Writing Across the Curriculum

Author: caitedungan

Read Around Groups

Read around groups are a great way to support peer review in your classroom in an non-traditional way. This activity helps students develop their vocabulary for discussing and critiquing writing, and solidifies ideas about what good writing looks like. Consider using this method in your classroom to engage your students in more dynamic peer review!

The One Minute Paper – Instructional Module

Interested in utilizing Dr. Thomas Sura’s One Minute Paper in your classroom? Here is a brief instructional video detailing how to implement it. This is a great way to foster reflective thinking in your students concerning their own writing practice, and has the added benefit of allowing you instant feedback on your own teaching practices!

Reverse Course Design

Based on a presentation by Melissa Broeckelman-Post, this learning module illustrates a methodology for course design that begins with the broad and gradually focuses in on how to create assignments and assessments. Each assignment is encouraged to link back to the original goals and outcomes desired for the course, so that everything remains focused and connected.

Consider using this method the next time you begin to design your class.

The Sticky Note Exercise

Looking for a new way to foster discussion in your classroom? Try this sticky note exercise! This highly adaptable exercise allows for meaningful discussion, while the anonymity of it allows students the freedom to express their ideas. Try using this method to discuss writing in your classroom, and see what new revelations your students come to.

Laptops in the Classroom: The Old New Crisis

Business conference

By: Caitlin Dungan

Caitlin Dungan is a PhD student in Mason’s Writing and Rhetoric PhD Program. Caitlin is a Graduate Research Assistant for Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and her current research interests include fanfiction, digital media and rhetoric, online feedback practices, and participatory culture.

When scholars talk about the intersections between writing and technology, as well as how technology forms, limits, complicates or expands writing practice, we tend to overlook the fact that writing itself is a form of technology. While writing changed the world as profoundly as the wheel did, somehow the act of writing always seems to undergo cyclical scrutiny as being attacked by some new, seemingly insidious form of technology (as handwriting was by the typewriter), being changed by that technology into something worthy of being preserved, and then attacked again by whatever technological innovation comes next.

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