Category Archives: Teaching Resources

Assignments, Blogs

WAW Standing Group Breakout #1 – Notes

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Thanks to Stacy Wilson of Mesa Community College for taking notes on our breakout discussion!

Bess Fox, Marymount U, VA: Described a WAW assignment where students read research on source use (e.g., Howard) and analyze their own source use. This assignment happens before a more traditional research paper assignment.

John Whicker, Fontbonne U, stresses context analysis. Assignments for first-semester FYC include an open letter to an English professor based on what they’ve learned about transfer; rhetorical analysis of a controversial issue; an argumentative essay where they take a nuanced position on that issue; and a theory of writing. Assignments for second-semester FYC include a guide to analyzing discourse communities, a genre analysis, a research project in two genres, and a theory of writing. See John’s materials on the CCCC 2019 site for more detail.

Assignments, Blogs, Teaching Resources, Teaching Strategies

Testing a Theory of Writing in FYW

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N. Claire Jackson
University of Louisville
claire.jackson.1@louisville.edu

In 2016, four other instructors at UMaine (where I was teaching at the time) and I began incorporating elements of the Teacher for Transfer curriculum into our WAW first-year-writing course. The theory of writing has been the TfT element I find the most useful, and I have students return to it repeatedly throughout the course, asking them to reflect on how they would make changes in light of their most recent reading and writing and then to revise that theory accordingly.

In planning our assignment sequences, we discussed the benefits of explicitly asking students to reflect on writing in other classes as well. This prompt is what I developed to foster that reflection. It is part of a scaffolded assignment sequence in which students engage in new writing tasks between (almost) every class to work toward final portfolios. This prompt is typically when I see students begin to make more thorough connections between the writing they do in first-year-writing and the other types of writing they engage in or expect to engage in in the future. While many of the readings I include focus on writing in new contexts, some of which are non-academic, asking students to apply their own theories to those other types of writing helps them see these connections more clearly than when they just read what others have said.

Prompt: Your last assignment asked you to “test” your theory of writing against your experiences writing your last essay in order to think about how complete and useful this theory is. While this is a good start to evaluating the usefulness of your theory, you should once again recall Downs’ and Robertson’s claim that “The better–the more completely, consistently, and elegantly–a theory accounts for past experience and the more accurate its predictions about future experience, the stronger or more robust it is, and thus the more useful it is” (111). As such, it would seem useful to test how consistently your theory of writing can account for your past experiences with writing and make predictions about future writing experiences for writing experiences outside of this class. Therefore, for this assignment you will turn your attention to writing you have produced (or are producing) outside of this class in order to begin to develop a clearer picture of the usefulness of your theory of writing.

For next class, please select a piece of your writing from outside of this class. It can be something you have completed or something you are still composing. You may choose an academic example (a history paper or lab report you wrote last week; an essay from high school) or a non-academic example (a tweet, a post on an online forum, a letter to your grandmother, fanfiction, a prayer journal, etc.). The more unlike the writing you do in ENG 101 this sample is, the more fruitful and interesting your examination will likely be.

After you have selected the piece of writing, use your theory of writing as a frame to explain what you did as you composed this piece of writing, how you did so, and why, much as you did in your last assignment. Like with the last assignment, the length will, in part, be determined by the usefulness of your theory of writing. If you find yourself unable to write much, you may want to instead begin thinking about how you will revise your theory of writing to account for this other type of writing.

You do not need to send me this piece of writing (though you can), but you will need to make sure I have enough context to understand what you’re saying, so you’ll want to cite specific examples from your text. Make sure you also explain what your theory of writing fails to account for–that is, are there ways your theory of writing as it is currently written fails to explain what happens when you write, say, a tweet instead of an academic essay? How will you revise your theory of writing in light of this information?

When you have finished, please revise your theory of writing based on the work you did here. Please send me your revised theory and the writing you did above.

Assignments, Blogs, Scholarship on WAW

Hendrickson & Garcia de Mueller 2016 – “Inviting students to determine for themselves what it means to write across disciplines”

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Hendrickson, Brian, and Genevieve Garcia de Mueller. “Inviting Students to Determine for Themselves What it Means to Write Across Disciplines.” The WAC Journal 27 (2016). Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/journal/vol27/hendrickson.pdf

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph: “Situated in the literature on threshold concepts and transfer of prior knowledge in WAC/WID and composition studies, with particular emphasis on the scholarship of writing across difference, our article explores the possibility of re-envisioning the role of the composition classroom within the broader literacy ecology of colleges and universities largely comprised of students from socioeconomically and ethnolinguistically underrepresented communities. We recount the pilot of a composition course prompting students to examine their own prior and other literacy values and practices, then transfer that growing meta-awareness to the critical acquisition of academic discourse. Our analysis of students’ self-assessment memos reveals that students apply certain threshold concepts to acquire critical agency as academic writers, and in a manner consistent with Guerra’s concept of transcultural repositioning. We further consider the role collective rubric development plays as a critical incident facilitating transcultural repositioning.”

