Category Archives: Teaching Strategies

Assignments, Blogs, Teaching Resources, Teaching Strategies

WAW Activity | Walkin’ & Talkin’

Leave a comment

by Joseph Robertshaw, University of Alabama in Hunstville

In this post, Joseph Robertshaw shares a peer review activity he’s used to scaffold peer review activity through oral discussion and embodied pedagogy.

Introduction

Reading Peter Elbow (1995) set me to thinking about the responses we get from others concerning our writing and subsequently the problems of peer review. The problem of audience and my students’ difficulty grasping the concept was a problem that led me to Bazerman and Tinberg (2015). They seemed to hear just what I was thinking when they wrote that “we form our sense of the self through taking the part of the other in our struggle to make ourselves understood. Such a view, while no longer positing that the author is dead, does encourage us to see the text as existing independently of the author and thus capable of being changed and perfected by the author and others”(p.62). The attempt to apply that concept led me here.

I have been using Walkin’ and Talkin’ for several years now as a late-stage-draft peer review exercise. I have used it in classes such as First Year Writing I & II, Strategies for Business Writing, Intro to Technical Writing, and New Media and Rhetoric. Students consistently report that the activity helps them understand Audience and its relationship to Purpose in ways they did not see before. For me, as a teacher, I value this as an assessment that actually does the work of assessment without the pressure of a high-stakes evaluation. The products my students create after this exercise are holistically better than the ones created before this activity. If your students are ready for this, it can be eye-opening and well worth the front-end prep. Writers need to see their writing as a thing, separate from themselves, that has a destination and a mission. This activity helps them learn how that works in applied practice.

Overview of The Activity: Walkin’ & Talkin’

The Talker walks with the Listener to a destination and tells the story of their current draft.

The Listener walks with the Talker and listens to their story speaking ONLY when appropriate.

The Listener is permitted only 3 possible utterances

  1. I don’t understand. (ask for clarification)
  2. Oh that’s good. (show of support)
  3. Why is that? (ask for backing) (Toulmin, 2003, p. 94)

When you reach your destination exchange roles for the trip back to the classroom.

Explanation and Reflection

This activity, which I have named Walkin’ and Talkin’, MUST be done at the beginning of a class session! This activity is one of the main contributions of this article because it offers a moment when the author and audience identities must be inhabited in a short window of time. This is an extra revision/editing exercise that I like to use if the weather is nice—if the weather is poor, I have moved it indoors to hallways and walking tracks as available.

It works best if done closer to a draft due date to help the students to focus their argument/narrative in their own minds and really own it by getting out of their minds and using their bodies. As Abby Knoblauch (2012) states “to ignore the body privileges the white masculinist discourse [of disembodiment] as universal” (p. 59). Since we are more than talking heads we should involve our whole person in any attempt to envision ourselves occupying a new role.

Science also lends its voice to this idea that walking helps humans inhabit their bodies more actively. Walking “led to improved creative performance [. . . also,] walking left a residue that produced strong performance when participants were subsequently sitting” (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014). In classes students are, from an early age, usually asked to remain in their seats unless there is some emergency or a performance of knowledge task to complete, like writing on a chalk board or whiteboard. They may perceive most requests from teachers in classrooms to be further tasks in a long string of micro-performances. For such students this next activity may seem a little odd. I make sure to tell them that it is okay to feel uncomfortable sometimes, stimulating thought about knowledge transfer, a little incoherence, and maybe even metacognition. There is much more here to research concerning the body and brain, and the ways they work with, or are kept from, each other in education. Our purpose now however, is not to explore that phenomenon in depth but rather to make good use of it, to help students write better.

