|
|
||||
Spring 2007 TA Orientation
Before the Orientation, you should read . . .Downs, Doug and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning FYC as Introduction to Writing Studies.” CCC, forthcoming. <http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter/archive/Wardle_Downs_CCCrevision.pdf> Those of us working in Writing Studies are confronted by the fact that our own research and theory calls our cornerstone course—and the underlying assumptions upon which it is based—into question. Added to this difficulty is the fact that few outside our own discipline know we exist; if they do know we exist, they know little or nothing about what we do as writing scholars. Certainly, our own research and theory about the nature of writing has done little to influence public conceptions of writing. These two problems—teaching at odds with our research and public misconceptions about writing and Writing Studies—can both be addressed through a Writing Studies pedagogy. In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a such a pedagogy. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for FYC. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and encourages more realistic conceptions of writing. Carter, Shannon. “Chapter 1: Introduction” and “Chapter 2: Narrating Literacy.” Literacies in Context. Southlake, Texas: Fountainhead Press, 2007. 5-39. <http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter/archive/Carter%20Reader%202006.pdf> Malley, Suzanne Blum and Amy Hawkins. “Ethnographic Inquiry as Writing Pedagogy.” Teaching Composition. McGraw Hill, February 2006. <http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/blummalleyhawkins/blumANDhawkins_module.html>. December 22, 2006.
Tentative Agenda for Orientation
|
|||||