Author: mistyc

Starting Fall 2020, Writing Across the Curriculum has a new offering for Writing Intensive certified instructors and their students. WI certified faculty can direct students enrolled in their classes this semester to WAC Office Hours. These office hours are one on one sessions in which a City Tech WAC Fellow provides a student with guidance and feedback on written work for a class assignment. This is an ideal way for City Tech students to refine their writing through research-backed WAC pedagogical principles. Now that all of CUNY is getting accustomed to 100% remote instruction, many of us are finding ourselves and our students facing isolation along with a heightened struggle to get a feel for progress in classes. One solution to this is to build connection around coursework into our syllabi. Some instructors are incorporating peer review, mandatory meetings with the professor, and even attendance at tutoring sessions.

For many students, getting feedback on their writing during the revision process, as opposed to after submission, is a new experience. This post addresses four best practices for developing a community of practice around writing. The ideas offered below can be used as a way to guide students in their use of support from WAC Fellows and other methods of engaging with others around their writing process.  

Use the limited time with others to focus on higher order writing concerns. Higher order concerns (HOCs) are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to the connection between writing and critical thinking. While lower order concerns (LOCs) deal with the mechanics of writing such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation, HOCs are crucial to crafting written work that successfully articulates ideas and defends theses (Weber 2017). HOCs are elements like the hypothesis or proposal, overarching structure, and methods used to support a conclusion. We can all remember the experience of grading a paper in which HOCs are not well developed. These are the papers that we pick up and reshuffle to the bottom of the pile of grading because they can be very challenging to decipher, much less provide feedback for. A clearly defined and well-supported thesis will shine through a paper in which the mechanics need improvement. The opposite is rarely true. A paper that needs HOC work might confuse a reader by not delivering a clear thesis, building to a point that seems different than the original thesis, or neglecting to actually support the important points. The challenge is that students and graders often focus first on LOCs because they immediately stand out and offer up their own feedback. Addressing HOCs requires more time and strategic thinking. This makes these areas ideal for tutoring and peer review contexts. The conversation between participants can be used to help develop ideas, test out essay design, and redirect faulty logic. 

Implement rhetorical stances into the writing process. Elements like audience and genre are HOCs that Bean (2011) brings together in the mnemonic RAFT. Bean distinguishes between the problem posed by a well-constructed assignment and the “RAFT”, or the  role (purpose), audience, format (genre), and task (98). Many students write papers in a generic “this is a college paper” format. It’s not their fault. They have likely encountered multiple assignments that do not specify elements like audience and genre, and to boot, many students have been taught through years of schooling to write this way. If we ask students to think about the difference between explaining a concept to a friend or a family member versus a group of academics, we can see how rhetorical aspects refine and supplement a topical problem to solve in an assignment. Students and tutors or peers can use the RAFT to think through the necessary elements to answer a question. Some possible questions to address: What will your audience need to access and understand your ideas? What sorts of information will build on the audience’s knowledge and scaffold them to an understanding of the author’s point? What are the writing conventions of the genre, and how closely should the author stick to these or can playing with them do some beneficial work? What sorts of examples and proof move your readers to your point? Addressing these questions also allows the author to decide if they have the required understanding of the topic or problem to speak to their audience. 

Decide how to use feedback. As challenging as it can be to provide valuable feedback, it can be equally challenging for students to implement. (See here for a WAC workshop on Effective Grading and here for a blog from a WAC Fellow for more ideas.)  Does the student have a specific set of issues they want to address in the session, or are they at the stage of writing where they need more general guidance? A tutoring and feedback session can set goals and realistic methods for implementing feedback. It can also model for students ways to look at writing with a critical eye.

Embrace brainstorming! In my experience, students often discount the importance of this stage of the writing process. It can feel like an extra step with no resulting deliverable. On the contrary, my writing process transformed when I took the beginning step of idea generation seriously. Brainstorming through writing can provide a wealth of ideas that never occur to us if we try to come up with a complete thesis and essay structure too early in the process. Even devoting an hour to letting the mind wander around a topic and putting these ideas on the paper or in a doc will point writers in directions towards an eventual finished piece. Students can work with peer reviewers and tutors to talk through possible ideas for an assignment. Taking advantage of the social nature of thinking and learning will have real benefits for the final written product.

