Expos to Hire Instructors Who Will Teach Full-Time

Full-time Instructors will teach Expository Writing for the first time next year as part of an experimental "team teaching plan."

Seven instructors have been hired as preceptors as part of a larger program of other suggested reforms will being discussed.

Other possible reforms include instituting tutorials and reforming current distinctions between middle and upper group students, Donald Byker, assistant director of Expository Writing, said yesterday.

A vote of the Faculty last spring established the post of preceptor as a full teaching position, effective this coming year. In the past Expository Writing has always been taught by part-time instructors or graduate students.

Byker said the preceptors will collect and coordinate different methods of teaching and will help the part-time teachers improve their instruction.

The Expository Writing Committee will cut its present staff of 91 part-time instructors to about 30, so that each instructor will gain more expertise by teaching more sections, he said. He said that each preceptor will head the part-time instructors in one of several areas of writing.

Byker said that eliminating the present distinction between middle and lower group courses--one of the reforms still under consideration--and offering a choice of classes to all freshmen is being "seriously considered." He said that the current resentment and stigma felt by students in lower group courses more than offset the possible advantages of possible homogeneity of talent within the group.

"It's not that clear that students in the middle group write significantly better than students in the lower groups," he said.

No Restricted Choice

Edward L. Pattullo director of the Center for the Behavioral Sciences and a member of the Committee on Expository Writing said. "It's absurd that choice should be restricted to only a certain small group of students on the basis of a very arbitrary test."

Elizabeth Buckley, one of next year's preceptors, said that she is not planning on any middle/lower group distinctions in next year's curriculum.

Pattullo said that the committee is considering offering tutorials on a limited basis next year for students with special needs. "Students at both ends of the spectrum still benefit by this," he said. "The ones with really extraordinary skills and the ones who need serious remedial work will be helped," he added.

Byker said that the Committee is also considering eliminating the present system of students' choice at registration.