Enough About Me: WAC to School

A blank notebook and pencil. Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels.

Happy new academic year! It's been a hectic ramp-up for me. I am now employed as a Grad Affiiliate at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning at UIUC (Hooray!), and so the beginning of the year has been action-packed: Delivering a session about active learning, leading microteaching sessions, and conducting playbacks of those sessions with each teaching assistant to talk about their performance and plans for the year. Additionally, I've been preparing for my own fall semester as a teaching assistant for HIST 103, A History of Everything: The Big Bang to Big Data. And, before I knew all of this was coming, I elected to take the two-day Writing Across Curriculum workshop offered by the Center for Writing Studies during the last few days of summer. (Yes, after all this excitement and then the beginning of classes this week, I slept in HARD this morning.)


As I've mentioned before, I like to go to workshops and lectures to get my brain moving. I never know what connections might occur to me while listening to someone talking about their work or explaining a concept. The Writing Across Curriculum workshop, led by Center for Writing Studies Director Paul Prior, and Assistant Directors Bruce Kovanen and previously discussed friend of the blog Logan Middleton, was no exception. I could philosophize about why this workshop was so good (I left the second day tired but convinced that everyone should take it at some point in their teaching career). However, I'll restrain myself and focus on some of the ideas I took away from the workshop and intend to implement in my own classroom.


First, the idea that discussion and consideration of the writing process is worth doing. On the first day of the workshop, we spent part of the morning drawing out our writing processes for the last project we worked on. I found it surprisingly cathartic-- perhaps because like many people, my writing process is stressful and also because I had a clear project in mind which I sent off for review recently. I'm already thinking about ways in which to implement this into a course. In a writing intensive course, I might assign students to write a short play dramatizing their writing process, then select a few to be performed in class. The goal would be to show how different everyone's process can be; that there are a variety of creative ways to think about and depict it, and to blow off some steam about the anxiety that talking about such a solitary activity can create.


I also found the approaches to grading useful-- I think many of us feel unsure about how to make grading decisions, how much detail to offer, and how to handle the disconnect between the experience of being the person grading and being the writer receiving comment. The workshop leaders suggested making high level/global comments first when grading, and focusing less on noting every missed comma or employing vague criticisms like "awkward" to mark up paper. I like this a lot and kind of did this with the one page responses in HIST 365, without fully appreciating that's what I was trying to do. Keeping this idea in mind may help with some confusion I often have over trying to get "enough" comments on the page, being unsure about whether comments are to justify the grade given or to help evolve the piece or to help the writer to improve.


However, my favorite point was the way that WAC approaches offer an appreciation of the function of writing not just to communicate but as a tool for the writer to think their way through a problem. I've only recently realized how true this is for my own process, perhaps one reason why outlining has always been a complex and frustrating process for me. One of the course readings, a chapter on informal writing from John C. Bean's Engaging Ideas, offers a variety of ways one can incorporate this sort of informal writing into a course. When workshop attendees were instructed to bring in an assignment or plan for the second day, I opted to reflect on one of these ideas. I've decided to experiment with employing writing in class to refocus discussion. If a discussion is getting interesting, heated, or pondering (i.e., circling a question), I will pause the discussion to have students write their way through the problem individually. I will advise them that these will not be turned in and are designed to help them consider a topic more fully, so they should take risks, perhaps write things they are unsure of or many contradictory potential answers to a question at hand and then evaluate them. Ideally, they will generate a short paragraph to a page of rough ideas. The audience for their written product will be only themselves initially; they will then bring up the ideas they wrote about in discussion (giving them the opportunity to be both totally honest and edit themselves for public hearing). I would respond verbally as they told the class about what they wrote, but not through written feedback. This activity is intended to build ease around writing and help students grow more confident in putting their thoughts together.


This idea appeals to me because of its difference from how I have typically used informal writing in relation to participation. Sometimes in the context of a discussion section, writing like this is treated as just a jumping off point, something to do to fill time or have something to grade or to make sure that students are reading or have something to talk about. I like the idea that if a conversation is bustling along TOO well or aggressively, writing can channel some of that energy into a constructive direction. By using this conversational energy and direction, the prompt will be clear and the task obvious: to weigh in on the question that the class just formulated.


More importantly, it can also suggest to students that writing isn’t just done to have something to say, but to help one think through things, as we discussed in regard to the evolution of WAC concepts. If they are encountering a tricky problem and stop to write it out mid-discussion and then discuss where that got them, it really shows the usefulness of that process, perhaps especially if students don’t immediately find it successful, because they can see it work for others in class even if the lightning bolt isn’t striking for them. Moreover, the class I am teaching this fall will not ask students to write extensive or formal papers, so emphasizing informal writing as a thinking strategy seems particularly useful.
Thanks to the Center for Writing Studies folks for giving a great workshop-- I highly recommend it to any graduate teachers.


Related Links:
Don't have time to go to this workshop-- or don't even go here? There's tons of great resources at the Center for Writing Studies' page of WAC Handouts.
This is a fun resource about Writing Across Curriculum-- answer all your FAQs about the concept with a click.