Education Commons^™

Amplifying Tutor Voices: A Qualitative Analysis For Improving Writing Center Tutoring Practices And Pedagogy, Leah Washko

English Department Masters Theses

Within the walls of university writing centers, tutors and tutees collaborate. They discuss writing, but even more than that, they communicate about ideas and theories bigger than themselves, all while discovering their identities. Exploration of how tutors define their authority and agency, while also highlighting the importance of tutors’ voices, is necessary for the continuation of writing center studies. Writing center tutors’ roles may be understood by some, but the mental hurdles, the questioning natures, and the care-giver roles they are emersed into need to be further investigated. Through a study conducted at Kutztown University’s Writing Center, tutors were surveyed …

Collaboration And Community In Undergraduate Writing Synchronous Video Courses (Svcs), Kimberly Fahle

English Theses & Dissertations

From the 2013 Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI), OWI Principle 11 suggests, “Online writing teachers and their institutions should develop personalized and interpersonal online communities to foster student success.” Previous discussions of synchronous modalities have suggested interpersonal benefits of this mode could aid in creating these communities and could minimize the isolation and transactional distance students can experience in asynchronous instruction, which in turn can impact their persistence and learning. However, with little research on this modality, it is difficult to corroborate this assumption or design synchronous courses to best exploit these …

Learning From Failure: Making The Feedback Loop Work, Natalie Bishop, Pam Dennis, Janet Land, Hannah Allford

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

“I spend hours providing feedback, but I have no idea if my students read it” is a common phrase echoed across college campuses. While best practices in teaching pedagogy laud the feedback cycle, many instructors question the impact their feedback has on their students’ writing. As the feedback loop continues to be a trending cog in the machine of formative assessment and authentic education, an essential component of the loop is often overlooked: the conversation.

Presenters will focus on providing easy-to-implement “conversation” opportunities for students to respond to instructor feedback. This reflective practice provides insight into a student’s learning processes, …

Leveraging Digital Communities Of Practice: How Asynchronous Digital Collaboration Afforded A Complex Reading/Writing Dialogue For Secondary School Students, Susanne Lee Nobles

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines a case study of a research unit taught to secondary school students with the inclusion of an asynchronous digital collaboration with college students. Over consecutive school years, two classes of high school seniors and two classes of college students, despite being geographically separated by more than 90 miles, worked together in multiple reading and writing exchanges within an online community as they read a primary text and as the secondary school students wrote research papers. This study seeks to understand the effects of this unit on the secondary school students’ thinking, reading, and writing skills, focusing specifically …

Archives Alive!: Librarian-Faculty Collaboration And An Alternative To The Five-Page Paper, Tom Keegan, Kelly Mcelroy

Tom Keegan

Co-Planning And Co-Teaching In A Summer Writing Institute: A Formative Experiment, Kelly Chandler-Olcott, Janine Nieroda, Bryan Ripley Crandall

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This paper reports findings from a two-year formative experiment (Reinking & Bradley, 2008) investigating a summer writing institute for students entering ninth grade at an urban high school. The three-week program was staffed by both university researchers and teachers. In contrast to traditional summer school, it was intended as enrichment, not remediation, for a heterogeneous group of students, and a learning experience, not just a teaching opportunity, for practitioners. The pedagogical goals of the intervention were two-fold: 1) increase students’ writing engagement and skill, and 2) improve teachers’ capacity to teach writing to diverse student populations. Findings focused on co-teaching …

Reimagining Relationships Between High School And College In The Wonderful World Of Writing Centers, Tammy Conard-Salvo, Richard Severe, Bridget Carey, Collin Baker

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Presentations

This panel presentation given at the 2014 International Writing Centers Assocation (IWCA) conference shows two ways that high school and college writing centers can intersect. The first presentation describes a partnership between a college and high school to form a “sister writing center.” The second presentation addresses shifting tutor identities when high school tutors go onto college. Both presentations identify direct and indirect relationships between high school and college writing centers, and attendees will be invited to share ideas about collaborating with high schools.