Keynote: Responding to Student Writing Workshop

Nancy Sommers, Harvard University
“The writing teacher’s ministry is not just to the words, but to the person who wrote the words.” William Zinsser

“It must be tough looking at a very large stack of papers, but it is the most helpful part of the essay process because without a reader the whole process is diminished.”
Alexandra Hays, college student

Our collective interest in responding is deeply professional and personal. We feel a weighty responsibility in responding to our students’ words, knowing that we, too, have received comments that have given us hope—and sometimes despair—in our abilities as writers. The words teachers scribbled on our papers are often the same words we scribble in the margins or at the bottom of our own students’ pages. These words, we hope, our students will take with them as they move from our class to the next, from one assignment to another, across the drafts. Responding to student writing reminds us of the pleasures of teaching writing, the call and response between our students’ words and our own. Yet most of us acknowledge that we don’t know how students use our comments or why they find some comments useful and others not.

In this workshop, we will engage with the words and ideas of one student writer. We’ll read the student’s draft and reflect on what it means to be a thoughtful reader of this student’s work. We will be asking questions such as:

• What lessons do students learn from comments?
• What distinguishes comments to inspire revision from comments to assess a final draft?
• And how do we engage students in a dialogue about their drafts?

The workshop will provide an opportunity for us to talk teacher-to-teacher about the work we do, collectively and individually, in responding to student writers.

Workshop A: Problem-based Learning: Inspiring Critical Thinking and Interdisciplinary Learning

Katherine Frank, CSU Pueblo
Session Description: This workshop will provide an introduction to Problem-based Learning and ways to incorporate this teaching and learning philosophy into the composition classroom. Participants will have the opportunity to collaborate with their peers and brainstorm regarding ways to use PBL with their students. There will be time for discussion, questions, and sharing of strategies.

Workshop B: Refiguring Technologies in Multimodal Communication: Ways to Improve Engagement and Learning

Rebecca Burnett, Georgia Institute of Technology
Session Description: Begin with two foundational premises: communication is both rhetorical and multimodal (Ball; Kress and Van Leeuwen; Selfe). Then consider the “social and material spaces” (Meeks): students and their wireless laptops are part of a complex and not necessarily learner- friendly “information ecology” (Nardi and O’Day). Finally, increase the social, psychological, and cognitive engagement of undergraduate students who move back and forth between the pedagogy of childhood and the andragogy of adulthood (Hiemstra and Sisco; Knowles; Zuckerman-Parker).

These factors form a backdrop for the workshop to focus on three areas:

• Analysis of innovative multimodal assignments and assignment sequences used in conventional, lab, and laptop classrooms
• Rhetorical integration of written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication
• Curricular changes that incorporate andragogy into undergraduate pedagogy, especially student responsibilities in planning, managing, and assessing problem-based projects

Workshop C: Teaching Creative Nonfiction: Concepts, Art, and Craft

Doug Hesse, University of Denver
Session Description: How do various genres of creative nonfiction—essay, memoir, literary journalism, and so on—fit in the writing curriculum? And, wherever, we place them, what teaching practices are effective, even enjoyable? My presentation will address both questions. After a quick overview of some history and concepts, along with some suggested readings, I’ll sketch a couple of course options, describe a number of assignments, and discuss teaching some teaching approaches I’ve found useful.


Quick note 9/13/08
Doug shared with us excerpts from the work of his friend, David Foster Wallace.

Here is a link to the full piece, "Consider the Lobster," from Gourmet Magazine: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster

Quick note 9/16/08
We learned of David Foster Wallace's suicide this past weekend. A headline in Slate said it best: "Infinitely Sad" I just wanted to add to this space this link to a commencement address that DFW gave at Kenyon College a few years back: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html. It says so much about the courage of his intellect and the source of his insights. And it strikes me too as another excellent example of the kind of writing creative nonfiction can lead one to.

Workshop D: Working Effectively with ESL Writers: Designing Assignments, Providing Feedback, and Using Technology

Susan Miller-Cochran, North Carolina State University
Session Description: With the increasing linguistic diversity present in all writing programs, effective strategies for working with ESL writers are increasingly in demand. In this hands-on workshop, participants will discuss relevant issues to consider when teaching in a linguistically diverse classroom such as constructing effective writing assignments, providing useful feedback, and developing guidelines for using technology with multilingual writers.

Workshop E: Land Mines Ahead: Teaching with Computer Games

Ryan M. Moeller, Utah State University & Ken McAllister, University of Arizona
Session Description: Teaching with computer games is fast becoming all the rage with the likes of Greg Ulmer, Jim Gee, Cyndi Selfe, and several others who are either teaching with computer games or talking about it. But the central question concerning this symposium workshop is: how feasible is it, really, to teach with computer games? The workshop leaders will present the five most common challenges of teaching with computer games and facilitate informed discussion from the workshop participants for overcoming or addressing those challenges.

These challenges are:

• Administrative: WPAs have concerns about setup costs and assessment.
• Technical: Game platforms can be expensive, insecure, and become obsolete.
• Pedagogical: How does one authoritatively map skill transfer from game settings to real world applications?
• Content-Centered: Navigating the cultural, ethical, and moral values embedded in games is difficult.
• Production/Adoption-Oriented: There are thousands of games and dozens of game development tools—which ones are right for your curricula?

Workshop F: Teaching Multigenre/Multimodal Composition

Liz Kleinfeld, Metropolitan State College of Denver & Amy Braziller, Red Rocks CC
Session Description: Our first year composition students consistently appreciate the freedom a multigenre/multimodal approach allows them. They emphasize that the ability to be creative is important to their learning process, and they are often pleasantly surprised, as one student wrote in a course evaluation, “that there was an element of fun in an English class." We have found that a multigenre/multimodal approach helps students and instructors alike re-engage with composing and researching. This session will explore ways to introduce genre to first year composition students, teach them to critically read different genre pieces, compose in different genres, and conduct research in genres.