Writing Centers Across the Curriculum

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Writing (Centers) Across the Curriculum

• Hudson Valley Writers Conference
• Neal Lerner
• MIT
• June 7, 2007

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What are your hopes and dreams for the
relationship between your writing center and WAC
activities at your institution?What are your
fears for that relationship?
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hopes and dreamsfears
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MITs Communication Requirement integrates
instruction and practice in writing and speaking
into all four years and across all parts of MIT's
undergraduate program.
http//web.mit.edu/wac/
Undergraduates take two CI classes in the
humanities, arts, or social sciences, and two CI
classes in their majors, usually laboratory
classes. CI classes are supported by lecturers
from the WAC program (thats me).
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Abstract Exercise

• What do you need to know in order to complete
  this task?

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What is the purpose of an abstract?

• A stand alone, mini-version of the paper (250
  words or less).
• Describes the main sections of the paper.
• States the purpose, findings, and impact of the
  work.
• The goal is an economy of words.

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The Essentials of an Abstractfrom the UW Madison
Writing Center

• In an abstracts you address this question
• What is the report about, in miniature and
  without too much detail?
• By doing the following
• State main objectives What did you investigate?
  Why?
• Describe methods What did you use?
• Summarize the most important results What did
  you find out?
• State major conclusions and significance What do
  your results mean? So what?)

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Abstract unscramble

• Zebrafish are useful vertebrates in which to
  carry out large-scale mutagenic screens to
  identify developmentally important genes.
• In order to follow the development of the
  zebrafish immune system, we previously isolated
  and characterized the recombination activating
  genes, rag1 and rag2.
• This paper describes the cloning and
  characterization of another such marker, ika1,
  which encodes a zinc finger transcription factor
  necessary for early lymphocyte differentiation.
• Whole mount in situ hybridization revealed
  expression of ika1 in 24 hr embryos in the
  intermediate cell mass, the first site of
  hematopoiesis (Weinstein et al., 1996), and the
  head.
• We also report the continuing efforts to create
  transgenes with the green fluorescent
  protein-coding region under the control of the
  promoters of rag1 and ika1.
• Fish containing these transgenes could then be
  mutagenized and screened quickly and easily for
  mutations in the immune system.

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Abstract Exercise 1 Lessons for Instruction

• Students need to understand the rhetorical
  functions of units of discourse (large abstract
  small sentence within the abstract)
• We need to make those functions visible for
  students (tacit vs. explicit knowledge).
• Many tasks are similar across disciplines
• Disciplines/fields/subjects have particular
  rhetorical requirements.

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Abstract Exercise 2 Lessons for the Writing
Center
How would you respond in a writing center session
to this students abstract?
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The Power of Writing

• At its best, writing has helped transform the
  world. Revolutions have been started by it.
  Oppression has been toppled by it. And it has
  enlightened the human condition.
• The National Commission on Writing in
• Americas Schools and Colleges, 2003

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The Importance of Writing

• The reward of disciplined writing is the most
  valuable job attribute of all a mind equipped to
  think. Writing today is not a frill for the few,
  but an essential skill for the many.
• The National Commission on Writing in Americas
  Schools and Colleges, 2003

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Some arguments for incorporating writing into any
course

• Writing is inherently an active cognitive
  process.
• Writing provides opportunities for reflection and
  metacognition writing slows down our thinking.
• Writing provides an opportunity to discover what
  we think and know (as well as to discover what we
  dont know).

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Writing and learning . . .

• Writing demands explicitness.
• Writing involves organizing and synthesizing
  (indicating relationships among) ideas.
• Writing makes our ephemeral thoughts more
  permanent and available to share with others.

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What research says about writing and engagement

• The relationship between the amount of writing
  for a course and students level of engagement
  whether engagement is measured by time spent on
  the course, or the intellectual challenge it
  presents, or students self-reported interest in
  it is stronger than any relationship we found
  between student engagement and any other course
  characteristic.
• --Richard Light, Harvard Assessment Seminars,
  Second Report (1992)

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Writing and engagement (cont.)

• It is stronger than the relation between student
  engagement and class size. It is far stronger
  than the relationship between level of engagement
  and why a student chooses a course (required vs.
  elective major field vs. not in the major field)
  . . . .
• --Richard Light, Harvard Assessment Seminars,
• Second Report (1992)

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The writing-learning connection

• Language, oral or written, is an expressive
  instrument through which we communicate what we
  have previously thought. It is also the
  reflective instrument through which we think,
  alone or with others, about what we are doing.
• Paul Connolly

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The best writing opportunities are designed as
authentic activities.

• Authentic activity . . . is important for
  learners because it is the only way they gain
  access to the standpoint that enables
  practitioners to act meaningfully and
  purposefully.
• Brown, Collins, Duguid, 1989

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Writing can create authentic desire.

• The use of writing in our classes is ideally
  about creating opportunities for students to
  have an authentic desire to converse with
  interested readers about real ideas.
• --John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas