The Writing Program’s Spring 2023 workshop hosted guest speaker Debbie Finocchio, the Assistant Core Director, who shared a useful handout of resources for FYW 150 instructors. The link to that resource is here. A second guest speaker, Deniz Perez-Combs, shared information about her service in the Academic Senate, and invited other Non Tenure Track (NTT) faculty to attend meetings and get involved. She also informed the team that a committee is currently researching issues relevant to all benefits-based and non-benefits based NTT faculty.
During the pedagogical workshop, Writing Program Director Megan Little briefly discussed the “multiple discourses” language in the learning outcomes for FYW150, and invited attendees to share their interpretation of this framework for teaching writing. Like other models for teaching composition, this one comes with strengths, limitations, and assumptions, which the group was encouraged to explore. In small groups, faculty shared how they interpret this language and shared assignments with each other in areas of reception (reading), production (writing), and investigation (“exploration” and “field research”). The handout used to guide this group discussion is here.
Other administrative updates were also covered in the workshop, notably, a call for FYW faculty to identify pedagogical areas where they can contribute to future Writing Program workshops. This list of potential areas, and other administrative announcements, are available in the handout here, and listed below.
- Multiple discourses (recurring theme): how do you understand and address this goal?
- Classroom, workload, and student management (recurring theme): How do you address issues, problems, and challenges?
- Personal narrative and expressivist writing: Do you use these in your class? As a bridge to academic writing? Or to inspire involvement and critical reflection in your students? What are the challenges? What characterizes outstanding papers
- Rhetoric and argument: How do you make rhetoric interesting to teach and to learn? Beyond formula, template, identification of terms? Innovative assignments beyond the standard “rhetorical analysis” essay, to help students see themselves as rhetoricians?
- Literature: Do you have innovative approaches to using literary texts to teach academic discourse? What kind of writing prompts do you use? What characterizes outstanding papers, arguments, or projects?
- Teaching ESL (international) and/or preparatory writers: We need to learn from folks with experience teaching these writers. It’s a specialized skill—please share tips based on your experience.
- Research and information literacy: Share great library research assignments, tightly structured (for purposes of plagiarism) and scaffolded, especially ones that challenge students to distinguish between different kinds of evidence.
- Creative writing: Do you teach creative writing? What exercises or assignments do you use to inspire FYW students to try creative approaches as they gain academic writing skills?
- Outside the classroom, “real-world” writing: Share writing assignments that have “real-world” audiences and purposes: policy change, community engagement, public sphere, activist writing, action research, online publishing, and so on. What characterizes outstanding projects?