Misunderstanding the Assignment : Teenage Students, College Writing, and the Pains of Growth

Many books take you inside a first-year composition class. Misunderstanding the Assignment takes you inside the minds of first-year composition students. Drawing on hours of videotaped interviews and copious ethnographic notes, Douglas Hunt has fashioned a nonfiction novel about learning and teaching writing. It traces the lives of six first-year students and their teacher from their first day together in a comp classroom through the end of the semester.

Hunt's book will excite theorists and ethnographers with its thick descriptions and offer questions worth considering to both new composition teachers and veterans. How do first-year college students experience their teachers? Their assignments? Their separation from home? How do these feelings support or inhibit learning? Are typical eighteen- and nineteen-year-old freshman developmentally ready for the demands of college? Hunt invites readers to draw their own conclusions from the multiple layers of information that he provides based on both his own research and the insights of composition theory, developmental psychology, and discourse theory.

Hunt frames the narrative as a modern novel, complete with a point of view that alternates among the individual students and their teacher, Rachel Palencia Harper. As you read, you will experience a typical composition class-with its new understandings and its many misunderstandings. In addition, a foreword by ethnographer Wendy Bishop situates the book within the discipline, and an afterword by Harper details how this experience changed her teaching. Finally, Hunt's own notes in the appendix describe his ethnographic processes and source materials.

DOUGLAS HUNT is an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia where he has served as the director of composition and helped launch an innovative writing-across-the-curriculum program. As both a teacher and an administrator, he has focused on undergraduate education and has edited several anthologies and guides for undergraduate English studies.