is that the faculty in the department conceived composition differently and wanted the new courses to align their visions. The majority of the interviewed faculty members understood the role of composition courses in terms of fixing grammatical issues in student writing while others emphasized on how composition at the university had to incorporate Black rhetorical traditions.

The results of these interviews were not always encouraging, particularly when the interviewees expressed views that were contrary to the ideas held by the interviewers who were cognizant of the current trends in composition theories and methodologies. For instance, a majority of the senior literature professor interviewees emphasized the importance of grammar and organizational aspects of writing such as outlines and paragraphs, with the connotation that composition classes were service courses that fixed surface level writing issues so that more intellectually challenging work could take place in other literature and upper division classes. Since the main objective of the interviews was to gather expectations and to understand the place of composition within the departmental culture, interviewers did not challenge the interviewees’ impressions of the composition courses. Most importantly, since the expectations were genuine, and the surface-level errors with which students entered upper division courses impeded the interviewed faculty’s attempt to achieve their course objectives, the re-designed courses were required to include grammar, mechanics, and punctuation as parts of their content.

Another way we tried, and continue to try, to articulate implicit views into pedagogical instruments has been instructor surveys. Every year, surveys are sent to all instructors to collect their feedback, which is analyzed and discussed within the Composition and Speech Committee, which in turn makes recommendations for the changes in the courses to be adopted in the following year. While the survey questions may differ slightly from one course to the other and from one year to the next even for the same course depending on the context, the objective is to create an inclusive approach that allows the possibilities of transferring ideas from practice to theories and to use them for the programmatic growth. Based on survey responses, one-to-one discourse-based interviews are also organized with the survey participants when it warrants a more intensive discussion.

For instance, the following is a set of questions from a fall 2021 survey for English 122: Rhetoric and Composition II:

1. What do you think about the overall structure of the current Blackboard course content? What modifications would you recommend?

2. Do you think the current content provides sufficient writing practice for a 2-credit first-year college composition course?

3. What new assignments/readings/activities would you recommend being added to the course? Why?

4. Which readings/assignments/activities from the current course would you recommend deleting for the next year? Why?

5. Given DSU’s HBCU context, what can we add to make the course more relevant to our student body and the university’s mission?

6. Is there anything exciting/impactful (an activity/ a modification in an assignment—anything) that you did in your section that you would like to recommend for other instructors?

7. What additional comments do you have?

To give readers a snapshot of how the survey results are used, we sent a survey to ENGL 121: Rhetoric and Composition I instructors in fall 2020 asking for their feedback. The survey provided a wide range of divergent feedback depending on particular instructors’ experience, the conception of first-year composition, and prior teaching experience. In a program with about 35 instructors, such divergence can be expected. But some common themes also emerged that guided the early revision of the course. For instance, instructors commented that the images used in the current course material did not match the HBCU demographics; addressing this feedback, we developed a new set of materials with more suitable images. Another change in this process was the addition of new reading response assignments; instructors suggested that the course needed (1) more substance, (2) longer writing assignments, and (3) more guided reading activities. To address these needs, we added two 800-word reading response assignments to ENGL 121, asking students to read assigned texts and write their responses using the four-level reading strategies—literal comprehension, interpretation, critical thinking, and application—that we are hoping could be a standard reading response format for non-composition English courses as well.

We have already gathered the fall 2021 survey results for the same course, and the common theme has been the labor aspect of the instructors. The current course has eight modules—one module for each week—and each module includes a quiz where students answer 3 to 4 questions with a 150-word response for each of them. These question-answer quizzes are part of assessments besides the major writing projects and discussion forum posts. While such quizzes are critical to ensure that students have read the prescribed material, the work has added an extra burden on instructors. Addressing this issue would be a major revision project for the course in summer 2022.

As noted above, we sometimes contact instructors to follow up on surveys responses. For instance, we interviewed English 123: Rhetoric and Speech instructors at the end spring 2022 following the survey results. As indicated in the last paragraph, instructors emphasized how the new course increased the grading time. The interviews at this round focused on articulating the instructors’ tacit knowledge so that the course load for students could be maintained while reducing the grading time for instructors. Again, while this form of interviews may not follow Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s original method, these back and forth dialogic interviews are helping us to draw out the tacit knowledge of instructors.

This kind of survey and feedback-generating procedure is particularly important for our program because a large majority of the classes are taught by adjunct instructors and their turnover rate is high, which routinely reduces the number of experienced instructors while requiring us to hire new teachers who need acclimatization within the institutional context. Having fully developed courses that have incorporated the innovations and insights of the teachers who have taught the classes before can be helpful to new instructors as they can teach the courses without having to begin them from scratch while using the full opportunity to tweak the content and structure within the broader framework of the syllabus.

Having such fully developed courses has also been important from the student perspective; no matter which section they are in, whether the one taught by a veteran instructor with degrees in writing studies or the one offered by a new instructor without such background, students in the redesigned course sequence have a similar experience in terms of content and assignment. From the programmatic perspective, creating an equitable experience for students across the sections had been a challenge before this new curriculum was introduced; veteran composition faculty members suggested a widely divergent writing experience for students in different sections depending on instructors, although the department shared a common syllabus and a textbook. The new program aimed to mitigate this challenge while encouraging instructors to modify the courses to best suit them for their teaching styles.

