The cstw.org site was hacked, and my colleague who oversees the site is looking to close it down soon.

What’s fantastic about this change is that we now can host the blog on the OSU CSTW site directly, rather than have an ugly I frame looking here.

So…as they say, “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

In the course I teach, Comparative Studies 367.01: American Identity in the World, students are asked to read, think, and talk about the ways in which race, class, gender continue to shape a culture that most students are proud to claim as their own. In order to mitigate discomfort that may result in defensiveness about one’s roles in systems of social privilege, I have my students engage these topics in a set of low-stakes assignments which lead them from self-reflexive analysis to cultural analysis.

I assign three short “take-home critical responses.” Each assignment begins with a prompt that asks students to apply a specific course concept to their own lives. This allows students to use their expertise on a topic (their own experience) in conjunction with critical tools that are new to them (what we cover in the course), which provides them with a degree of confidence in what they write while also asking them to do something unfamiliar. Additionally, this assignment serves to remind me of the complex subjectivities that my students bring to the classroom while providing a platform whereupon a dialogue about writing between my students and myself can begin.

I also assign “in-class critical responses” comprised of 2-3 open-ended questions which are completed in conjunction with films we watch during the course. The questions I ask usually take a particularly rich quote from one of the theoretical texts that we are reading and ask the students to apply the quote to a particular element in the film. Students are asked to generate answers either in narrative or outline form. Having students complete these responses allows them to do some “pre-writing” in anticipation of class discussion regarding the films, and this assignment demonstrates how to use course readings and discussion as the grounds from which we can ask interesting questions (which they are asked to do for their final paper assignment). Also, reading the students’ responses provides me with feedback concerning how well the class is understanding the course material and how prepared they are to apply course material to a case study of their choosing for the final paper. I find that removing the pressure of grades allows students to take the sorts of risks that are necessary for learning, so I assess both of these assignments on a pass/fail basis. Anyone who completes the assignments according to the instructions receives full credit.

Students who initially resist the analytical approaches to American identity that provide a foundation for the course tend to benefit most from these assignments. For example, one student who initially served as a voice of resistance in class discussion, gradually revealed an increasing willingness to engage with the course material. At the end of the quarter, he surprised me with an email explaining that the course had really taught him to think more carefully about race in the United States. He then continued on demonstrating what he had learned by offering his analysis of the role that implicit ideas about race continued to play in discourses surrounding President Obama–an analysis he would not have listened to, much less made, when the quarter started!

A few weeks ago I facilitated a workshop on teaching with portfolios for Learning Technology. As much as we talk about the technology supporting e-portfolios, it’s good to step back and take stock of the pedagogical approaches behind them. Here are a few principles I think are central to portfolio pedagogy:

They can be process oriented. What we ultimately value about learning is less about students regurgitating all of the ‘facts’ they learned than helping them take up the processes of inquiry we want them to practice. Portfolios give you both a more complete picture of student’s learning and also an opportunity to structure assignments in a way that teaches students process.

They can create room for student self-representation and self-reflection. Portfolios can allow students to take comprehensive stock of what they’ve learned and come to new insights about their work. Furthermore, we want our students to learn how to think like professionals in our fields. Portfolios allow students to work out their identities as professionals and scholars. As they enter their professional, civic, and personal lives, this self-awareness is a crucial skill.

They can allow for flexible assessment. When we see a more comprehensive picture of students’ work, we can talk with our colleagues in a more informed way about what we really value about the work our students do. These conversations can be extremely valuable because you can discover unexpected areas of consensus and disagreement about program values and outcomes.

They can be directed toward multiple audiences and can contextualize student work in different ways. Portfolios can give us a framework for allowing students to present their work not just to us within the classroom, but to other audiences as well: their classmates, your colleagues in your department or program, professionals in their fields of interest, or others. Plus, they can bring in their work from outside the classroom as evidence of their learning, making crucial connections to their course of study.