Indeed, the writing process is deeply tied to the thinking process, and both of these are thoroughly social processes. Writing is always to another, even if that other is the writer themselves. Thinking is a way of grappling with the world around us and taking eventual action. Using these ideas can help students make the best use of WAC Office Hours, peer reviews, and one on one meetings with professors. 

References

Bean, John C. 2011. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Weber, Breanne. 2017. “Higher Order vs. Lower Order Concerns.” Last modified June 16, 2017. https://pages.uncc.edu/unccwrc/blog/2017/06/16/higher-order-vs-lower-order-concerns/.

By Labanya Unni

In more than half a decade of my teaching English, one of the most profound challenges I have faced is the question of English as a second language. I encountered this problem in a more limited sense in India, when I first began teaching, where degrees of fluency varied on the basis of class-position and cultural capital. While this issue was definitely something that I navigated, the student body had enough cultural and contextual homogeneity to convey modes of critical thinking in the minds of students. In the US, this problem takes on more complex proportions, since much of the student body is composed of international exchange students, migrants, first- or second-generation English speakers, and even students whose English are infused with specific dialects.

As a teacher, I find it difficult to see students struggling not just with ideas but also with the medium in which these ideas are expressed. From classroom interactions, it is clear that non-native English students sometimes feel inhibited and isolated, often without the space to express unique cultural and linguistic perspectives that they could bring to the table. It is difficult not to dwell on the profoundly hegemonic structure of English as a global language and the onerousness of teaching it to a non-native speaker, this thought process could potentially lead to defeatist modes of thinking or a tendency to shift or deny responsibility (the “abolitionist move” as David R. Russell puts it in his essay “Writing Across the Curriculum”).

These are strategies I have learned in my last few years as a teacher:

Modifying the rubric: The single-point rubric is not just a grading tool, but also a useful checklist for students to have while writing their essays. With English as second language students, teachers need to have awareness of the lexical and grammatical specifics that they bring to the table. This requires a careful perusal of student essays, as their textual analyses, evidence and thesis presentation might not be in a customary academic style. It might also be helpful to go over the rubric in class and carefully break down its contents, with detailed examples and illustrations.

Mindset: As someone teaching in the medium of the English language, it is perhaps useful to understand how English came to be historically constituted as a global language (David Crystal’s English as a Global Language is a good resource for that). A lot of what we understand as critical discourse/thinking reflects a majoritarian Western conception of knowledge, and it might be pertinent to communicate some of these ideas in class. Understanding some of this might help lessen the anxiety of a second language speaker who comes to class with the notion that English fluency represents the height of cultural and linguistic achievement.

WAC principles: The great thing about WAC is that it emphasizes thinking as well as writing. Ideas such as minimal marking, multiple drafting, scaffolding, low stakes writing, editing oriented towards revision rather than grammar correction, are very useful to keep in mind while dealing with second language speakers. John Bean in Engaging Ideas thoughtfully advises teachers to be forgiving of ‘accent errors’ – errors that come from not having naturally inhabited English speaking milieus.

Affective measures: It is clear that the question of English as a second language cannot just be tackled with a handful of linguistic and academic guidelines. There is, without a doubt, an affective component to this process, in which it is important for the teacher to make the student feel comfortable. This can be done by pairing them with peer study-partners (ideally with kind and thoughtful native speakers); encouraging creative and inclusive learning activities that are idea-based; taking the time to interact with them during office hours to try and gauge their cultural and rhetorical contexts and encouraging personal writing that lead up to academic writing/thinking

Utilizing writing centers: Writing centers have activities that professors might not be able to conduct in class due to limited time. Exercises likes conversation classes, dictionary-use, listening or audio-based learning can be useful supplements to WAC. According to Stephen Krashen in his Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, the most effective way to teach a language is to mimic as much as possible the natural methods of acquiring said language, which is through conversation, low-anxiety settings, and “comprehensible inputs” – the writing center, which is just an aid without the worry of grades might be a good place to implement these principles. Teachers across disciplines would do well to work closely with writing centers to provide extra support to second language speakers.

Works cited

John, Bean C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass; 2nd Edition, 2011

Krashen, Stephen D. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Prentice-Hall International, 1988.

Russel, David R. “Writing Across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Toward a Social Interpretation”, College English, vol. 52. 1990, pp. 52-73, JSTOR

We at WAC talk a lot about peer review as a strategy for scaffolding assignments and getting students thinking about writing. And for good reason. Peer review supports the research and learning process where knowledge is developed in stages through combining exploration, production, and reflection. Beyond these more commonly discussed aspects, peer review used strategically has other benefits for course design, supporting students, and making class logistics easier for instructors. In this post, we’ll have a look at some of the recent research on peer review that speaks to its usefulness.

