Tag: Reading

Undergraduate Column: Can We Talk about Reading?

Post author By aoleary4
Post date May 31, 2017

By Artie O’Leary

I have only experienced conversations about reading twice in my entire academic career. I don’t mean that we didn’t talk about the course readings themselves in my classes, we’ve talked quite a bit in many classes about the content of the pieces assigned. But these conversations often focused on content alone: What did the writer say? How is what the writer said different from what another writer said? How did what the writer say about the topic help me to understand important information related to the focus of the class?

Tags analytical reading, Reading, research, Writing

Teaching Writing Technology

Laptops in the Classroom: The Old New Crisis

Post author By caitedungan
Post date April 2, 2015

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.

Tags laptops, note-taking, notes, notetaking, Reading, retention, teaching writing, writing pedagogy

Teaching Writing

“The Rhetorical Situation” and Reading Strategies in Advanced Composition

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date February 5, 2015

by: Caitlin Holmes

Caitlin Holmes is the Assistant Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at George Mason University. She blogs regularly about teaching here at thewritingcampus.com. You can reach her via email at wac@gmu.edu.

During a pre-semester meeting to discuss the QEP assessment findings of Mason’s English 302 Students-as-Scholars Program, instructors of our Advanced Composition courses went over the primary student learning outcomes (SLO):

SLO-1, Discovery: Understand how they can engage in the practice of scholarship at GMU
SLO-2, Discovery: Understand research methods used in a discipline
SLO-3, Discovery: Understand how knowledge is transmitted within a discipline, across disciplines, and to the public
SLO-4, Inquiry: Articulate and refine a question
SLO-5, Inquiry: Follow ethical principles
SLO-6, Inquiry: Situate the scholarly inquiry [and inquiry process] within a broader context
SLO-7, Inquiry: Apply appropriate scholarly conventions during scholarly inquiry/reporting

What those discussions reinforced for my colleagues and me is that engagement in scholarship and knowledge transmission requires that students have advanced reading practices that often are not overtly discussed – or are sometimes presumed as proficiencies – as we work on writing competencies.

Tags College Composition, education, exigence, Mason WAC, pedagogy, Reading, reading strategies, research, Teaching, teaching reading, Teaching Strategies, WAC, Writing in the Disciplines, writing pedagogy