So I ask them to walk, in pairs (instructor chosen), to a randomly selected location. I place the names of nearby places on campus, which might take 5-7 minutes to reach by walking, on strips of paper which are drawn from a hat/box/container. I try to reserve a nearby location or two for students with reduced mobility needs—but this consideration does not influence the pairings—and I send the pairs off for a walk. I ask one person to talk about their paper on the way out to the location, then switch roles, so that the other person can talk on the way back about their own paper. Feedback is limited to allow the body and senses to think and embody the story for the writer and to embody the audience role for the listener.

The only responses that are allowed are:
* I don’t understand. (ask for clarification)
* Oh that’s good. (show of support)
* Why is that? (ask for backing) (Toulmin, 2003, p. 94)

The responses are meant to allow the writer to physically—in real time and sequence—see and hear where their argument seems confusing or weak without ever having anyone say “this is weak” or “this writing is confusing” which can be confrontational among peers. The walking also stimulates circulation of oxygen to the brain even as it takes composing out of the classroom and into the world. Like Plato’s Socrates in the Pheadrus who walked to reflect, Bunyan’s Christian seeking the way to the Celestial City, Steinbeck’s Lennie and George walking to a new social situation, or even Tolkien’s Frodo and Samwise who walked to defeat evil, the students take turns being: the speaker and listener, the self and the other, the teacher and the student. They try to make themselves understood by attempting to understand the other and their needs as an audience. It is a rhetorical dexterity to be able to hold multiple roles at one time.

Through this practice, many of my students begin to look at storytelling and narrative differently, as writing and composing are attached subconsciously to this act of walking and talking which they have been doing for years. —What? We already compose stuff? — Why yes you do. Tweets, Facebook posts, Mass Texts, Texts, Snapchats, excuses why you were late to this class, explanations to your friends why you can’t hang today . . . these are all examples of composition in various modes and registers, composed for different audiences. If they don’t know that they are composers and critics how can they practice refining those roles toward academic uses? How can they come to the conclusion that each role can help them become better at the other?


They must see and claim their expertise so that they can confidently offer advice to other composers and consider the advice of others well. It is incumbent upon teachers to show them the experience that they have as Patricia Bizzell (1982) states “all discourse communities constitute and interpret experience” (p. 230). We also have another charge as posited by David Bartholomae (1986) to help them adapt that experience to new settings. How can instructors guide these practices if the topic is not discussed in the professional development training and CEU’s they receive? Perhaps a tangent for another time.

As I await the return of my wandering composers, I have written a question on the board and instructions for the students to answer it in their journals/blogs. It reads like this: “Having shared your composition with your peer, can you identify some areas where you need to revise or explain in greater depth your own message in order to achieve your purpose with your audience?”

There is no sound quite like the frenzied clacking of 20+ sets of fingers upon keyboards when they return from walking and talking. The ordered thoughts that come from live non-evaluative feedback create a condition in which the thoughts flow through the fingertips as fast as the writer can allow. No pauses. No groans. No Writer’s block.

I have observed that the time needed to complete the reflection entries that come after these walks takes twice as long as other entries. Over the many academic terms in which I have employed this activity, the time allotment had to be increased from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. Infinitely more interesting though: is the fact that at the end of those 10 minutes of keyboard clacking, at least a quarter of the class, in 100% of those sections, protests that they want more time to finish their reflections. I see this as intense engagement.

References

Bartholomae, D. (1986). Inventing the University. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1), 4-23.

Bazerman, C., & Tinberg, H. (2015). Text Is an Object Outside of Oneself That Can Be Improved and Developed. In L. Adler-Kassner, & E. Wardle, Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (pp. 61-62). Logan: Utah State University Press.

Bizzell, P. (1982). ” Cognition, Convention and Certainty:What We Need to Know about Writing. Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, 3(3), 213-243.