Blogs, Reading Lists for Courses, Teaching Strategies, Textbooks

WAW Standing Group – Dr. Sam Looker-Koenigs on her new book, Language Diversity and Academic Writing

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At our CCCC Standing Group meeting this year, we were thrilled to have Dr. Sam Looker-Koenigs talk about her new Bedford Spotlight Reader, Language Diversity and Academic Writing. Her handout from the presentation is attached; it shares her rationale for the course, chapter summaries, and a selected bibliography.

Assignments, Blogs, Reading Lists for Courses, Teaching Strategies

WAW Standing Group, CCCC 2018 Notes. Language Diversity and Academic Writing group.

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During the WAW Standing Group meeting, our breakout group discussed:

The textbook: Language Diversity and Academic Writing by Samantha Looker-Koenigs

  • We recognized the diversity of scholars in the textbook as important. Some of us shared that our first attempts creating a WAW reading list for our students included mostly white men. More diversity of authors read in the classroom is needed.
  • The book includes excerpts rather than full articles because 1) Bedford had constraints about lengths, both for the textbook as a whole and for individual readings, and 2) because this allowed more readings to be included.

Literacy Narratives

  • This discussion began with a list of possible readings to use to frame the literacy narrative, especially one that addresses issues of language diversity. I, unfortunately, did not catch all of those readings. The two I did catch were Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others.
  • The latter reading is useful for moving away from issues of “linguistic tourism” in the class.
  • This idea of “linguistic tourism” framed some anxiety around asking students to engage in a literacy narrative that asks students to focus on their diverse language practices. Geoff mentioned hearing of an assignment where students were required to code-mesh, which included asking white students to use AAE. We all recognized this as a problem.
  • We discussed framing code-meshing for students using Canagarajah or Ashanti Young. In thinking about WAW approaches to language diversity, we discussed the necessity of helping students think about how academic writing already involves a meshing of codes, but that’s it important to recognize the difference in stakes for different language users.
  • It was shared by multiple people that literacy narratives often feel performative, with students engaging in transformation narratives articulating what they think the teacher wants to hear. Nick shared borrowing the “Theory of Writing” from Yancey et al.’s “Teaching for Transfer” curriculum as something students begin on the first day of class and repeatedly return to throughout the semester. This theory of writing asks students to explain what previous experiences informed their ideas about writing, so students engage in some of the same moves as a literacy narrative but in a more critical manner.

Approaches to Assignment Sequencing

  • Several approaches to structuring the course were discussed:
    • The way the textbook moves through thinking about issues of language and identity to academic writing.
    • Working backwards from that: starting with readings and discussion on the ways in which ideas of “good writing” are not stable but context-dependent. Once students recognize this, then moving to destabilize their notions of standard language.
    • Linking discussions of language diversity with discussions of the rhetorical situations. Students can begin by thinking about what type of language is appropriate for a text message and what type of language is appropriate for an assignment, and why.
    • Working towards discussions of language by beginning with discussions of nonverbal language (i.e. graffiti, body language, etc.) to think about how communication within culture and how those communicative norms change. This can then move to official signs (i.e. stop signs), as codes that are written for us, before moving to language as traditionally conceived. John Swales’ article on discourse is useful framing for this.
    • Beginning with a “language autobiography” rather than a “literacy narrative.” The first week of class is ungraded reflection where students talk about themselves as writers. Students then read the Thaiss and Zawacki article in the text book and think about how some of the things they’ve been taught to do in writing are indicative of the larger moves discussed here.
Blogs, Teaching Strategies

Writing-About-Writing in the Student-Centered Composition Research Classroom

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This blog post provides observations from an expository writing and research class I recently taught using a WAW approach. In the class, I asked my students to read series of composition articles organized by topic, to help students acclimate to a shared research environment. These topics included the use of grading contracts in composition research, peer review in composition classrooms and in professional writing situations, and articles providing historical context for the field of composition.

The general theme of these articles was an application to classroom writing activities and writing pedagogy. WAW approaches to teaching composition allow students a wide opportunity to gain familiarity with elements of composition theory and to gain further experience and practice using WAW threshold concepts in classroom discourse. But students learning in WAW classrooms achieve even more when they take responsibility, not only to learn content, but in teaching their fellow students.