Professor Tim Rhodus made an important point during the portfolio workshop that I’ve been thinking about since then: the classroom isn’t just a safe place for students to learn and practice “real world” activity; it is, in fact, part of the “real world”, as much as we and our students tend to imagine it as separate from it. Portfolios offer a number of ways to break down the false distinctions we make about what belongs in the classroom and outside it, and open up a number of opportunities to bring our teaching and learning into greater focus.

I’ve included a short bibliography below of scholarship on portfolios and assessment from the perspective of composition studies.

Bob Broad. What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing. Utah State University Press, 2003.

Pat Belanoff and Marcia Dickson, ed. Portfolios: Process and Product. Boynton/Cook, 1991.

Brian Huot. (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Utah State University Press, 2002.

Kathleen Blake Yancey and Irwin Weiser, ed. Situating Portfolios: Four Perspectives. Utah State University Press, 1997.

Many instructors are familiar with peer assessment–and the frustration with students who don’t offer substantive feedback during the process or even grasp requisite writing standards. To maximize the benefits from peer assessment, take a few minutes to teach students how to offer constructive feedback to each other. It can be a great way for students to reflect on and develop their writing, discuss course content and form a classroom learning community. It can produce multiple points of critique and lighten your assessment workload–all this for a relatively small investment of time.

Low Stakes Activity: Implement a WAC “Writing to Learn” activity such as “speed-dating a thesis” into one of your class periods.

In this exercise, students students sit in two circles: one inside the other. Students from each circle face each other and exchange their thesis statements for a short period of time (one-two minutes), and then the outside circle rotates to a new partner. Students do this as many times as the instructor wishes. The goal is for each student to give suggestions on their classmates’ thesis statements in order to refine the language and clarity.

The goal is for each student to give suggestions on their classmates’ thesis statements in order to refine the language and clarity. This and other activities can be found in WAC’s Writing to Learn activity booklet .

Medium Stakes Activity: Have your students bring in drafts–or even a page–from a writing assignment to share with their peers.

After reviewing the instructions, purpose, and assessment criteria for the assignment, instruct each student to provide written feedback that reflects the rubric and/or goals of the assignment. Give students a “feedback guide” (for some examples, see our wiki page on peer response ) so that they are offering feedback based on the course goals.

Alternatively, bring in an anonymous sample paper written for a similar assignment in a different quarter and, as a class, talk about how you would assess the first paragraph relative to the rubric and/or goals of the assignment. After breaking students into small groups and having them assess the remainder of the paper, you can bring the class back together to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the draft, how it might be graded, and what might be the most pressing challenges facing the writer. This can also be a good activity with which to model assessment to students in preparation for reading the drafts of their peers.

High Stakes Activity: Partner with another instructor in your department and have your students trade papers for peer review.

Have students bring two copies of a paper or draft without their names on it to class. Students can draw or be secretly assigned numbers to put on both of their copies. Collect all of the papers and trade the set with another instructor in your department. Once you have the other set of papers, pass out two to each of your students and have them edit the papers–either in class or as a homework assignment. This can also be done electronically via the instructor if you wish.

Not only will students learn extra material by looking at papers on topics from outside their original course, but their editing skills for their own work will be heightened through the experience of reviewing their peers’ assignments.

OSU Community Example:
Professor in microbiology, Juan Alfonzo, has his students work in pairs to write course-related grant proposals for submission to the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health. When the proposals are complete, the class forms two groups to act as review boards for the granting institutions. Collaboratively, each “board” develops assessment criteria, then assesses and ranks the other group’s proposals. At the end of the assessment, each group writes a summary outlining and explaining their decisions. Prof. Alfonzo explains that this assignment has been extremely successful. In fact, one group of students actually performed the research they had proposed in his class, and produced first-author papers published in well-regarded journals. Professor Alfonzo recalls, “I was reading a journal and I saw an idea that I knew I recognized. It turned out to be the students I had had in my class turning their proposals into research!”

