The first session of this year’s CUNY Writing Fellows orientation/professional development series was more of a success than last year’s. It is still true that each Fellow’s experience might be different, just because each campus’s program is so different from each other, but I feel like I learned more this year.
I attended an afternoon workshop run by Jason Tougaw, a WAC coordinator at Queens College, on some of the ideas for in-class workshops. After looking at a useful glossary compiled in Gordon Harvey’s “Elements of the Academic Essay” (can be downloaded from QC’s student resources page here), we experienced three activities that they actually used in their in-class workshops. The three separate reading activities focused on thinking about what writers are actually ‘doing’ through their writing (describing? analyzing? claiming? arguing?), how writers express their attitude towards the source they are integrating (i.g. “X argues/believes/acknowledges/emphasizes/implies/observes….”), and, finally, what the writers’ ‘motivating moves’ behind the text are.
The beauty of the ideas presented in these activities, I thought, was that they are concrete and yet flexible enough to be incorporated in different forms in our actual in-class workshops. It could be used in a workshop on analytical reading, but it could also be introduced as a revision strategy by using a student paper as a sample (as done in this workshop), or as a writing strategy by throwing in a writing exercise.
Even though my work for the Institute this semester, which I will talk about in my next posting, does not seem to involve workshops on reading and writing, I appreciated this workshop not only because I enjoyed his good teaching, but also because it presented ideas that are concrete enough for Fellows to immediately put to use in their actual work at a campus, and, for that matter, their upcoming teaching career during or after our graduate work. I walked out of it feeling like I had been ‘professionally developed’ a bit. After all, isn’t it what these orientations are about?
I have looked through the QC resources, and there are in fact some great ideas there. But I wasn’t able to find anything on teaching business writing, for example teaching to write executive summaries. It is a completely different genre and does not easily fall into the categories at many WAC websites. I hope some of you might have some ideas for me?
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