When teaching composition I attempt to help students claim power by co-teaching the WAW curriculum with them. In doing this I attempt to invoke principles of critical pedagogy, following the principles Shor suggests in When Students Have Power. Shor explores the benefits and pitfalls of designing courses with students taking a more direct role in decision-making that affects the class (e.g. meeting times, class assignments). I attempt to do this by dividing the class into workgroups—usually five groups of four students—and then assign specific days and articles for each group to cover.

Although they are still subject to instructor power in the classroom, students co-operating in teaching WAW articles have liberty to select whichever methods they would like to help present on their assigned readings for the week. I provide students examples of what previous classes have done for activities (e.g. handouts outlining the reading, lists of generative discussion questions). I then ask students to lead discussion using their own activities. Having used this approach during the past several years of teaching WAW, I have three observations:

1. Students who are responsible for teaching articles make significant reflection on those articles during low-stakes, informal writing assigned for those articles.

2. Students who are responsible for teaching articles also specifically refer back to earlier threshold concepts they taught while engaged in later classroom discussions covering new threshold concepts. Cooperating in work groups provides students the opportunity to develop what James Gee calls affinity groups, which foster an environment to discuss threshold concepts.

3. Students have an easier time identifying with composition theory as a result of teaching the content with their peers. Although this could be considered a graduate student effect, undergraduate students also show signs of showing greater identification with a WAW curriculum when they are not only positioned as composition researchers but as co-instructors. Pedagogically, I’m concerned not just that students identify with metacognitive concepts but that they are able to transfer this knowledge to other rhetorical situations for their own purposes.

Student Feedback and Response

I invited students to voluntarily provide feedback throughout the course and at the end of the semester by means of an informal survey. In this space I will focus on one aspect of feedback students provided: the difficulty in students making links between the WAW articles and formal course writing assignments. As is the case in many classes, students in this sectioned noted how they felt they had to read too many articles. While I had taken care to limit the total readings to what seemed manageable to me, I do intend to revise the reading list to reduce the total number of readings required with their feedback in view.

Nonetheless, perhaps the most important thing I learned in making this attempt to teach this course as a WAW course is to more closely integrate concepts from the reading into the required formal writing assignments. As a WAW approach, inviting students to use the writing concepts they have been reading about in their writing means giving them an opportunity to do just that in writing. That is because education, especially in a WAW classroom, is somewhat reducible to what transfers to other rhetorical situations and contexts. In this class, I submit, the general skills required to access research scholarship (rhetorical assessment of authorship and situation, summary, synthesis, reflection, analysis) are all skills tied into gaining access to other sites’ discourses.

With regard to the student-centric group work, students acknowledged in their feedback that they seemed to get along quite well with their peers. Additionally, each article that they read provided an excess of content for students to wallow in. I had required students to write informal writing assignments for each of the readings, but this time I missed a vital opportunity to have students connect their wallowing to formal writing assignments. That would have potentially allowed students to make more connections among the articles, the other formal writing they were doing, and the specific research goals I was asking them to achieve.

A perennial issue, peer review and feedback, made its presence known in discussions with students throughout the semester. Students commented to me that group presentations allowed the class to discuss WAW threshold concepts from the readings together, to better understand them. I find it likely that asking students both to write individually and to present as groups, to discuss threshold concepts, both made the process somewhat tedious but also effective. At the end of the class, the entire class looked for patterns in the survey responses they had voluntarily filled out. Several students at that time observed that though they had not always enjoyed the workload, they had gained knowledge about writing throughout the semester’s reading and writing assignments.

Samuel Stinson, a PhD student, is a teaching assistant at Ohio University.
Assignments, Blogs

Writing about Business Writing: An Ethnography Assignment

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Marianna Hendricks
The University of Texas at El Paso
mrdrum@utep.edu

Since 2010, I have experimented with integrating a WAW approach in my first-year writing courses. In 2012, I grew these efforts to include more business writing, both within first-year writing and in a dedicated course on workplace writing.

One way this has been successful is in the assignment below, the Workplace Writing Ethnography, which I developed alongside several colleagues at UTEP. This project stems from the commonly-assigned literacy narrative, or auto-ethnography, and extends the task of ethnography into exploring genres and conventions of a students’ target (or current) workplace. This is especially important for students who intend to enter a new career after college, as the project emphasizes analysis of the ways novices enter and integrate into a discourse community.

 

Workplace Writing Ethnography

Overview

The Workplace Writing Ethnography is different from the auto-ethnography. Rather than examine multiple writing practices for an individual (you), this assignment allows you to explore how written communication is structured within a single workplace. Ultimately, your objective is to: 1) get a sense of what genres are common within your chosen workplace, 2) profile conventions and “document cycling” practices (Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller, 1985) that are considered normal there, and 3) document (or propose) ways that novices could enter the written communication practices effectively and efficiently.