WAC Resources: Check out the latest additions to our Writing Across the Curriculum Resource Wiki.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading four upcoming workshops Winter quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website.

We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website.

Have a great finals week and winter break,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Lindsay Bernhagen, Comparative Studies
Mara Gross, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Deborah Petrone, Education: Teaching and Learning
Courtnie Wolfgang, Art Education

One of the most exciting results of teaching–but most challenging to achieve–occurs when students are able to express curiosity about your course’s subject matter. Check out the following ideas for using writing to encourage your students to think more critically about their work.

Tomorrow: Give your students a survey to gauge their understanding of course concepts and ideas as well as their personal interest and engagement with the course.

When you are wondering if students are beginning to grasp the concepts you’ve been tackling together for several classes, consider asking students to reflect on what interests them so far in the course, or what concepts are confusing them. Some of these informal/exploratory writing exercises might help determine if you’re all on the same page, as well as inspire classroom discussion.

Sample Prompts:

What is one concept that really sticks with you that we’ve discussed so far? What concepts are confusing you?
Where do you see these concepts in action in your work and life outside the classroom? What connections do you see between this course and recent events?

Next Week: Have students apply a course concept, idea, or theory to a current event or contemporary social issue.

Discussing current events can help students to see how ideas you’re working through, which can often seem abstract in the context of the classroom, have significance beyond the class. It can also address the challenge of presenting research in your field to a wider public: how might the specialized concepts you’re discussing be presented to a ‘lay’ audience? What sorts of ethical issues do researchers need to be aware of when they are presenting their work more widely?

Sciences: Have students compare the presentation of a research journal article, a university press release on the same research project, and a newspaper article citing the press release that is written for a more general audience. How do the writers of each of the releases translate the complexities of the research for a public audience? Do they avoid pitfalls like ‘hyping’ the results, or making claims the original research can’t support?

Humanities: Have students bring in two newspaper articles addressing the same issue but from two different perspectives. For example, ask students to find two editorials addressing the topic of gender reassignment surgery from opposite perspectives so that you can facilitate a discussion of the differences in tone, style, and argumentation.

Next Quarter: Ask your students to apply a course concept or idea in a genre of writing that tries to persuade an audience, such as a policy proposal, an advertising campaign, or an op-ed.

Engaging with a different genre of writing can help students see how their work might fit into a context outside of academia (e.g. popular culture, professional settings, or personal communications). Through practice with persuasive techniques, rich vocabulary, and alternative phrasing, student can also learn how to reach a variety of audiences with their writing. Most importantly, it helps them understand what is at stake when they have to communicate their ideas to others.

Arts and Humanities: One area rich with persuasive language is the advertising industry. Tackling advertisements can elicit dialogue surrounding target audiences and stereotyping, as well as consumer behavior. Teachers interested in exploring such topics might ask students to develop a product (real or fictional) to market. They must identify their target audience, television network(s) to whom they will pitch their product, and the time slots and television shows that will yield the most effective exposure. Students write a “pitch” that uses compelling language and “juicy” adjectives in order to sell their idea, and they deliver that pitch to classmates. Some instructors may ask students to rate whether or not they would “buy” what their classmates are selling as a way to keep them engaged throughout the presentations. Discussion questions following the assignment might focus on the reasoning behind students’ choices, the greater cultural narratives at work (generalizations, stereotypes, target audiences), and the connections to other course concepts and texts.

Sciences: In order to allow students to step back from laboratory research, pull together their conclusions, and consider how to communicate their findings, students can reframe their research writing into grant proposals, acting as the researchers pitching a research grant application in terms of its relevance to specific grant criteria. As a form of peer review, they might act as members of a review board who must solicit and select which of their colleagues projects will be funded. In this case, students would have to consider how to frame their research questions to appeal to a granting agency’s funding criteria, and learn how to evaluate their colleagues’ proposals using those criteria. Not only does this allow students to learn important, common professional practices, but it also forces them to consider how to focus their research findings as they prepare to present them to a wider audience.

