Today's colleges and universities are faced with the challenges of reforming their curriculums in an effort to hold a generation of students who are now demanding more than just a degree. Today prominent writers in the field of higher education point to the necessity of assessing and reconstructing college courses so that new direction will be provided. Each student entering college for the first time usually must enroll in an English composition course. Such a course offers great potential to encourage the creative capacity of the incoming student and foster an attitude of personal inquiry. The diversity of subjects and intentions which can be introduced in the beginning composition course offers a healthy reservoir of opportunity for exploring personal meaning. Introducing some of the goals and concepts of creativity may thus inspire the design of a new course given to meeting the challenges of higher education.The problem of this study was to develop a course in freshman English composition based on the theories of creativity and directed towards the development of the student's creative and critical capacity.

For teachers of freshman English composition, the most time-consuming aspect of teaching is responding to student papers (Anson, 2012; Straub, 2000b). Teachers respond in various ways, but most teachers agree that they should offer written feedback to students (Beach & Friedrich, 2006). However, little research has been conducted to determine how teachers’ written feedback practices reflect their beliefs about the purpose of such feedback. This qualitative study explores the relationship between English composition teachers’ beliefs about written feedback and their actual written feedback practices. The participants were a sample of four instructors of freshman English composition at a mid-sized metropolitan public university. Interviews, classroom observations, course documents, and samples of teachers’ written comments were analyzed to determine teachers’ written response practices and their beliefs related to the purposes of freshman writing and their roles as writing teachers. Results suggest that teachers were aware of their beliefs, and their written response practices were consistent with their beliefs. Teachers utilized different approaches to respond to student writing, but those approaches are consistent with current recommendations for responding to student writing. Three major themes emerged from the study. First, teachers must be given the opportunity to reflect about and articulate their beliefs about written response so they will know why they respond in the way they do. Second, teachers work within the boundaries of their specific writing program to organize their written responses to student writing. Third, teachers must respond to student writing from varying perspectives as readers of the text. The findings support studies which indicate that written response is a sociocultural practice and teacher beliefs are just one aspect of the complex nature of teacher written response. The study should add to the fields of response theory and the formation of teacher beliefs.