Programs: Writing Workshop
Mission Statement
The mission of the Writing Workshop is to offer opportunities for students to work intensively on their writing in meaningful ways in addition to the writing experience that English 110 provides. In that sense, Workshop courses (English 109.01, 109.02, and 110.03 and 193.03) are transitions between high school and college, providing additional practice in doing the kinds of work that will be required in other college classes: reading, writing, discussion, and critical thinking.In collaboration with the Digital Media Project, sections of each of our three courses meet regularly in computer classrooms, helping students to prepare for the demands of college and workplaces in the twenty-first century and to think critically about the effects of digital media on workplaces and communities. The Workshop also believes in developing strong relationships with the communities that surround the University. Since 1996, we have regularly offered service-learning versions of our courses that involve OSU students in tutoring projects at local elementary schools. This work becomes part of a study of literacy in context when students return to their campus classrooms.
As Andrea Lunsford argues in "Politics and Practices in Basic Writing," "good writing instruction should march slightly ahead of students, thus challenging them to reach beyond themselves" and, rather than "preparing" them to do college level work, to immediately engage them in the demanding work the university inevitably asks of them. Current Workshop courses aim to answer this call, and they are a vital part of the foundation for the General Education Curriculum (GEC) courses.
Each teacher develops his or her own specific syllabus, but Workshop courses all work out of a set of theories that see specific disciplines or communities in the University as adopting their own particular variations of "good writing," their own discourses with discipline-specific ideologies and conventions of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking. Our courses show students how language is tied to community, providing them with the ability to analyze what kind of language (written and spoken) is valued in a particular university course, for example, and then make a conscious decision about the extent to which they want to conform or to challenge conventions. With these goals at their center, Writing Workshop courses endeavor create "incentives and context for thinking and writing" in the following integrated ways:
- by communicating a view of writing and learning as a social and collaborative enterprise
- by emphasizing meaning-making through theory-building
- by valuing student agendas and experiences
- by appreciating difference, diversity, and respect for others
- by decentering authority so that students can claim their own voices.
These pedagogical objectives are firmly based in current composition theory and research that argues such contexts promote the best atmosphere for learning and writing (see for example, Rose, Farr and Daniels, and Shirley Brice Heath's work). They also respond to calls like Paulo Freire's for valuing and bringing various kinds of literacies into institutional contexts such as academia.
