composition

More from IWAC 2014 today! What a wonderful conference! This time I'm going spend some time considering the presentation by Anne Ellen Geller, Michele Eodice, and Neal Lerner about the Meaningful Writing Project , a massive grounded theory study that questions what makes writing assignments meaningful to students and how faculty that have composed these meaningful writing assignments think about writing and writing pedagogy. This particular presentation was focused on the latter. Disclaimer: I have a very positive bias towards the panel I'm going to write about in this post. I strongly believe in the importance of student-centered research when it comes to describing student learning experiences. I love to hear the voices of writers and educators; narratives are exciting. I also admire an approach that works from a strength-based concept of student learning experiences rather than a deficit one. And of course, Anne Ellen Geller is my dissertation chair, and one of the most kick...

As promised, I'm diving into some of the things that the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference presentations prompted me to consider. Today, I'm going to talk more about the wonderful talk given by Melody Pugh , Naomi Silver, and Anne Ruggles Gere called "Interrogating Disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An Institutional Ethnography." The scholars framed the discussion around what began an institutional review of the Upper Level Writing Requirement (ULWR) at their university, which lead to interviews with faculties and students about their expectations and experiences with these ULWR. What they found was a real struggle with defining disciplines/disciplinarity and whether their concepts of "writing in the discipline" would actually serve students. Many students and professors expressed a desire to explore more genres, but felt that was outside the bounds of " writing in the discipline ," which largely seemed to boil down to wr...

I just returned from the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference at the University of Minnesota, and I have to say it was one of my best conference experiences yet. The presentations were engaging, the people were open and friendly, and Minneapolis was a great city. During my brief two days there, I managed to sit in on 5 panels, one in which I presented, a keynote, and an incredible plenary session. In truth, it made me a little sad that I'm not a WAC WPA because I would have loved the opportunity to implement some of the ideas that were discussed at the universities where I am involved in writing pedagogy. The Panels Here is a brief overview of the titles of the panels that I attended: Role Reversal: When Students Teach Faculty in WAC Programs - Deanna Daniels & Brandy Grabow, Kate Ronald & Lucy Manley, and Greg Skutches Writing Beyond the Curriculum - Nicole Papaioannou, Dan Reis & Caroline Klidonas, and KaaVonia Hinton & Yonghee S...

Yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting 7 high school senior English classes with three of my colleagues from the writing center. Our mission was to introduce high school students to the world of college writing before they got there. It was a great day, and I really enjoyed getting to learn what high school students thought about college writing. While we prepared a great handout that talked about being context-appropriate, making arguments, and campus resources, etc., we wound up turning our original formal lecture with some discussion plan into a Q & A session. Our icebreaker was to have each student write a question or something they'd heard about college writing down and put it in a basket. Then we would read a few anonymously and discuss in conjunction with our planned lecture/handout. This wound up being the heart of each presentation, which tackled most of the stuff we had written down for them anyway. I thought it was really a great moment. We saw how much h...

That Don't Actually Have to Do with My Research Question I've been working on my dissertation for two full academic years (plus one long summer), and if you've read my earlier posts, you know it hasn't been all rainbows and butterflies. Now that the struggle of the recruitment process has eased up a bit, though, I'm able to finally enjoy my research. So far, I've held four full sets of interviews and five half-sets with undergraduates and recent graduates. I feel incredibly lucky to have had such great participants who were willing to share so much of their lives, identities, and experiences with me. What I'm learning, beyond the stuff that I'm supposed to be learning about my research question, is also pretty awesome and exciting for me. 1.  Undergraduates are incredibly articulate.   This is the one that really stood out to me. I spend a lot of time with undergraduates, and I hear them talk about their ideas, but it's usually when they're strug...

"Think of the solution, not the problem." That is a line from one of my favorite books, The Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. The book is mostly about Richard Cypher, a woodsman who faces enormous tragedy and learns that he is a wizard--- I think of the Sword of Truth Series as an adult version of the Harry Potter series (and highly recommend it to everyone!). In this moment, as Richard agonizes over all the way things could go wrong while trying to pretty much save the world, Zedd (Richard's mentor) tells Richard  he must "think of the solution, not the problem." This line stuck with me from the first time I read it nearly ten years ago. This year, I've really tried to make this my mantra, and I thought that, in the midst of the chaos of the end of the semester/academic year, it was worth sharing with all of my educator and student friends out there. In many ways, this mantra stands against a lot of what I've learned as a graduate student, whe...

A recent article on Inside Higher Ed called " Too Much Informality " by Katrina Gulliver sparked controversy when it proclaimed that every professor should call themselves by title (Dr./Professor), call students by their title (Mr./Ms.), and expect the same treatment from students. It claimed that using first names promoted a lack of respect and professionalism. Her ideas definitely didn't sit well with me. For starters, it really upsets me when people blame students and generalize entire populations of young adults as rude and disrespectful. I would argue that those students are the minority. I would even go so far as to say that many of those who blame the students for having no respect, often do not respect the students and consider them beneath them, as I think Professor Gulliver does. At my first teaching job, I used my first name--Nicole. As a doctoral student, I didn't quite feel comfortable being addressed as professor, and I use more of a guide/coach strategy...