I enjoy working with faculty across the disciplines on intellectually rewarding ways to help students with their writing, and I would be happy to work with specific faculty groups on their specific interests and concerns.  Please email me with your interests for using writing in your teaching.  The following brief descriptions suggest the kinds of workshops I’ve led with faculty.

Responding to Difference and Error in Student Writing

I work with faculty to distinguish between those features of students’ writing that can legitimately be treated as “error” and those that might simply represent “difference,” and demonstrate, through hands-on analysis with faculty of sample student writing, strategies for helping students learn to identify and revise errors in their writing. 

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Engaging English Language Learners in Our Courses

Using analyses of sample student writing, I lead writing instructors and tutors through strategies for moving beyond limited, and limiting, notions of what it means to write in English can so that teachers can find more rewarding ways of making sense of students’ writing. 

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Reading and Writing Assignment Sequences

I use examples from my own and others’ teaching to illustrate principles and strategies for integrating sequences of writing and reading assignments into coursework so that students learn to use their writing to revise their reading and thinking about subject matter in substantive ways. 

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Using Student Writing in Our Classroom Teaching

Through practice-discussion of student writing with faculty, I demonstrate ways to talk with students about their writing that can help students see the relationship between the ways they write and their thinking about the course subject matter, and that offer intellectual incentives for students to give far more, and more productive, attention to their writing.

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Teaching Reading in the Writing Course

Through engaging and analyzing responses to a text, I help faculty to identify both the problems writing students experience with reading and ways to address these in teacher comments, writing assignments, and class discussions to help students become more responsible in both their reading and their writing.

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Teaching Proofreading vs. Teaching Grammar

Drawing on my experience working to help students improve their proofreading skills, I use sample student writing to engage faculty in hands-on analysis of the problems students have with finding and correcting errors in their writing and developing strategies with their students to become better proofreaders.

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Teaching Writing through Music

I use my experience teaching courses in song criticism to show how teachers can have students use their written responses to music to learn to recognize the value and effect of different ways of identifying the “text” of a song for the meanings they are able to produce and what they are able to hear in their encounters with music.  I work with faculty to link this question of identifying a “text” to different disciplinary-specific concerns of interpretation.