Elbow, P. (1995). PETER ELBOW ON WRITING:A Conversation with America’s Top Writing Teacher. 1-18. (J. Saxe, Editor) Media Education Foundation. Retrieved 1 25, 2015, from http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/301/transcript_301.pdf

Knoblauch, A. A. (2012). Bodies of Knowledge: Definitions, Delineations, and Implications of Embodied Writing in the Academy. Composition Studies, 40(2), 50-65. Retrieved 12 13, 2017

Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking On Creative Thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142-1152. Retrieved 10 23, 2017

Toulmin, S. (2003). The Uses of Argument. Caimbridge: University of Caimbridge Press. Retrieved from http://johnnywalters.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/3/5/13358288/toulmin-the-uses-of-argument_1.pdf

Assignments, Blogs, Teaching Resources, Teaching Strategies

Testing a Theory of Writing in FYW

Leave a comment

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.

Blogs, Reading Lists for Courses, Teaching Strategies, Textbooks

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

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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

2 Comments

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.
Blogs, Scholarship on WAW, Teaching Strategies

At Home with Writing about Writing

Leave a comment

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).

Assignments, Blogs, Teaching Strategies

Teaching Writing about Writing 4C15 SIG

1 Comment

Our CCCC 15 WAW SIG (gotta love acronyms) teaching group shared some really interesting ways to teach Writing about Writing.
We had a diverse group, from people teaching at a fully integrated WAW school to STEM WAW to WAW going rogue. Thanks to all of our participants. I walked away from the SIG with many, many great ideas!

Part of our discussion seemed to circle back on ways to get students “over the hump” of a difficult and rigorous writing curriculum. Here are some ideas we discussed:

  • Teach the literacy narrative first to ease them in.
  • Use children’s literacy TV shows to get them thinking about literacy (Reading Rainbow, Dora the Explorer)
  • Use the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (http://daln.osu.edu) as a resource.
  • Teach some reading strategies such as reading the first time very quickly for main ideas, reading headings and subheadings, skimming methods and data sections while concentrating on introductions and conclusions.
  • Understanding that this difficult materials is about treating students as adult/college level learners. We don’t “water down” anything for them.
  • Reminding them that they’ll be proud of their own hard work at the end of the semester.

We also discussed a variety of ways to think about WAW courses:
STEM WAW can focus on STEM genres, using a science accommodation assignment, reading Jeanne Fahnestock’s 1986 article, “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts.”

Approach WAW thematically by deconstructing preconceived notions of writing that students bring with them.

  • What about a whole course on revision?
  • What if a first-year course focused on deconstructing the five paragraph essay? Think of White’s “Five Paragraph Theme Theme.”
  • How might we deconstruct the use of “I” in academic writing?
  • This could also be a course around one of our Threshold Concepts
  • Why not construct a course around major people in writing studies? Read and write about Donald Murray’s ideas and how they’ve changed over time. What other figures might work for this approach?

Please consider using this space to comment about other ideas or assignments that work for you!

Scholarship from WAW, Scholarship on WAW, Teaching Strategies

Downs, “Teaching first-year writers to use texts: Scholarly readings in Writing-about-Writing in First-Year Comp”

Leave a comment

Downs’ article provides great suggestions for helping students navigate scholarly articles.

Downs, Doug. “Teaching First-year Writers to Use Texts: Scholarly Readings in Writing-about-writing in First-year Comp.” Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy (2010): 19-50.

Teaching Strategies

Support for Critical Reading

4 Comments

On the WAW network Ning in 2011, instructors had a conversation about how to help students read scholarly articles. With the contributors’ permission, we have copied and pasted the initial post and–in the comments–the replies.

***

Hi, all!

I’m in the process of meeting w/ and preparing a group of 9 of our part-time faculty here to pilot WAW in spring 2012. (It will be piloted in our second semester comp course.)

The one question I’m getting consistently, that I am currently unable to answer is about supporting students with the readings. I know Barb Bird has done a good deal of work on this and I’m sure others of you have as well. I’d benefit from seeing handouts, hearing about your approach, and advice on supporting instructors in their approaches!

Thank you!

-Michelle LaFrance

(To read the replies, scroll below or click on “Comments,” above.)