OSU Community Example: Justin Acome, a TA in Political Science, has his students write an assignment in the form of an op/ed, speech, letter-to-the-editor, media (book, movie, article) review, or a policy memo.  Students are asked to make arguments using course material in only 350 words and without relying on jargon. Students are then given extensive feedback and required to revise their work so that it is as clear and coherent as possible. Justin explains, “keeping the texts so short forces students to make decisions about what does and does not need to be said, itself both a political lesson and an important writing skill.”

WAC Resources:Check out the latest additions to our Writing Across the Curriculum Resource Wiki: https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/osuwacresources/Home

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading four upcoming workshops Spring quarter, two through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT) and two through Learning Technology:

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html).

For further information, visit Learning Technology’s website (http://lt.osu.edu/calendar/).

We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Lindsay Bernhagen, Comparative Studies
Mara Gross, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Deborah Petrone, Education: Teaching and Learning
Courtnie Wolfgang, Art Education

End-of-the-quarter grading can be a difficult task after putting so much energy into teaching. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with a pile of papers to grade that need a quick turn around, especially when you have a number of students graduating. Thankfully, there are a variety of ways to make grading less time consuming that can be instigated as you wrap up your class, during finals week, and as you plan for next quarter of teaching. Check out the following tips to learn more about how you can make your end-of-the-quarter grading process more efficient.

As You’re Wrapping Up Class: Discuss your end-of-the-quarter grading plans with your students and determine their expectations. For example, if students are turning in their assignments on the last day of class, ask them to indicate if they want extensive comments on their final projects or if they simply want a short overview of how they might improve their writing for their upcoming classes. You could also offer to meet with students at the beginning of the following quarter if they want to stop by and pick up their final projects. You might be surprised at how many students are planning on graduating, going out of the country, or leaving for home right after finals week, so they won’t be able to pick up their projects until after the quarter is over, if at all. It can be helpful to know what students are expecting because this can cut down on your grading time.

Finals Week: If you haven’t already created a rubric, look over the final assignment or project for your course and consider the assignment’s instructional goals. Then, develop a hierarchy of elements to which you will respond. Developing a rubric that concentrates on only the top three to five prioritized elements that you have chosen can help you grade more quickly and effectively. Learn more about creating grading rubrics on the WAC Wiki (https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/osuwacresources/How+to+Develop+a+Rubric).

Next Quarter: As you plan your course for next quarter, think about including your students in the design of your grading rubrics. Asking students about the criteria that they would use to assess an assignment is a great way to talk about learning goals and what they should be prioritizing as they work on their projects. Planning this rubric in advance with students also gives them the chance to peer review each others’ work based on the rubric, making your grading experience more effective, and teaches students to set their own evaluative standards. In turn, students will likely learn to meet those standards on their own and hold themselves and their classmates accountable to those standards. Furthermore, they may also feel more invested in an assignment if they have contributed to the assessment tool.

WAC Resources: Check out the latest additions to our Writing Across the Curriculum Resource Wiki: https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/osuwacresources/Home

Additional Resources: Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson’s Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998). This book is a great resource for instructors who are interested in saving time when grading and commenting on student projects. The authors offer several strategies to reduce the amount of time spent without reducing the quality of the grading or comments. For example, Walvoord and Anderson suggest using rubrics, checklists, or guidelines to make the grading criteria explicit for students and to help you focus your comments.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

Let us know how we can help you over the summer months. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great summer,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

Technology is constantly changing how we communicate and how we do our scholarly work. In the context of what are sometimes radical changes, it is important for us to help our students think critically about the ways they use technology and the ways technology affects how we produce, disseminate, and value knowledge. This doesn’t mean, however, that we need to jump in and grab the latest gadget or adopt the most recent application to generate buzz. If we carefully consider how technology affects our teaching and our students’ learning, we can find ways to help students not only enhance their written work through technology, but also provide them with the capacity to adapt and innovate in a rapidly changing environment. Here are some examples from some of your colleagues at Ohio State who are using technology to both enhance student learning and help students hone their writing skills.

