Programs: Writing Workshop
Faculty: Writing Workshop for Teachers
Over the years of its existence, the Writing Workshop has redefined, again, and again, its approach to what is typically called "remedial" instruction. Through these cumulative redefinitions, the Workshop has set tasks for students that are constantly more challenging, questioned any and all received definitions of "remedial" students, and developed curricula that look very little like the "remedial" instruction offered in most other educational institutions across the country. While these redefinitions have often been spurred by glimpses we teachers caught of our students' untapped literacy skills, the changes soon were fueled by other forces--our increased questioning of institutional, academic, cultural, and socioeconomic hierarchies and the instructional (was well as other) forces that perpetuate these hierarchies.In addition to reconceiving "remedial" instruction, the Workshop has redefined composition courses themselves. All Workshop courses lead students into and through a multitude of theory-building activities and use discourse as the medium of inquiry as well as the substance of it. The discourses used include traditional ones, for example, collected essays by published writers; but just as importantly, they use a variety of non-traditional ones.For example, student essays and oral interviews serve as data for theories alongside the traditionally "authoritative" texts. Students read, analyze and create digital media, from web sites to audio essays.
Discourse also serves many functions in Workshop classes. For example, small groups use oral and/or written discourse heuristically as well as for the tasks of synthesis and analysis. Teachers use student-led discussions to challenge received notions of classroom authority and to acquaint students with their own intellectual powers; students who may never have thought themselves as "bookish" interact verbally with their peers about materials they have all read. These discourse practices and theory-building activities, in the context of intensive writing classrooms especially, aim to show students that intellectual (and other) authority is not monolithic, that the students themselves, if not empowered in a politically ideal way, do in fact hold "authorities," and the at knowledge (discourse) is created (constructed) collaboratively.
To accomplish these ends, students in all Writing Workshop classes engage in quarter-long inquiries and read and write constantly about the subjects under investigation, often language and power or popular culture in 110.03 and in 109.01/109.02, usually growth and change in adolescence. Writing assignments include both formal and informal ones; writing reading, speaking, and listening weave recursively to pose positions, question them, and then re-pose them in more encompassing, complicated, and problematic ways. Writing assignments (including those in digital media) that appear to be typical personal experience essays are part of the basis upon which students build, collectively and individually, the theories they pose.
A variety of pedagogical techniques support these goals; teachers assign students substantial responsibility for leading the inquiries; students actively construct knowledge rather than passively accept it; collaboration structures a variety of activities; students use a variety of electronic methods to exchange writing both on and off campus (e-mail, e-portfolios, classroom LANs); peer response and teacher conferences are standard; lectures are rare if not non-existent. Classes are often noisy, busy, unruly, and thus a-typical of college classrooms. Click here to view our mission statement.
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