Group items tagged

"College readiness has several dimensions, but of particular import is readiness to produce scholarly work that meets the expectations of college instructors. Differences from high school and college are well documented in the literature, and this study adds to that body of work by delineating the characteristics of first-year college assignments through a qualitative analysis of college faculty assignment instructions. Three themes emerge from the analysis: information literacy, especially initiating inquiry; academic writing, especially citing evidence in support of a thesis; learner dispositions, especially curiosity, open-mindedness, self-reliance, and perseverance. Findings have implications for high school library programs and high school teachers as well as librarians working with first-year college students."

from abstract: "in keeping with theory and practice of tutor training in inquiry-based pedagogy, ELL students and peer tutors vacillate between the linguistic dominant position, indicating that participants establish a collaborative and egalitarian environment. However, L1 tutors may experience dissonance because the agenda set by ELL students often focuses on surface features such as grammar and diction rather than on global revisions" (36).

Links to all of the WAC Bibliographies on the following topics: Writing in the Disciplines Writing to Learn Program Design Faculty Concerns WAC in Two-Year Colleges WAC in the Schools WAC in the Disciplines WAC Assessment Pedagogy Writing Processes Writing Conventions Genre Research WAC and Writing Centers/Learning Centers Writing Fellows Programs WAC and Second-Language Writing Service and Experiential Learning Literacy Community Inquiry Technology Discourse Analysis Graduate Students

Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and pro-cess. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty de-velopment initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors' com-ments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tu-tor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such ac-counts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the "writing center grand narrative," which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as "comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing" to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.