You will choose a workplace that you are either already in, or a workplace you would like to join in the future, perhaps as part of your career goals.

This assignment stems from class discussion of John Swales’ (1990) article “The Concept of Discourse Community,” where he gives six defining characteristics of discourse communities:

  1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
  2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
  3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
  4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
  5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.
  6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. (pp. 471-473)

Gathering Data

You will explore the six elements of discourse communities as they relate to the written communication within a particular workplace. When selecting your community, consider the guidelines listed below:

Locate a business or organization that is related to your future career aspirations. If you wish to study your current workplace, work with an upper-level supervisor to research beyond your current role.

  1. Contact an upper-level supervisor of this business or organization. Briefly explain your project, ask permission to observe people on-the-job for at least 3 hours, and set up an interview with the supervisor following your observation.
  2. Observe members of the community during a shared activity, and take detailed notes of how they interact (what are they doing? what kinds of things do they say? what do they write? how do you know who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’?).
  3. Request an interview with at least one lower-level employee in the organization.
  4. Collect artifacts and writing produced in the community. Consider requesting examples of emails, memos, business letters, web materials, brochures, mission statements, grant proposals, or procedures.

Record and/or take detailed notes during interviews with the supervisor and lower-level employee (we will develop research questions as a class beforehand).

Analyzing Data

After completing your observation and interviews, review your notes and the artifacts you have collected. As you read and re-read, try to answer as many of the following questions as possible:

  • What are the shared goals of this community? Why does the group exist and what does it do?
  • What mechanisms do members use to communicate? What are the purposes of these mechanisms?
  • Which of these mechanisms are considered genres? Which are primarily written?
  • Who are the normal audiences for these genres? What do they usually want to know? What do they expect to see?
  • What are some conventions for written communication in these genres? Is there a certain tone, specialized language, or standard way of saving or sharing information?
  • What kinds of “document cycling” take place in this community? Who provides feedback, and how often? When is a document considered final? How does it get there?
  • Who has expertise? Who are the newcomers? How do newcomers learn appropriate language, genres, knowledge?

Connect your findings with at least two of our readings. Consider whether your research seems to line up with what we read and discussed, or if your findings call some ideas into question.

Presenting Data

You will present your findings within a 5- to 7-page article, using a format commonly used to share qualitative research in academic journals. This article should be double-spaced, using a 12-point font in Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri, and one-inch margins. Please include all of the following sections:

  • A title page, including a title, your name, class time, and contact information.
  • Introduction, providing an overview of your workplace and research questions.
  • Literature Review, using course readings and any other relevant sources to support the way you structured your inquiry, data collection methods, analysis, or findings.
  • Methods, providing details of how you collected and analyzed data, in a way that another researcher could reasonably replicate.
  • Discussion, making connections between what you found and what it might mean, especially to a novice entering the workplace or someone looking to improve current practices.

The final version of your article should follow APA format, including a title page with running head, in-text and reference page citations, page numbers, and first-level section headings.

Drafting and Peer Review

All students will have multiple opportunities to share working drafts of their article with peers and the instructor for feedback. Please come to class on peer review days with as much work completed as possible, and be ready to provide meaningful comments on “global” issues such as appropriate focus, helpful structure, clear descriptions, and sufficient detail. Students who wish to receive additional feedback may make an appointment with the instructor during office hours and visit the University Writing Center to meet with a tutor; however, do not come expecting an editing session.

Blogs, Scholarship on WAW, Teaching Strategies

At Home with Writing about Writing

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Cynthia A. Cochran, Illinois College

December 5, 2015

A few years ago I began to learn about a growing community of people teaching writing in a way that would eventually make me feel right at home: Writing about Writing. I had not yet discovered Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs’ book of that title and had neglected to read their seminal article on this teaching approach, but at conferences I began to hear people using the term, and a departmental colleagues began using Writing about Writing.  One year at 4Cs, I took a look at its chapters and noticed assignments similar to those I had developed for my students, such as chapters on literacy narratives and writing processes, an explanation of discourse communities, metacognitive questions, and even some of the essays and articles I had been using with students.

Having a background in rhetoric and composition studies, I was delighted – and intrigued — to see some of my favorite research articles, too, seminal works in writing studies. It was almost a coming home.

