Introduction and Overview of Research Plan: At this point in the quarter, patience is thin. It is getting harder and harder to calmly, and civilly reply to students when they ask where an assignment is posted, when something is due, or email me about their projects because ‘they don’t know where to turn it in’– […]
Author: Megan
“Making Ethnography Our Own: Why and How Writing Studies Must Redefine Core Research Practices” by Mary Sheridan
Citation: Sheridan, Mary. “Making Ethnography Our Own: Why and How Writing Studies Must Redefine Core Research Practices.” Writing Studies Research in Practice : Methods and Methodologies, Southern Illinois University Press, 2012, pp. 73–82. Summary: Mary Sheridan’s article is a chapter in the larger piece of work Writing Studies Research in Practice : Methods and Methodologies. In her […]
How Many Times Have I Told You This? A Study on Student Comprehension and Retention of Directions
Intro to the proposed research: At this point in the quarter, patience is thin. It is getting harder and harder to calmly, and civilly reply to students when they ask where an assignment is posted, when something is due, or email me a their projects because ‘they don’t know where to turn it in’– even […]
Fostering and Stifling
Conflict is good. Conflict keeps us from the sheep and shepherd mentality in the classroom, but conflict is a difficult balancing act to pull off well. I encourage my students to ask questions, and to be active in their learning, but I struggle personally with walking the line between healthy conflict that fosters engaged multi-vocal […]
Shut Up and Listen to Each Other
My students speak over each other quite a bit in class. They have this idea that the only voice in class they should listen to is mine. During my warm-up question/discussion section, they will listen quietly while I speak, but I continually have to remind students to be quiet, and listen to their fellow student […]
In Search of Student B
Choses Assignment: Rose and Me Chosen Piece: Student B Dear Student B, First off, I am glad to hear that you no longer suffer from writer’s block in the ways you did in high school. It is introspective of you to note that you used to be afflicted in the same way Ruth was in Rose’s […]
Still Haunted…
If I were to look into their brains at the beginning of the quarter, I imagine my students would be thinking “why am I writing? This is silly—I won’t be needing to write essays later on in life”. These assumptions spring up due to their narrow (or Rose may describe it as rigid) definition of literacy. […]
The Genre of The Teacher
“ I hated in high school when I would get my writing back from my teacher, and they would edit it and make me take stuff out, and at the end it didn’t even sound like me. The thing I turned in wasn’t my writing”. That is a quote from one of my student’s letters […]
More Thoughts on Teaching Thinking
This post has a strong connection to my previous post. Durring my most ideological meditations about the impacts this class could have on one of my students, my thoughts turn more often towards thinking rather than writing. I want my students to leave my classroom with strong skills for critical thinking. As I said in […]
In a Constant State of Realization
I believe my students are halfway aware of their world. All of them are true college freshmen. All of them came right from high school, and for many this is a first time away from home. They are just now beginning to look in any other direction besides right in front of them. A good […]
Engaging Sources through Reading-Writing Connections Across the Disciplines
Citation: Carillo, Ellen C. “Engaging Sources through Reading-Writing Connections Across the Disciplines.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 13, no. 2, July 2016, p. 19. Summary Carillo aims to demonstrate how in a system where we emphasize the importance of “discipline-specific literacy” we are falling short by privileging writing over reading. She argues for the reinstatement of […]
The Performance of Difference
Classroom 107 in the Humanities Building on Western Washington University’s campus is structurally composed to posit myself as someone different from my students. Room 107 is a cookie cutter copy of many other classrooms not only on WWU’s campus, but at universities and classrooms worldwide. It is binary. In through the door—if you have authority […]
We are a community of writers
I spent some reflective time thinking about what I wanted my classroom to “look like” when I was drafting my syllabus. A starting off point would be my “Class Climate” section of my ENG101 syllabus: “First and foremost we are a community of writers. Writing is a personal exercise by nature. In order for all […]
“When Nursing Students Write: Changing Attitudes”-Dobie & Poirrier
Citation: Dobie, Ann, and Gail Poirrier. “When Nursing Students Write: Changing Attitudes.” Research in Teaching Writing Across the Diciplines, vol. 1, no. 3, p. 11. Summary In Dobie and Poirrier’s concise yet intellectually rich article, they discuss how academics evaluate (or struggle with evaluating) the success of writing-across-the curriculum programs. They table the dilemma writing-across-the […]
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My Dad Doesn’t Get to Use the Front Door
I have lived my life hyper aware of the physical body, and its capabilities in the public world. At the age of nineteen, a motorcycle accident severed my father’s spinal cord. He is a paraplegic, and has used a wheelchair since the day of the accident. In my first sentence I am specific when I […]
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Grammar: The Colonizer’s Guide to Oppression
Laura Lisbeth’s “Strunk and White Set the Standard” moves to scandalously debunk and dethrone the writing handbook, The Elements of Style. Upon hearing that title uttered, I shuddered. It is a book I have wrestled with over the course of my writing career. I read this essay after Elizabeth Wardle’s which argued that there was […]
The Academic Food Chain
When I think of my classroom as an ecosystem, an assignment from my high school biology class comes to mind. For the assignment, we had to “go out into nature”, observe an ecosystem, and construct a poster depicting the food chain of that ecosystem. If I am to utilize that exercise as a lens in […]
Blog Post 1: Surprised That Went So Well
Before my first day of teaching ENG 101, I expected to have a class comprised of students who wholly did not want to be there, and would reject whatever I said because “We don’t like reading or writing, and why Ms. Too-Young-To-Be-My-Professor is any of this important?”. I expected the class to be constructed in […]