Tag: Writing in the Disciplines

“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

Faculty Writing

New Series: Supporting Faculty Writers – “The Weekend Retreat”

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date January 22, 2015

Erica Jacobs teaches English at Oakton High School and writing at George Mason University. She had a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University and has published numerous articles in local newspapers, newsletters, and magazines. This article is a reprint from her 1997 publication, “The Weekend Retreat.” Be on the look-out for her follow-up piece this February on her most recent participation in the WAC-sponsored Winter Faculty Writing Retreat that took place on January 7-8, 2015.

As a non-tenure track teacher at George Mason University, I was pleased to discover I was eligible to participate in a “Writing Retreat” sponsored by the English department and the Northern Virginia Writing Project in the fall of 1978. Don Gallehr had completed the first two summers of the Writing Institute with local high school teachers, and their success on the secondary level seemed to promise equal success on the University level.

Tags education, faculty, faculty retreat, faculty writing, faculty writing support, Higher Ed, higher education, Mason WAC, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing education, writing feedback, Writing in the Disciplines

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