Past Events
Winter Writing 5 Open House
Monday, October 22, 2018, 4:30 - 5:30 pm
Baker Library Room 105, the East Reading Room (next to KAF cafe, across from DCAL)
Calling all students scheduled for Winter Writing 5! We are holding an Open House for you: come meet many of the faculty teaching Writing 5 in winter term, ask questions, find out more about the courses, and enjoy some snacks.
What to Expect from Writing 5
Monday, October 22, 2018, 3:30 - 4:15 pm
Carson Hall Room L02
What can you expect in the winter term of Writing 5? How--and why--is college writing different from high school writing, and how are Dartmouth's Writing 5 courses different from the kind of writing instruction you may have encountered in the past? What can you do to best prepare for this transition? Join us for an interactive discussion as we offer answers to these questions and prepare you for the writing you'll be in doing in your second term at Dartmouth.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Thursday, September 6, 2018
Time: 12:00 - 5:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Refreshments will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Thursday, May 31, 2018
Time: 12:00 - 5:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Refreshments will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Strategic Conferencing with Our Students: The Why, the How, the When
Date: Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Christiane Donahue
This session will explore student learning in conferencing and approaches to conferencing—one of the key activities in our writing courses. Its inspiration is in the idea shared with the May 3rd session of “working together to advance as writers and communicators.” We will look at some of the research about how conferencing achieves these goals, share ideas about the purposes of conferencing, and talk about various effective practices and timings. Lunch will be served.
Listening for Student Learning in Writing Tutoring
Date: Thursday, May 3, 2018
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Nick Van Kley
Join RWIT for a closer look at what goes on in RWIT tutoring sessions. RWIT periodically records tutoring sessions—to support students who want a lasting record of their sessions, to empower tutors to reflect on their tutoring, and to sustain program assessment. In this session, we’ll take a tour of RWIT sessions by listening to audio excerpts of these recordings. Hear how Dartmouth students work together to advance as writers and communicators. Lunch will be served.
Assisting Students in Preparing Effective Arts & Humanities Presentations
Date: Monday, April 23, 2018
Time: 12:45 - 2 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Darlene Drummond
We will focus on classroom presentations as one type of presentational speaking. Speaking assignments in arts and humanities courses often rely on the student's analysis and interpretation of a particular idea, event, person, or thing. We will discuss how we can assist students in preparing the most effective informative talks of description and analysis in which they explain the relevancy of a historical or contemporary person or event; genre or school of philosophical thought; or a piece of literature, music, or art. We will also discuss how to assist students in leading classroom discussions based on a question they researched. Tip sheets, rubrics and basic guideline sheets that can be easily adapted to any course will be provided. Lunch will be served.
The Work of Citation in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Date: Thursday, April 19, 2018
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Alan Taylor and Megan McIntyre
Students performing college-level research writing are often overwhelmed by the scale of the endeavor: there are research questions to formulate, sources to find, notes to take, arguments to synthesize, references to cite. Orchestrating these disparate bits and pieces is unlike anything most students have attempted; without some sort of organized system for managing this workflow, things can become overwhelming. However, there is a growing array of software designed to help manage the research-writing process; many of these are free and open-source. In this session, we will explore some strategies for teaching these research processes and a number of these electronic solutions and learn how they may assist students with their research projects. Lunch will be served.
Cartoons as Multimodal Compositions in First-year Writing
Date: Thursday, February 15, 2018
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Discussions about multimodality as one of the important tools students should develop in their initiation into college writing have been ongoing in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, focused on a range of possibilities: films, audio compositions, visual arguments, hyperlinked compositions, and so on. This session will feature Larry Gonick, who authors highly effective scientific cartoons presenting different domains of scientific knowledge. After a presentation of his work and approach, we will discuss ways in which cartooning could be a particularly powerful mode of meaning construction in our courses. Lunch will be served.