OSU Community Examples:

Dr. Ellen Furlong, an instructor in the Department of Psychology, uses a wiki to organize her students’ writing for a large research methods course of a hundred students. She has students imagine that they are submitting literature review and methodological proposal articles to a journal called Future Directions in Psychological Science, housed on the wiki. In groups, students build their articles step-by-step, from their introduction, to their methods section, until they complete a full paper. At each stage, students establish a rubric to evaluate their own and their colleagues’ work, structuring peer review in a way that mirrors the practice of professional academic journals. “Having students participate in the assessment process is key for this project, because it really saves the time I might have had to spend bringing their papers up to my expectations alone,” Dr. Furlong explains. “They set a very high standard for themselves, even higher than I might have set for them. As a result, they are more engaged with their work than in previous quarters, they offer more substantive feedback on their peers’ work, and the quality of their work has improved overall.”

Professor Ben McCorkle from the Department of English at the Marion regional campus has his students in his digital media composing course explore internet “memes,” trends or recurring ideas that internet users adapt and put their own mark on (for an archive and explanation of popular internet memes, see http://knowyourmeme.com/). As an informal introductory exercise, Dr. McCorkle has his students “build their own meme,” taking a popular internet trend, composing a visual project that gives their own take on that trend, and reflecting on the significance of their project. While such a project might seem silly or trivial, Dr. McCorkle uses memes as a way of helping students to understand, as he puts it, “the practical, rhetorical and ethical dimensions of composing in a digital world.” The project prepares students for larger, more involved projects later in the quarter by familiarizing them with composing software they will be using later in the course and by giving them a critical apparatus to think about how digital media are circulated and evaluated on the web. “Students really respond to this assignment, in part because of its ‘low-stakes’ nature, which alleviates some of their anxieties about using unfamiliar software,” Dr. McCorkle explains. “They also like taking part in producing the kind of text that exists out there in the world. When they move on to a larger assignment that calls for more explicit attention to design, I think they will feel comfortable making that transition.”

Tanisha Jackson, a graduate teaching associate in the Department of Art Education and WAC consultant, introduces her students to the online virtual space “Second Life” in a 367 second level writing course as a means to exploring identity and community. She asks students to think about various roles that influence their identity (i.e. relationships, personal experiences, involvement in groups and communities, and physical appearance). From there, students individually create Second Life accounts and go through the creative process of building an avatar (the virtual representation of themselves in Second Life) without limitations. They are asked to reflect on the development of their avatar through written responses to specific questions. Next, students explore and write about a space on the site that they visit and conduct real world interviews with people in Second Life about the process of constructing their appearance. “This assignment gives students an opportunity to really engage with the concept of identity and how it is connected to a person’s physical appearance and their relationship to particular communities,” Tanisha says. “This assignment also provides the possibility to create new identities in a technological space. Students are enthusiastic about altering their appearance in fantastical ways in Second Life and in conceptualizing the implications of their creative decision making process with how they truly see themselves in real life.”

WAC Resources: Check out the latest additions to our Writing Across the Curriculum Resource Wiki: https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/osuwacresources/Home

OSU Campus Resources: Our campus provides many opportunities for instructors to explore ways to engage students across multiple dimensions using technology. Resources on campus like the Digital Union (http://digitalunion.osu.edu/) provide workshops on how to create electronic student portfolios and online learning communities. Instructors in the Colleges of the Arts and Humanities can also work with the Student Technology Consultant Program at the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (http://cstw.osu.edu/stc). In addition to sponsoring regular workshops on technology that ban be used in research and in the classroom, highly trained undergraduate students can come to your office and help you work through using instructional technology.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two upcoming workshops Spring quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

