Programs: Writing Workshop
Projects
Medary and Trevitt/OSU Literacy Partnerships
We will continue our service-learning versions of English 110.03 working with first graders at Medary Elementary School (Thursdays, 10:30-11:48 am) and at Trevitt Elementary School (Wednesdays, 3:00-4:30). For Autumn 2004 Mindy Wright and Pat Kedzerski will be teaching the service-learning versions. For Winter 2005, we plan to repeat our pilot apprenticeship project, partnering new and experienced service-lerning teachers. New teachers will be responsible for the on-campus/classroom portions of the courses and experienced teachers will have responsibilities as liaison at the elementary schools. If you are interested in participating in the apprenticeship program, make arrangements to visit a service-learning class during Autumn 2004. For Autumn 2004-2005, we are funded (in partnership with CSTW's Africentric Literacy Partnership) by a Columbus Foundation Grant.Success Challenge Tutoring
Writing Workshop will continue the partnership we began in Spring 2004 with CSTW to provide tutoring for students in English 109 classes. The Success Challenge Partnership is evolving to use e-portfolios as a primary means for at risk students to receive additional feedback on their writing and digital composing. Future plans might include: focus groups of 109 students to collect information about the impact of e-portfolios on their writing and college work and a possible long-term longitudinal study of undergraduate writing a public, land-grant research university.This project is sponsored by Success Challenge Funds from the Federation of the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences and CSTW.Linden-McKinley/OSU Literacy Partnerships
For the second year, CSTW and the Writing Workshop will be working closely with teachers and small student writing groups at Linden-McKinley High School. Our first workshop will be a professional development workshop with teachers on November 10, one of Columbus Public Schools' Professional Development Days. Teachers from CSTW, FYWP, and WW wil be recruited to work with student writing groups several times a quarter.Columbus Literacy Council/OSU Humanities Literacy Partnership
This partnership consists of a group of faculty and administrators across the College of Humanities and at Columbus Literacy Council. We are funded by an OSU Service-Learning Team Initiative Grant (sponsored by the Corporation for National Service). The project has one overall immediate goal: to investigate how and if use of computer-assisted software can leverage CLC's resources, allowing them to reach more students who come there to learn how to read and write in English. To accomplish this goal, we are developing a service-leraning version of 367, one for English, one for AAAS, and one for Spanish and Portguese. Students in these classes will work as tutors with students at CLC, guiding them in their choice of software modules and working on reading and writing activities. The pilot for English 367 is scheduled for Spring 2005.Literacy Studies Working Group
As part of his work as an Eminent Scholar, Professor Harvey Graff is setting up interdisciplinary discussion groups on the topic of literacy.We live at a challenging time with respect to both literacy and literacy studies. On the one hand, many different literacies are proclaimed, from cyber to health and emotional literacy, mathematical to aesthetic literacy. The potential advance that this profusion might represent, however, is lost in the confusing clash of claims and counter-claims, and the persisting sense of doom due to fears of the decline of literacy skills and the consequent defeat of civilization as we have known it. A sense of crisis and despair contradictorily accompanies the assertion of many literacies. Talking clearly, knowledgeably, and critically about literacy is an inescapable need today. As we clarify our usage and our reflections about literacy(ies), we not only hold the potential to improve our communications and abilities to collaborate but we also have a rare opportunity to reinvigorate teaching and learning. This working group (in its first year) plans to establish a Literacy Working Group for its two-year run, from 2004-2006, with an aim of fostering a sense of collaboration among different disciplinary clusters and their constituents (and their different proclaimed “literacies”), from the social and natural sciences to the arts and humanities, medicine and law. From a beginning in the humanities, the Working Group intends to foster a critical, cross-campus conversation and investigation into the nature of literacy and literacies, bringing historical, contextual, comparative, and critical perspectives and modes of understanding together to stimulate new relationships institutionally and intellectually. Goals to make OSU distinctive
- by focusing on institutionalized but also more diffused interests and activities relating to literacy studies
- by fostering and then changing the conversation; changing dissemination; changing practice and challenging theory, expectations, policies
- by cross campus efforts and outreach, by reciprocal concern to advance both theory and practice
- by founding a literacy studies workshop, forum, and lecture/conference
