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Commonplace: "Timely, Relevant, and Compelling" Student Writing
When graduate students Michael Harker and Aaron McKain asked Scott DeWitt to lunch to discuss an interesting idea, DeWitt saw an opportunity to raise the stakes on student writing. The resulting project, an online journal of peer-reviewed student work called Commonplace, has become a staple of the new First-Year Writing Program curriculum.
It's a common complaint of composition classes: students spend an academic quarter writing and revising a research paper, only to put it in a drawer after the final grade is posted. When Scott DeWitt, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Media Project, became Director of the First-Year Writing Program in the Ohio State University's English Department, one of his challenges was to build a curriculum that would make students see the relevance of academic research and writing to their own lives.
"Commonplace is about making these situations real. There are always arguments that posit that the academy is not the real world—that it's an artificial situation: a student writes a paper for the teacher and the teacher gives it back," said Aaron McKain, Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Composition. "And we're saying, no, we can create a real rhetorical situation: one student trying to convince the Ohio State student universe—that entire group of people—of something. The students are really responding to that because there's something at stake."
Peer review is as much a part of the pedagogical objectives of the project as the initial writing is. Each student essay is reviewed by a group of three anonymous peers before moving on to an executive editorial board comprised of graduate students. "We've all worked on this project for different reasons," said Michael Harker, Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Composition. "In the past, peer review hasn't been a very exciting process for people. But here we have a situation where peer review is a very memorable experience. For me, what I really wanted was to re-engage the idea of peer review in composition and make it a memorable process for both students and teachers. I think we've done that."
Ultimately, the project encourages students to take themselves more seriously as writers and students in any discipline. "We've got this narrative built into the course," said Dewitt. "We tell students: we want you to see the relationship between what it means to be a scholar and academic in a ‘research one' institution and your responsibility to talk about your work to people outside your discipline and outside the university. What we've done here is to strike a really great relationship between those two things by starting students right off the bat with academic research, and then, as a way of getting them to see their work as real, we get them involved in Commonplace."
Visit Commonplace at www.commonplaceuniversity.com.