•Making Research Meaningful. May 5, 2010. Time: 11:30am-1:00pm. Location: Thomson Library, room 165
•Writing Across Borders. May 12, 2010. Time: 11:30am-1:00pm. Location: 150 Younkin Success Center

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

Once students begin to work on final projects and look toward Spring Break activities, their attention often shifts from active engagement with their peers toward a focus on the instructor, or more specifically, course expectations and final grades. Students may also view you, the instructor, as the sole audience for their final writing projects, thus neglecting to take their colleagues into consideration. The following writing exercises encourage students to re-engage with their peers inside and outside of the classroom at the end of the quarter and help you maintain a strong learning community through finals week and beyond.

Ask students to check in with one another in small groups concerning the progress of their final assignments or projects. Have students talk with their peers about the challenges and successes they come up against when completing their final assignment. Students may also use this time to ask each other questions or request revision assistance. Walk around and listen in on the small group discussions. This exercise will provide you with new insights regarding any questions or challenges your students are experiencing and provide you with an opportunity to address these issues before finals week.

Ask your students to write about the most useful thing they learned this quarter and share it with their peers. This can be an anonymous large-group activity that you collect for your own reflection, or you can pair specific students together and ask them to write letters to one another that you collect after class. In addition to students learning about their colleagues’ accomplishments, you can locate patterns in their writing when looking through their responses. Think about sharing some of these responses with your students at the beginning of next quarter so that they can see your previous students’ writing accomplishments.

Have students collectively share their projects in panel presentations. Plan ahead to give students the opportunity to share their research and larger projects in a presentation format. When assignments are turned in individually, students can miss important connections to their peers’ work and course themes. Creating panel presentations, in which students with similar project topics can come together and present ideas, is a great way to keep students engaged with one another as they take on the responsibility of presenting to others the relationship between their individual projects. Consider making this panel presentation a more public event in which you invite colleagues, thus giving students a wider audience to present their work.

OSU Community Example: Susan Hanson, Academic Program Coordinator and Assistant Program Director for Literacy Studies and the Veterans Learning Community, asks students at the end of each quarter to write “letters of advice” addressed to her future students. This assignment creates an occasion for students to thoughtfully reflect on what they have learned by the end of course and what future advice might help others learn more effectively. In the process, it also gives instructors a chance to see the class from the students’ perspective. Giving students the opportunity to address an audience of their peers creates a unique engagement between students and gives instructors a way to assess the class as a whole. Instructors can also use the “letters of advice” as ways to introduce course concepts. For example, Hanson explains, “I have used the advice to introduce summarizing and synthesizing to incoming students. The in-class writing assignment involves working in groups to produce two paragraphs: one summary and one synthesis of the advice their colleagues from the previous quarter had put together.” The texts from the previous quarter then become the foundation for work in the following quarter, on the one hand giving the new students the benefit of hearing advice from the previous quarter, and on the other giving them an opportunity to establish their own classroom norms from this advice.

WAC Resources: Check out the latest additions to our Writing Across the Curriculum Resource Wiki: https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/display/osuwacresources/Home

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You: See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two upcoming workshops Spring quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

•Making Research Meaningful. May 5, 2010. Time: 11:30am-1:00pm. Location: Thomson Library, room 165
•Writing Across Borders. May 12, 2010. Time: 11:30am-1:00pm. Location: Younkin Success Center, room TBA

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

The MLA and APA have recently revised their style manuals, and it’s a good opportunity to talk with your students about the stylistic conventions that scholars in your field follow. On the one hand, these conventions are formal–citations of different kinds must be written in a specific format, and rules for specialized cases of usage must be obeyed. On the other, style can also be taught as a tool of writing that helps student develop their individual writing voices while they also learn how style embodies particular ways of thinking within a discipline. Because style often embodies scholarly and disciplinary values, it is important for students to understand its significance and feel comfortable making appropriate stylistic choices within their writing. Here are some approaches to addressing style with your students:

Tomorrow: If you have style “pet peeves,” this is a great time to let your students know before they turn in the first major assignment of the quarter. Take time to sit down and make a list of things that frustrate you about student writing styles. For example, have you ever told your students that they are too wordy? Or that their sentences are too choppy? Perhaps you have asked students not to be too excessive with the use of particular words or phrases or you have encouraged them not to rely so heavily on the passive voice. These are all stylistic, rather than grammatical, concerns and can be discussed with students as they write throughout the quarter. Once you’ve identified these pet peeves, in the long run you can give students examples of clunky passages and demonstrate how they might improve them.

