Tag: Writing Across the Curriculum

Against “The Library Scavenger Hunt”: Better Library Research Assignments

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date January 15, 2015

Jen Stevens is the Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian at George Mason University and a consultant for Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Faculty Senate Committee. She has extensive experience assisting undergraduate and graduate student writers discover new resources and information in their research process. For her information and current InfoGuides, click here!

In my work as a Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian at George Mason University, I work with faculty members and their students to help the students learn how to do better research, which in turn leads to better writing.

Last week, I found the strangest thing in the Fenwick Library Reference area. . .

Tags College Composition, composition, education, Higher Ed, higher education, libraries, Online writing, pedagogy, research, Teaching, Teaching Strategies, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing pedagogy

Modules

VIDEO: Principles for Assignment Design

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date December 5, 2014

Teaching Writing

Read-Around Groups: Low-Stakes and High-Impact Writing in First-Year Composition

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date November 13, 2014

By Caitlin Holmes

Since Dr. José Bowen visited Mason in September 2014, I have been working to implement more of his suggestions for teaching practice into my class. I wrote previously about utilizing one such suggestion: a combination of reading, writing in response, and discussion to understand the rhetorical nature of APA style. More recently, I have experimented with another approach to improving student writing in a low-stakes environment that requires students to show the higher-order thinking skills that Dr. Bowen emphasized: read-around groups. During his workshop at Mason, Bowen reminded us that students respond well to uncertainty, failure, and experimentation, and read-around groups (or RAGs, as they are also known) certainly allow for those conditions to emerge in a productive way.

Tags composition, education, pedagogy, Peer Review, Revision, student feedback, Teaching, Teaching Strategies, WAC, WID, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing education, writing feedback, Writing in the Disciplines

Teaching Writing

Generic or specific: writing in and across the disciplines

Post author By caitedungan
Post date October 27, 2014

In this post by The UWC Writing Centre, the focus is on the open-mindedness necessary to teach writing across disciplines. When faculty-requested workshops on impossibly broad topics like “Can you come and tell my students how to write at university?” are not the solution to student writing issues, what is? The preliminary answer: a dialogue on the nature of the writing assignment, faculty expectations and qualifications for excellence within the assignment. This opens the door to conversations about how to best serve student writers in their discipline: by operating somewhere between the generic and the specific.

Tags culture of writing, faculty development, The Writing Campus, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines

Evaluating Writing Teaching Writing

Responding to Student Writing/Writers

Post author By caitedungan
Post date October 20, 2014

Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed. highlights some of the best practices from Nancy Sommers’ new book, Responding to Student Writers. One of the most helpful insights is the ability to recognize that our comments to students may be contradictory, misleading, or vague, and that the real purpose of offering feedback to students is to “teach one lesson at a time.”

“We should ‘ask ourselves: What single lesson do I want to convey to students through comments? And how will I teach this lesson?'”

Tags College Composition, Feedback, higher education, student feedback, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines, writing pedagogy