The periodic instructor surveys have also been important for us to develop the course material. As it has been stated above, one of the main features of our new program has been the absence of a textbook, which means we have to use OERs and develop material within the university for our courses. Initially, in 2020, we created fully developed master courses on Blackboard, our institution’s learning management system (LMS), and uploaded them to individual instructors’ course shells for them to adopt as well as modify the content depending on their interests and teaching styles. While the whole department was involved in reviewing and revising process, the courses were developed initially using the expertise and experience of a few faculty, mostly the authors of this profile. Our plan is to continuously improve the program by using the collective knowledge, experience, and innovation of all stakeholders, particularly the instructors, down the years. Instructor surveys, one-to-one interviews, professional development sessions, and departmental committee meetings are going to be some of the instruments to carry out this plan. This approach would help us not only to make the program inclusive but also to inject collective feedback into the courses so that the program grows organically over the years.

A final place we have used DBIs to articulate tacit knowledge among our faculty members has been professional development hours. Organized by the Composition and Speech Program twice each semester, the hours have turned out to be important forums to generate ideas for programmatic refinement. For instance, one of our spring 2022 professional development meetings focused on the personal narrative assignment, the first major writing work in English 121. Unlike in a typical professional development session where an expert is expected to guide relatively new participants on the topic, we have visualized these meetings to be idea inventing opportunities. For example, the meeting started with a short description of the personal narrative assignment, which was not new to the participants because they have been teaching the course. Then, after the description, facilitator posed the following questions, which themselves were developed in response to previous conversations among instructors, highlighting how the deliberations would be part of the further one-to-one discussions and the assignment re-writing process.

1. What is your experience of teaching personal narratives? What best practices would you suggest?

2. How can we respond better to personal narratives that discuss traumatic experiences?

3. How do we create safe space within the context of a class where students can express difficult experiences without fearing bad judgment?

The meeting spent considerable time on the second question and one of the conclusions or recommendations from the discussion was that the assignment could be re-written or at least could have multiple options. Discussing these options offered a version of Odell, Goswami, & Herrington’s approach by making instructors, especially new ones, aware of possibilities they may not have seen as viable. Instructor participants shared their experimentations highlighting how asking students to write about uplifting moments—instead of merely asking them to select a moment—would positively impact the students’ as well as instructors’ mental health. Based on this recommendation, the personal narrative assignment is going to revised in summer 2022.

Deep discourse between faculty and other stakeholders is important for our program building plan. When we started the redesign process of our program, the department was in one place in terms of the need for the replacement of the existing courses in 2019. But determining what should replace the old courses was not and has not been an easy decision. Individual faculty members, especially those who are interested and invested in the composition program, have their own vision of what a composition program should look like and what it should attain, and translating those visions into a singular working program still remains an aspiration. For instance, the department has adopted the new program almost unanimously in technical terms—it was first passed through the department’s Composition and Speech and Curriculum Committees respectively, then was approved by a vote of the English faculty, and finally by the university’s General Education Committee and Faculty Senate—but English faculty members have continued to voice their concerns and offer ideas about how the program can be improved. We have decided to keep the conversations open as constructive tools so that we can refine our program. For example, early on, during the first phase of the piloting, the idea that the courses were rather light dominated the conversation, directing us to refocus our attention on the amount and quality of the content. But now, after running hundreds of sections, the concern is of a different kind; instructors are suggesting to rethink the course load as it may be heavier than what should it normally be for a 2-credit hour 8-week writing class.

Another topic of our conversation, for instance, remains the 8-week model. Almost all of the faculty invested in the program themselves have taught classes using the 16-week model for a long time. While composition courses were also taught in the 4-week winter or 5-week summer sessions at the university for a long period, these sessions are treated as irregular, special offerings, not the regular sections designed for the majority of students. We have taken an open-minded approach and are analyzing data how students’ writing develops when they are asked to complete almost the same amount of writing and reading in a compressed time scheme. The initial analysis of the data, as well as the instructor survey reports, demonstrate that students learn as much writing from these new courses as they did in earlier 3-credit hour 16-week courses. Ongoing data-based and experience-centered deep conversations among core stakeholders will help us to evaluate the efficacy of this format further in the future.

HBCU Composition Program and the Effort to Create an Anti-racist Pedagogical Approach

Given the fact that college composition in the United States has long been dominated by the normative “correct-incorrect” tradition, many HBCU WPAs and composition faculty have noted a challenge to create a writing program that is simultaneously anti-racist (Inoue, “Foreword”), recognizes Black literacy heritage (Young), and prepares students for corporate America (Green; Jackson et al.). Indeed, recent theoretical developments in anti-racist and inclusive pedagogies have provided much-needed impetus for transformative education, but converting those aspirational theories into practice remains a work-in-progress. Working on our composition and speech program at a minority serving institution, we feel especially well-placed to make transformation and recent redesign was used for that purpose. Some of our initial strategies in this regard have been the effort to validate students’ own language and experience, removal of remedial classes, adoption of the spirit of labor-based grading, use of Open Educational Resources (OERs), and incorporation of readings that explicitly discuss systemic racism and emphasizes African-American literary heritage.