Over the next year, I continued to use the same book I had recently adopted, Gary Goshgarian’s Exploring Language; its range of readings on language in written, oral and visual communication interested my students and I found them to be useful as springboards to getting students to consider their own language use at a metacognitive level. Themes in my course drawn from Exploring Language chapters all focused on some dimension of visual, verbal, or semiotic communication included freedom of speech and censorship; hate language; sign language and visual rhetoric; discourse communities and genre; language, identity, and literacy narratives; propaganda; and writing processes. The students seemed receptive enough and they certainly improved their writing, but I did not think they were as advanced at the metacognitive level as I wanted them to be so as to facilitate transfer of writing knowledge and skill from my class to all their other classes.

I began to question my approach, specifically, whether my syllabus did enough to encourage or require students to read and possibly do empirical studies of writing. Were a literacy narrative and an assignment like an etymology essay enough? Had I been too timid about introducing students to methods of inquiry I use? I began to think so.

At the next 4C’s my curiosity drove me to the WAW SIG, partly to find out whether what I did was WAW enough, or WAW at all, or maybe something else. I entered the WAW house tentatively.

As I listened to colleagues describing their approaches to teaching first-year students about writing studies – not just about how to write – my curiosity grew, as did my comfort. It was great to meet people who had confidence that undergraduates in any field would and could learn more about writing and improve their own writing effectively through WAW. Remember, I had never included more than two assignments that asked students to examine writing as data. Maybe I didn’t need to be afraid to share my expertise with students more directly by engaging them in discussions about the study of writing.

So I changed plans. I began to include more assignments to engage students in metacognitive self-reflection about their recent writing to build on their literacy narrative. I reverted to using an assignment that asked students to collect interview data about writing in a particular discourse community. And I included a researched paper on a topic related to language. Finding a way to squeeze everything in was difficult to do in the context of teaching in a learning community defined mainly by my teaching partner’s first-year seminar topic (but that is an essay for another day).

Currently my approach is to introduce students to college writing through WAW by introducing them to themselves. From day one to the final, I layer in opportunities for students to reflect on their progress as writers: I periodically ask them to consider and self-assess their writing history, strengths and needs, processes and goals. After a first assignment in which they write a brief in-class essay on their writing strengths and needs, they read literacy narratives by a range of writers included in the anthology and then write their own essay on some aspect of their language identity. I still ask them to write researched paper on a topic related to course theme of language and communication. They also now do a brief assignment that involves interviewing someone in their chosen or current favorite field of study, find an example of writing in that major or profession (preferably something written by their interview subject), and use this as an example for analysis. The course ends with a final in-class reflective essay to cap their literacy project, which by that time will include their first-day essay, their literacy narrative, several self-assessment letters, and the final essay.

I still characterize my course as one that hits a half-way mark between WAW and writing about communication. Sometimes I share my own research with the students – whatever research I happen to have completed most recently, what I will be talking about in my next conference paper, or questions I would like to research. I report on recent findings in writing research whenever the moment arises. But although the students may draw on reports of empirical studies in their own research paper, their only data collection happens in the discourse community assignment. I may add a verbal think-aloud protocol assignment for them to study their writing process, an assignment harkening back to my teaching assistant days under the direction of Linda Flower.

I won’t bother you with the stories about improved course evaluations since I’m not certain those things are always worth the effort, but I will say this. I am feeling at home with WAW. I believe this approach is working, though I have no easy way to do a comparison study without sacrificial lambs. But I can see the evidence of the improvement in their writing and in the things some of them say in their self-assessments. Imagine my delight, for example, when one of them wrote about his assistant football coach, who had written a journal article! Because I want to increase students’ ability to think at the metacognitive level, I talk explicitly and often about transferring concepts and skills from one domain to another; the thread of self-assessment reinforces their metacognitive skill, which I hope will lead to greater transfer. (Perhaps there is a study about that in my future – and perhaps some students will collaborate in that research.)

WAW has slowly became home as I explore its rooms. Each assignment I try is like a piece of furniture to be moved, prized, or perhaps tossed to the curb. Now in my second year as At-Large Member on the WAW Steering Committee, I have grown in confidence that I am “doing WAW.” During the past year, I have been conducting research with Rebecca Babcock, interviewing instructors about WAW and examining their course materials. I am excited by what I am learning about what WAW is and can be. Through it all, I have grown more confident as I realize that WAW is a house with rooms to spare and lots of furniture to buy.

And yet, expansive as it is, WAW is a cozy house. I have become increasingly cognizant that the WAW community enfranchises me to live out and share with my students the expertise I have been so careful to nurture.

Postscript: For the landmark article justifying the use of WAW for teaching beginning college writers, complete with sample assignments, see Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s 2007 College Composition and Communication article, “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning “First-Year Composition” as “Introduction to Writing Studies” (58.4, pages 552-584).