Later this quarter: Ask students to identify conventions of style in their assigned course readings. Before or during class, take ten minutes to have students describe the tone, highlight the main claims, and underline the citations in an article or section of text. Students are often so used to reading for information, they don’t pay attention to the stylistic features of what they read, and miss crucial written cues that communicate how scholarly work is done. How, for instance, do scholars voice their disagreement with a colleague? How do they frame discussion of a primary text? How does a scientist account for outlying data? How can students trace a genealogy of scholarship from an article’s footnotes?

Next quarter: Help students to better understand stylistic conventions by designing a series of assignments that address the crucial components of style students seem to struggle with in your classes. For example, a course in the social sciences might include a writing assignment in which students look carefully at how researchers in the field pose analytical questions that properly operationalize variables. Following this assignment, students can further explore how they can frame their methodology in a way that builds off of previous research. Then, you might have an assignment where you help students to analyze numerical data that address their question (a good resource for quantitative writing is Jane E. Miller’s Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers, which is available in electronic form through the library’s website). Staging these stylistic themes within a larger project can help students understand how stylistic conventions are often connected to specific intellectual tasks in research.

OSU Community Example: Professor Mark Moritz in Anthropology has had his students create a wiki collecting articles on hunting and gathering societies. The goal of the wiki is to represent foraging societies without recreating myths that have been perpetuated from earlier scholarship and in the media. Dr. Moritz wanted the students to follow the stylistic conventions of the American Anthropological Association, but he knew that that guidance alone wouldn’t help students understand how that style might be adapted to wikis, or to tackle the difficulty of representing societies that too often are exploited through stereotypes. In collaboration with WAC, Dr. Moritz had students develop a style guide page as they began their project, which anticipated difficult stylistic choices that arose as they compiled their articles. How, for example, could they show images of people from these societies in ways that don’t reinforce stereotypes about foraging societies such as those perpetuated about the Ju/’Hoansi in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy? Students decided that all images and other media need to have clear headings that explain where and when the images came from, and need to carefully situate the images within a society’s history and current circumstances. “I was hoping to improve student’s critical literacy of internet and scholarly materials by having them become writers and editors of scholarly materials on the internet,” Dr. Moritz notes. “In addition, by writing for larger audiences and as producers of knowledge, students became part of the larger scholarly community and began to view themselves as anthropologists.”

Easy Online Resources:

See the handouts posted on CSTW’s Writing Center website: http://cstw.osu.edu/writingcenter/handouts/default.cfm. Find handouts that deal with MLA, APA, and Chicago Style Documentation along with handouts on Sentence Combinations and Word Choice. These handouts provide quick and easy ways to address issues of style with your students in the classroom.

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You:

See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. For more ideas about how you might implement writing to learn activities please contact us to schedule an individual consultation. To further our aim of facilitating dialogue about teaching writing, we offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres. We also can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two upcoming workshops Winter quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

•Responding to Student Writing. February 4th, 11:30am-1:00pm, Younkin Success Center
•Grading to Learn: Writing and Assessment Across the Curriculum. February 11th, 11:30am-1:00pm, Younkin Success Center

We also have a workshop scheduled with Learning Technology:

•Assessing Digital Media: Re-Mediating Teaching and Learning. February 26th, 1-2:30pm, Learning Collaborative Studio, 060 Science and Engineering Library