Part of our anti-racist pedagogical approach has attempted to empower our students by encouraging them to explore and express their language and experience. For instance, in the first composition course in the 4-course sequence, students write about themselves in their personal narratives as well as in “This I Believe” paper. The objective is to validate African-American as well as all marginalized experiences as worthy of academic language and expression, particularly for students who may feel that their languages and experiences are less valuable than the standard ivory tower expression. Secondly, we have tried to balance the content in such a way that students do not miss mainstream composition methodologies and writing theories while also providing them with readings that emphasize African-American heritage. These include essays from The 1619 Project published in The New York Times, and other Black biographies and literacy narratives supporting the objective of facilitating students to understand, examine and question the racist part of history and power-structure. While some seasoned instructors supplemented their own material to the textbook and introduced many texts of African-American heritage in our older program, the textbook-based model largely replicated the mainstream composition content in majority of our classes. Now that we have developed our material, we could be more selective and purposeful in what we choose to discuss.

As suggested in Asao B. Inoue’s recent book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, highlighted labor-based grading can be more inclusive, equitable assessment. The grading contract between the students and instructors signed in the beginning of the term makes the course expectations obvious for students, assuring that the amount of work they put in would result into a grade as described in the contract. From the instructors’ perspectives, grading may be a normal, routine, and fair game because of their own academic and disciplinary acculturation, but it can often be a mysterious process for many students, especially those from marginalized communities, and without role models or family members with a significant academic experience. Although we have not adopted a full labor-based grading practice yet, we have tried to incorporate a part of its spirit by specifying the word counts for all assignments and discussion forums and indicating that meeting those requirements would significantly impact students’ grades. For instance, in almost all assignments as well quizzes and other writing tasks, we have added statements like the following to guarantee students that their labor will be acknowledged in course of grading their work: “You will receive full points for this task if (1) you respond to the prompt directly, (2) your work meets the length requirements, (3) your writing does not have significant mechanical issues, and (4) demonstrates that you have put in the time in preparation of the work.” Indeed, the ingrained “correct-incorrect” mindset that is at the core of English instruction still informs much of our instruction largely because we ourselves have plenty to learn as well as unlearn for such kind of writing instruction, but we have tried to loosen its grip by reducing the time spent on grammar teaching as well as by incorporating the spirit of labor-based grading so that all thoughtful creative compositions receive due credit during assessment.

When discussing the labor, it is important to note the faculty composition of a program because it is their intellectual and physical labor that determines how the program operates. In our programmatic context, the majority of our composition courses are currently taught by adjunct faculty. Undoubtedly, our adjunct instructors are excellent, are committed to student success, and have received great student feedback, but the combination of the precarity associated with adjunct contracts and the absence of a significant number of full-time faculty completely devoted to composition courses means that we have challenges in developing a robust program from a human resource perspective. We have requested the appointment of at least five full-time permanent faculty to teach writing courses to mitigate this shortcoming. Given that we recently added a concentration in Writing to our English Bachelor of Arts major, as well as a minor in Writing available to students across the university, and that the Delaware State student population is growing, we expect new hires and the enrichment of writing expertise in the department.

Conclusion

Delaware State University’s new composition and speech program has been developed with a future in perspective. While it borrows theories and practices from the long history of composition and rhetoric scholarship and is guided by current anti-racist, inclusive pedagogical theories, the program also acknowledges that there is much to learn about how writing and rhetoric works and how it should be like in the context of minority serving institutions, for which we believe in the importance of articulating the tacit knowledge among ourselves as we experience and experiment with our teaching here within the institution. As noted above, we imagine several possible forms this work could take going forward:

1. Applying the methods we’ve developed here to assignments, rubrics, and other materials instructors are creating with our new curriculum in mind. We wonder how program-centric documents such as mission statements or materials are helping instructors work with the outcomes at the heart of the new curriculum.

2. Balancing “correct-incorrect” thinking, disciplinary conventions, and anti-racist perspectives that recognize the legitimacy of students’ language: how does instructors’ tacit knowledge take up ideas, language, and practices from these different traditions? How can DBIs help us create mentoring opportunities that help us affect a balance workable for our program and its instructors?

3. Developing Open Educational Resources (OER) with the specific needs of HBCUs in mind: what would it need to develop a dynamic online OER hub that colleges and instructors could adapt for them while feeding the hub for its continuous development?

We also believe that more collaborative efforts across similar institutions and like-minded faculty in other universities could help us chart a better future for our writing programs, and we would be delighted if other programs that serve historically marginalized programs adapt our work to their contexts. We hope this article offers a tangible step toward that cooperation.

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