In November 2008 seven St. John's University faculty
presented on a panel at the Second
International Writing and Critical Thinking Conference, Quinnipiac
University. The panel, titled "Intermediate Outcomes
of the Rome Experience From Six Faculty Across the Disciplines and
the WAC Director," was given within a session titled "Thinking and
Writing Abroad to Strengthen Thinking and Writing Across
Campus."
Speaker 1: James Benson,
Vice Provost, Dean of Information Resources and Libraries, and
Associate Professor, Library and Information Science, St. John’s
College
Returning to full-time teaching next year. I plan to propose a
modification of our MLS curriculum to make it communication
intensive. I am examining writing practices in discipline &
department to develop the proposal. In my previous full-time
teaching life, I always felt ineffective in assisting students with
their writing. I am now learning how to provide more effective
feedback on student papers.
When I next teach I will have students in a college &
university library management class posting written essays to a
wiki on a tri- weekly writing cycle. The ten to fifteen students in
the class will chose a specific topic about which each will write a
short (400-500 word) essay.
The essay topic list will be based on my enumeration of major
research themes in the literatures of academic libraries, higher
education, & scholarly communication. For each writing cycle,
students will also revise at least two other student's essays. The
purpose of this process is to teach collaborative writing, using
topic taxonomies, recursive editing, & committee built segues
among the topics. For the final writing cycle, student groups will
collaboratively assemble related topical essays into a larger
thematic work.
The Writing Cycle Process:
Each student will post their drafts and self-critiques of their
drafts on the individual student's wiki page. Other students will
post peer feedback. I will then post my comments on the drafts
directly to the student’s wiki page. As a result, students will a
continuing set of their versions [including notes and ideas] and
feedback, all in a repository. At the end of the course, the
student groups can draw from the repository to write final versions
and individual reflections about their writing and learning in the
class. Students will see everyone’s work. This process will allow
students to see how the project can generate varying types of
essays, see the instructor’s reactions to different work on the
same project, and observe other students’ responses to a variety of
writing examples.
Presentation Assignment
Students will also present one topic to the class and receive peer
feedback. They subsequently will make an audio recording of their
presentation as a voice over coupled to a set of power point slides
outlining the presentation.
Speaker 2: Andrea J.
Bergman, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology,
St. John’s College
"The Use of a Reading Journal: Linking Writing with Learning to
Read"
One assignment for my abnormal psychology class this semester is a
reading journal. This was done as an attempt to have students
become more thoughtful about the material that they are reading
through their writing. Each student is required to post
comments for each chapter of the textbook. These comments can
include reactions, questions, criticisms, and reflections on the
material that they read. This is done on Blackboard/WebCT and
an unexpected benefit of this assignment is that students are
reading each others' comments and then posting comments on the
comments. This has created an on-line academic environment
that, I believe, has enhanced the learning of the course
material.
Speaker 3: Frank Cantelmo,
Associate Professor, Department of Biology, St. John’s
College
"Workshopping to Practice Scientific Terms"
I am using workshops in my honors scientific inquiry course to
support introductory science students as they: 1) learn and
practice identifying scientific concepts and terminology; 2) read
and critique the content, method and writing of popular science
articles in newspapers and magazines; and, 3) summarize the
published articles to reveal how the articles illustrate or
integrate scientific concepts and terminology. I choose draft
student summaries representative of the successes and struggles of
the entire class and provide all the students with these summaries
and the original science articles summarized. Working
together across four class periods, students first read the
original articles, considering them with questions like: “Who is
doing the science and what are they doing?” and “What scientific
terminology can we tease out of this article?” to imagine together
why and how they might summarize these articles and tease out the
terminology. Then, students workshop the summaries written by their
peers for what they are and aren’t doing well – in summary and in
identifying concepts and terminology present in that article – and
discuss how and why the summaries could be strengthened. The
open classroom conversation of science and writing about science
allows me to reiterate lessons of content.
Speaker 4: Maura
Flannery, Professor, Computer Science, Mathematics and
Science, College of Professional Studies
I have two roles on campus, professor of biology and director of
our Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) both roles have been
influenced by my experience in Rome. In terms of teaching, I
am much more aware of the link between reading and writing.
Several times, I have asked students to write about their reading
assignments in class. These are short exercises, but they
have been very illuminating for me, and they have sent the message
to students that I take the reading seriously. I have also
used this type of exercise more formally to assess their
comprehension of basic concepts, and I find myself being more
thoughtful in my responses to their essay papers, assignments which
I've used for several years. In CTL workshops, I am using
many of the techniques that the writing instructors used during the
week in Rome. I learned a great deal about getting faculty to
work collaboratively.
Speaker 5: Anne Ellen
Geller, Associate Professor, English, St. John’s College,
Director, Writing Across the Curriculum, Institute for Writing
Studies
This year the Writing Across the Curriculum program has asked
the faculty who participated in the Summer Faculty Writing
Institute in Rome to describe their experiences and their
intermediate outcomes (course based, departmental, etc.) to faculty
colleagues at writing across the curriculum lunches. We have
titled these lunches: “Lessons, Experiences, and New Ideas from
Faculty Colleagues.” What has been striking about these
informal presentations is how faculty from across the disciplines
have responded – with amazement at the way students in their
colleagues’ classes have engaged in informal, online and in-class
writing, with respect for their colleagues as learners and
risk-takers, and with gratitude for the generous way their
colleagues are letting them into their classrooms and their
teaching.
Speaker 6: Carolyn
Vigorito, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology,
St. John’s College
"The Use of Online Peer-to-Peer Discussion Posts to Promote
Writing to Learn"
This semester I have students in a child psychology class
posting written responses to a weekly online discussion topic
related to course readings. The forty students in the class were
randomly divided into smaller groups of ten students each for their
online discussions. They were required to post their own response
to the topic question and to respond to at least 2 members of their
online group each week. Twice during the semester, students were
required to visit the Writing Center and in conjunction with a
writing tutor they were to select their three strongest posts and
three weakest posts. In addition, they wrote a reflection essay on
why they thought the written posts they chose were weak or strong.
In their essays, students commented that this was a worthwhile
exercise that benefited their own development as writers.
Speaker 7: May Webber,
Chair, Division of Humanities, Associate Professor of Philosophy,
College of Professional Studies
The normative side to my ethics courses includes student
participation in a discussion group wherein it is the student’s
responsibility to argue either the pro or con side to a moral
issue. Preparation involves writing a paper defending the position
he/she intends to argue. This semester I tried incorporating both
“peer review’ and “professorial review” into this process. Students
had the benefit of having a rough draft of their papers critiqued
by both their peers and me. The final draft was due at the end of
class the day the student’s group presented.