One major barrier to great final papers is last minute work. Scaffolding assignments aids in preventing this. How can peer review support this? A number of studies have found that courses tend to have peer review sessions scheduled around a week prior to the final assignment deadline (Baker 2016, 181). In these studies, students focused on copy editing feedback in the form of grammatical points and spelling errors (ibid). The real benefit of peer review, however, comes in the form of development of student ideas. Earlier review sessions allow students time to deal with the content of each other’s arguments. Feedback recipients also can take time to think about feedback and implement it more thoughtfully. Schedule peer review sessions earlier in the semester (and have this be part of their grade). In addition to increasing the chances of higher quality work, this also makes students less likely to plagiarize since they have more time to prepare and work with sources. Foregrounding the role of peer review by scheduling it early in the semester as a graded component will also socialize students into the importance of peer review. Rather than seeing it as a final requirement after the bulk of the work is done, it can be a significant component to building a paper.

Emphasizing peer review as crucial in the process can also happen through assistance in giving feedback. While students may have done peer reviews before, the truth is they rarely get explicit instruction in how to go about this. The thought of giving negative comments to fellow classmates can be intimidating. And, students often are not sure what to focus on for feedback. Models for feedback delivery can assist with this. For example, peer review can include a handout with prompts for students to use. Incorporating this as an official feedback form gives students guidelines for thinking about their classmates’ work. Prompts can include:

• This paper is about _______________________
• The biggest strength of this paper is __________________________________
• You should most focus on ________________________ in order to support your thesis.
• You might think about (xyz theory, writer, etc.)
• I’m not sure I understand (how z supports y, x is connected to z, etc.) Can you explain this more?
• I was really interested in your point about ______________________________

These types of prompts help students understand supportive ways to frame comments. This also helps to guide them in what to focus on. If you want to go further with this, you can use these or similar prompts when working with assigned course texts. Doing this as part of a class discussion helps students become active readers and think of what points in a piece of writing warrant feedback. Along these lines, there may be a positive correlation between deliberation (as opposed to argumentation) around a topic and learning outcomes (Klein 2016, 228). Argumentation puts students in a position to defend ideas whereas deliberation invites more open-ended discussion. To this end, getting students to think of peer review as active engagement with a text’s ideas (as opposed to criticism) can foster deliberation. The prompts above can help with this.

What sort of feedback has results? How can we give our students specific models so that peers have usable feedback? A study of peer review in an ESL class offers clues. In a 2017 study of digital peer review sessions for ESL students, researchers classified types of feedback into a number of categories describing content and qualities (Leijen). They found that two types of feedback were most likely to lead to revisions: alteration and recurring (ibid, 44). Feedback classified as alteration offered specific guidance on points in the text. For example: “Evidence A doesn’t seem to connect to your main point. Maybe add an explanatory paragraph to clarify.” This is in contrast to more global feedback such as “Evidence doesn’t support main idea well.” Recurring feedback was the same advice given by multiple reviewers. This study provides valuable information for helping students design feedback for peers. Giving them examples of specific and direct feedback and having multiple reviewers can make feedback more productive for students.

All of this we have discussed so far relates to the inherently social nature of writing. Klein (2016) notes that more recent theories of writing characterize it as created within various kinds of contexts and by multiple contributors (329-330). Indeed, writing is never truly a solitary affair. Feedback, ideas from the world around us, course lectures and readings, and many other things all come together to create written work. Peer review is a way to build on the multi-voiced nature of writing to help students succeed.

References

Baker, Kimberly M. 2016. “Peer Review as a Strategy for Improving Students’ Writing Process.” Active Learning in Higher Education 17(3): 179-192.

Klein, Perry D. 2016. “Trends in Research on Writing as a Learning Activity.” Journal of Writing Research 7(3): 311-350.

Leijen, D.A.J. 2017. “A Novel Approach to Examine the Impact of Web-based Peer Review on the Revisions of L2 Writers.” Computers and Composition 43: 35-54.

