First-Year Composition: A "Service" Course No Longer?

In continuing to think about the first chapter of the Beach, Anson, Breuch, and Swiss book, Engaging Students in Digital Writing (draft copy, 2008, pp. 1-17), I am starting to make "links" as I begin to recall my past readings in College Composition Theory and Pedagogy.

One "theory" or approach to First-Year [College] Composition (FYC) is that it is a "service" course--not in the sense of service learning, although some people include that approach, but in the sense of being "in service" to all the other courses in the curriculum. In other words, students should learn in FYC how to do the kinds of writing that they will encounter in other courses in college.

On the other hand, another approach is to focus almost entirely on the "writing process"--whose proponents include, if I'm remembering correctly, composition scholars like Janet Emig, Peter Elbow, and Donald Murray. In fact, as I was reading this first chapter, a quotation from Donald Murray kept coming to mind--and I'm PARAPHRASING here:

As writing teachers, we cannot possibly know what kinds of writing our students will encounter later on in their college careers, let alone what kinds of writing they will encounter in their lives outside of and after college. Thus, we should help them to understand the writing process itself, guide them through the steps, all its ins and outs, foster their use of it in any writing situation. Then we will have truly helped them, for any writing project will be better if writers follow the writing process to plan, draft, revise, edit, and proofread their writing.

I could probably find the exact passage if someone asked.

But this relates to this digital writing class. We cannot possibly know what kinds of digital writing our students are already doing, in and/or outside of school, nor can we even begin to guess what kinds of digital writing they will be asked to do in the future--or even what new digital writing tools will be used in the future. Thus, we should continue to stress the writing process as we ask them to use various digital writing tools.

But this will conflict with those, both in the English Department and in other departments, who feel that FYC should be a "service" course. If Biology, or Math, or Health, or Political Science does not use blogs, or wikis, or podcasts, or whatever, are we in FYC "wasting our students' time" helping them to use these things? If digital writing becomes a focal point in the class, we won't be able to cover Reviews of Literature, or Annotated Bibliographies, or Lab Reports, or whatever. What happens then when our students go, unprepared, into these other classes?