For further information and registration for these events, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html) or Learning Technology’s site (https://registration.it.ohio-state.edu/node/110). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English

Activity Idea: Take some time at the end of this quarter to think about what writing assignments worked well and reflect on some of the challenges you faced teaching writing. Your colleague in the office down the hall might be your best resource for this, and you might be hers as well. In our work in WAC, we have the privilege of talking to Ohio State’s most creative and resourceful teachers every day. For this tip email, we’ve collected a few approaches from three instructors we’ve worked with this quarter that have really inspired us:

• Kimberly Clavin, an instructional supervisor in Mechanical Engineering, has developed a technical writing workshop for students preparing lab reports. The workshop covers a range of topics that introduce students to crucial tasks in report writing, and helps students work through their writing collaboratively. For instance, during one part of the workshop, students write instructions on how to assemble a mechanical system such as a glue gun, and then pass their instructions to another group, which attempts to follow the instructions and provide feedback to the writers. Another component of the workshop has students evaluate different components “dissected” from sample lab reports, while another has them collaboratively edit abstracts. “All three exercises were received well by the students with the report dissection proving to be the most helpful,” Clavin notes. “The implementation of the workshops has resulted in higher quality writing as well as increased student understanding.”
• Manisha Sharma, a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Art Education, has her students grade each other using an assignment rubric. After composing a rough draft, students trade their work and look for key elements in each others’ papers (i.e. thesis statement, key words, supporting literature and concluding thoughts). The goal is for students to go back and review the comments of their peers and make appropriate changes to their final draft. “My interaction with other instructors attending a WAC workshops brought clarification to the different areas of assessment (Evaluation, Grading, Feedback, Testing),” she notes. “Since then, I’ve applied assessment in my teaching practices through the student-to-student reviews and instructor-to-student reviews. This has been helpful to both students and myself in assessing their progress and understanding of course materials.”
• Rather than assign her students a lengthy research paper, Victoria Genetin, Graduate Teaching Assistant in Women’s Studies and WAC Consultant, decided to assign them a 10-entry annotated bibliography. Her goals were to help her students gain a better understanding of the research process, sharpen their organizational skills, and begin to draw connections between theories and arguments made by scholars in Women’s Studies. Recently, she has also asked her students to reflect on their experience completing the assignment: how much time they devoted to the project, what aspects of the assignment they found most challenging, any academic skills they developed or improved upon, and what they learned about themselves as a student and a writer. “Based on their responses,” she explains, “the annotated bibliography assignment introduced many of my students to the services available at The Ohio State library, specifically the online journal databases. Additionally, this assignment provided them with an opportunity to ‘get comfortable’ with the research and writing process and made them more aware of conversations and debates among scholars through academic journals.”

More Ways the WAC Team Can Help You:
See an archive of our past tip e-mails at: http://cstw.org/WAC/?cat=50. If you want to trade ideas about your assignments, contact us to schedule an individual consultation. We also offer workshops with faculty and graduate teaching associates that tackle issues involving the teaching of writing in various academic genres, and can co-facilitate in-class presentations for your students, demonstrating innovative approaches to writing instruction and lending students strategies for overcoming challenges with assignments.

We’ll be leading two upcoming workshops Winter quarter through the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT):

•Responding to Student Writing. February 4, 11:30am-1:00pm, 150 Younkin Success Center
•Grading to Learn: Writing and Assessment Across the Curriculum. February 11, 11:30am-1:00pm, 150 Younkin Success Center

For further information, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s website (http://ucat.osu.edu/participate/ftad_events/ftad_events.html). We hope you’ll join us.

Let us know how we can help. Contact us by phone (292-9650), e-mail (waccstw@osu.edu), or through our website (http://cstw.osu.edu/wac).

Have a great quarter,
The WAC Team,
Dr. Chris Manion, WAC Coordinator
Victoria Genetin, Women’s Studies
Tanisha Jackson, Art Education
Katie Linder, Women’s Studies
Kate White, English