Recently I came across an interview with anthropologist and historian Alan Macfarlane (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnd_B89_ugE). This hour-long interview is a gem: it is entirely about the writing process and is conducted by a student in the process of learning the ropes of academic writing. As the author of three graduate school theses, 20 books, and numerous academic articles, Macfarlane has had years to hone his writing process. While he primarily discusses graduate school writing, his insights into the writing process hold valuable information for teaching undergraduates. How can instructors use knowledge of the larger-scale writing process to help students achieve results in written assignments? How can we help students become active participants in their own writing goals? Below, I outline some key takeaways from Macfarlane’s interview and suggest ways to implement them through Writing across the Curriculum theory and practice.

Think about your starting point: Macfarlane discusses starting points for writing from a couple of perspectives. In one sense, this is about the timing of different stages in the writing process: from thinking to research to actual written production. Students often see writing as “broken off” from these other stages. However, doing the work of actual writing as early as the thinking, research, and planning stages leads to a much more manageable writing process overall. For one thing, writing during data and source gathering allows the writer to manage information as it is gathered. This means a much more manageable “pile” of information, theory, or data. As new information is added, writing down one’s new insights, ideas, and importantly points of excitement (more on this below) incorporates the new information into what has already been gathered. This type of writing process is also valuable because it allows for more breaks between periods of work, which facilitates cognitive information processing. We can think of this piece of advice as what Writing across the Curriculum notes as the crucial relationship between critical thinking and writing. The writing a student does during the early stages of an assignment allows them to think their way to research questions and thesis statements. WAC pedagogy offers a number of strategies for instructors to help this process. These include assignments that link course content to personal experience, explaining concepts to others, and providing analytical entry points through controversial statements or “what if” scenarios. (See Bean 2011 pp 151-159 for more information and examples.)

Write from the “hub”: Writing during the early research stages is related to my favorite piece of advice from Macfarlane: write from the hub. The hub is the area of inquiry that excites the writer. Macfarlane compares this method to starting a fire. You set down the ideas that interest you first. This triggers motivation and lights the fire. Importantly, the initial excitement creates cognitive connections and insights that lead to more ideas. In other words, these points of interest and curiosity set the mind alight. Once these ideas are explored, the student can begin to outline from their hub to other sections of the assignment. Perhaps the point of interest becomes the main paper thesis. Or, or it may be that the writer now understands they need a different starting point to build to their favorite idea. WAC-inspired exploratory writing tasks are ideal for helping students find their writing “hubs”. These can include journalling, creative writing activities such as dialogues between important figures, and mid-class writing sessions to process course content.

Make writing a communal process: Another point Macfarlane brings up is the helpfulness of creating a writing group involving both social aspects and opportunities to share written work. Instructors can help create the conditions for this. Setting aside short chunks of time three to four times throughout the semester for students to share ideas and progress on their papers is one way to do this. Another idea is to use online platforms such as Blackboard for students to post and receive peer engagement with their writing. This could include weekly assignments to: (1) post a general topic they have chosen with rationale and some background, (2) give a brief explanation of a defined number of sources they have found for final papers, or (3) upload a draft of an assignment. This will aid students in formulating their ideas through explaining to another. They also receive valuable feedback to improve their assignments. Importantly, this also taps into Macfarlane’s point that everything we expose ourselves to adds to our body of ideas. We never know what might give a writer a new perspective.

Expanding the social context in which student writers produce assignments makes pathways for all sorts of new knowledge. This can also increase motivation for students who do not initially have an interest in a particular topic or class subject. In analyzing participation in an undergraduate interdisciplinary conference, Barron, Gruber, and Pfannenstiel (2016) noted a high degree of student engagement in working across fields to make their research comprehensible to lay people. The key was in creation of an affinity group, a social community with shared ideas about knowledge and communication. Getting students to work together to make the conference successful created an affinity group that got them engaged in fields they had little knowledge of previously. By emphasizing the social aspect of writing, instructors can help motivate students unsure of how to connect to new course content. Finally, incorporating regular communication with professors into the syllabus around the developing paper will add a community aspect to student writing. This will also make writing less stressful for students as they have approval for their ideas and research questions from the person who will be assessing their work.

 

Barron, Nancy Guerra, Sibylle Gruber, and Amber Nicole Pfannenstiel. 2016. “Reconstructing the Concept of Academic Motivation: A Gaming Symposium as an Academic Site for Critical Inquiry.” Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing 13(4). from https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/hip/barroneetal2016.pdf.

Bean, John C. 2011. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.