I was pleased to join several Core 101-102 faculty members for a recent workshop. We shared excellent WAC-style pedagogy and I can take no credit for this; the Core faculty developed and led this event.
The most important lesson for this observer is that faculty are concerned about commentary. I’ve long known that faculty work hard when designing assignments, but I’ve had an impression–probably mistaken–that most faculty are writing the sort of vague and counterproductive commentary I once saw as a Writing Center tutor.
Ray Hilliard moderated our meeting; Ray returned to his former position of coordinator while David Leary is on leave. Ray has always had a strong investment in improving students’ academic-writing skills, and we covered a lot of ground with our colleagues. We discussed the follow topics, and participants used actual student papers to consider appropriate pedagogy:
- Eric Yellin (History) had a very useful yardstick for measuring student understanding of an assignment. He said that one mark of a strong writer would be someone who was “thinking beyond the question” and doing original work as compared to a writer who might be “struggling with what the question was.”
- Ray finds himself spending less time writing commentary now that he employs MS Word’s embedded commentary feature. Several participants either use that tool or plan to do so.
- We all noted that in our sample papers, the instructors began with positive reinforcement for something a writer had done well, then maintained a friendly tone all along. This is a pedagogical approach all Writing Fellows learn in Eng. 383.
- We all agreed to “put grammar in its place” as an important, but not primary, concern when writing commentary. In Core, crafting one’s focus, analysis, and support are first-order concerns. Grammar must be addressed, but faculty, again in the same way Fellows learn, agreed that finding patterns of error rather than isolated incidents would best serve writers.
- Several faculty did lament that students were not being careful enough with word-choice. This lack of care and nuance can lead to prose that does the job but not in an eloquent manner.