Category: Faculty Writing

Students as Teachers – Professor/Student Collaboration Improves a History Course

Post author By caitedungan
Post date October 13, 2014

In a recent post from Bryn Mawr’s Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, Professor Alejandro Quintana, Assistant Professor in the History Department at St. John’s University, and his student Writing Fellow, Morgan Zajkowski, have written an excellent blog post detailing their work together. Over the course of a semester, Quintana and Zajkowski collaborated on ways to improve student writing, retention, and participation in Quintana’s history course, guided by the principles of WAC. They offer helpful insights into fostering student engagement and making the classroom a dynamic place for collaborative discussion, while using low-risk writing assignments to build student confidence.

“I expected at some point to be forced to say no to any major suggestion to change my teaching practices. To my great surprise this never happened; our collaboration was progressive and smooth. Before I realized it, we were making significant changes to my teaching methodology. I learned so much from Morgan and my teaching practices were reshaped for the better. Today, a year after our collaboration, I have incorporated into all my current courses all the activities and assignments she helped me develop during the spring semester of 2013.”

“Students as Teachers Transforming a History Course” – Alejandro Quintana and Morgan Zajkowski

Tags Collaborative Teaching, College Composition, higher education, History, Teaching, WAC, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines

Evaluating Writing Faculty Writing Graduate Students Teaching Writing

Rethinking the Research Paper

Post author By Michelle LaFrance
Post date April 21, 2014

By Michelle LaFrance

Rebecca Schuman whipped up an educational furor in December of 2013, writing on Slate.com: “We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure.” Schuman’s rationale: “Students Hate Writing Papers. Professors Hate Grading Papers.” Since Schuman’s post went viral, any number of online responses have cropped up—defending the typical college essay, suggesting new approaches to this central writing activity, and critiquing the sorts of characterizations of education that arise from “click bait” traffic on sites like Salon.com. But Schuman’s post echoes with a lively, ongoing conversation in the field of Writing Studies. She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to question the traditional research-based essay in college courses.

Evaluating Writing Faculty Writing Graduate Students Teaching Writing

From Writing Intensive to Writing Integrated: how do you keep writing at the center of student learning?

Post author By Michelle LaFrance
Post date February 10, 2014

By Michelle LaFrance
Effective writing instruction is as much about helping students to understand the conventions of disciplinary writing, as it is supporting students to understand the content central to student work in a major. To be effective writers, students must come to learn the many different tacit expectations, heuristics, conventions, and resources that experts often take for granted.