MAKING THE WRITING WORKSHOP WORK
Date: Thursday, February 1, 2018
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Many of us already use workshops in our writing courses, but how do they work, how can they be challenging, and can they be designed, organized, and conducted differently? This session will begin with a brief history of the writing workshop and a review of the literature regarding its value. The session will also host a panel of faculty sharing how they structure and diversify their workshop sessions and will conclude with an opportunity for attendees to construct new workshop components in courses that include writing. The session will be led by Mark Koch and Megan McIntyre. Lunch will be served.
Workshopping Writing Prompts with RWIT
Date: Thursday, January 25, 2018
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
The assignments we create define students' experiences in our classes, setting goals and providing structure for students' calendars. We think deeply about those assignments as we prepare for the term, predicting student responses and trying to forecast likely questions or misunderstandings. In this session, led by Nick Van Kley, we'll take a closer look at the student experience of writing prompts. We'll start by reviewing some current scholarship on the role of prompts in writing instruction. Faculty will then have a chance to workshop their own assignment prompts--something new or old--with fellow faculty and experienced RWIT tutors. Tutors will give faculty a new perspective on what our prompts say to students. Lunch will be served.
Preemptive Feedback: How We Can Affect Student Responses to Critical Feedback
Date: Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Time: 12:45 - 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Slight changes to the way professors talk about feedback, preemptively, might help students to get more out of criticism in our courses. In this session, Speech professor Josh Compton will share how inoculation messaging—usually thought of only as a way to confer resistance to influence—can also affect how students perceive their self-efficacy in the face of criticism. Lunch will be served.
Portfolios in Progress
Date: Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Join us for a panel discussion, facilitated by Megan McIntyre and Alan Taylor, about how faculty across the Institute are using the new WordPress portfolios in their classes this term. As many of us are using eportfolios in our classes for the first time, this session will allow us to share experiences and insights from the first few months. How have these portfolios shifted attention to reflection? How have students embraced (or not) these new spaces? What is going as expected? What has emerged unexpectedly? Panelists will share assignments, rationale, and initial successes or learning experiences. Following the panel discussion, attendees will share their own portfolio descriptions and assignments and discuss their own successes/challenges. Faculty not using portfolios are welcome to join us and listen in. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: October 30, 2017
Time: 3:30 – 7:30 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Dinner will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Speaking about Public Speaking, Before Public Speaking, for Better Public Speaking
Date: Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Time: 12:40 - 2:05 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Some of the most recent inoculation research offers good news for public speakers: Speakers can be inoculated against destructive public speaking anxiety before they experience this anxiety. The key is to reframe perceptions of public speaking before the speech—which can change how they prepare for their speeches, think about their speeches, feel about their speeches—and do their speeches. In this session, Speech professor Josh Compton shares some of his work in this emerging research area, offering data-informed strategies for talking with students about public speaking in ways that make them more confident, better speakers/thinkers. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Writing beyond First-year Writing
Date: Thursday, October 5, 2017
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
What do students remember—or not—from first-year writing in their second and third years? What writing experiences do they have after the first year? What resources and strategies support them? How is their definition of “writing” changing? What gives them the most satisfaction? In this session, Institute and FYS faculty will report on preliminary findings from interviews of 45 students during 2016 sophomore summer who had participated their first year in a portfolio initiative. Participants will discuss how these preliminary findings might inform our teaching, and will develop questions we should be asking these same students in their upcoming senior year. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Writing 2/3 or Writing 5? Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Students’ Self-Placement
Date: Thursday, September 28, 2017
Time: 12:15 - 1:45 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Every fall we welcome new students into our sections of Writing 2-3 and Writing 5. But how do they get there, and how might that influence our pedagogical choices and our assumptions as teachers? This interactive session, led by Mark Koch and Christiane Donahue, will invite participants to review our placement process, hear about the research on “directed self-placement,” and try out some of the placement steps. We will discuss the design and foundation of the process, share some examples of student placement essays, and talk about how these essays might help us to shape our teaching and to support students effectively as they transition into their first college writing class. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Wednesday, September 6, 2017
Time: 8:30 am – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
SUMMER SEMINAR 2017: JULY 30-AUGUST 11, 2017
ANNUAL DARTMOUTH SUMMER SEMINAR FOR COMPOSITION RESEARCH
"Data-driven Inquiry: Process, Methods, Results"
This seminar is offered by Dartmouth College’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, in collaboration with the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Time: 8:30 am – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
2017 Benjamin F. Barge and Class of 1866 Prizes for Oratory Speech Contest
Thursday, May 18, 2017, 4:30 pm
Location: Treasure Room, Baker Library
The Institute for Writing and Rhetoric is pleased to announce that the Benjamin F. Barge and Class of 1866 Prizes for Oratory speech contest will be held on Thursday, May 18, 2017, at 4:30 pm in the Treasure Room (Baker Library). A reception and award presentation will follow in the Ferguson Room (Baker Library Room 206).
Dartmouth student finalists will present original persuasive speeches to a public audience and a panel of judges in a competition for cash prizes. At the conclusion of the event, one senior will be awarded the Benjamin F. Barge Prize for Oratory, and one sophomore and one junior will each receive Class of 1866 Prizes for Oratory. A preliminary program listing planned speech titles and more information can be found online at: http://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/curriculum/prizes
Presidential Speechwriting Event
Thursday, May 18, 2017, 11 am
Location: Occom Commons, Goldstein Dormitory, McLaughlin Cluster
The Institute for Writing and Rhetoric will host two presidential speechwriters on Thursday, May 18th — David Cavell (Barack Obama) and Peter Robinson (Ronald Reagan). Speechwriters will meet with Dartmouth students from our speech classes for a one-hour speechwriting discussion from 11 am-noon. Then, the speechwriters will join Institute for Writing and Rhetoric faculty, special guests, and students for a lunch reception.
The Pleasures of Writing?
Date: Tuesday, May 9
Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Leaders: Doyin Ogunfeyimi, Megan McIntyre
What is it that we do in the classroom, in assignment sequences, and in workshops that might work against student pleasure—curiosity, interest, gratification, investment, affect, etc.—in the writing classroom? And how could we re-envision aspects of our courses to help promote writerly pleasures across multiple writing contexts and genres? This workshop will draw on the Institute’s data to discuss how students construct their writerly pleasures and to suggest how we can repurpose these pleasurable writing experiences to foster engaged and purposive classroom environments. Lunch will be served.
Using Art to Elucidate Social Scientific Theories and Concepts
Date: Thursday, May 4
Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Leader: Darlene Drummond
Narratives are theoretical vehicles in their own right that help make sense of what’s happening around us by politicizing personal experiences to mobilize resources for social change. This session will focus on using research and/or writing exercises grounded in creative analytic practices such as evocative autoethnography and poetry to help students understand key course theories and concepts. Lunch will be served.
Peer to Peer: What RWIT Tutors Can Teach Writing Faculty
Date: Thursday, April 20
Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Leader: Nick Van Kley
RWIT Tutors see our students in settings we do not. They work carefully with student drafts and help students digest our assignments, course structures, and feedback. In this session, we will hear from experienced RWIT tutors about their encounters with student writers. What has their unique perspective taught them about our students' experiences? Lunch will be served.
Reading as Writing: Teaching Reading in Writing Courses
Date: Thursday, April 6
Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Leaders: Christiane Donahue and Mark Koch
Like writing, reading involves different demands, assumptions, and strategies in different contexts; reading is entangled with writing as two sides to the same coin. This session will explore some current research on the essential reading-writing relationship at the college level and some strategies for working with students. Based on sample readings participants bring to the workshop, we will ask ourselves: what purposes do our assigned readings serve? What “kind” of reader do we expect and how we might help that reader to develop? Lunch will be served.
Understanding and Teaching Source Use
Date: Thursday, March 2, 2017
Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Christiane Donahue
Join us for a discussion of how to help students understand the work of entering into dialogue, in their writing and speeches, with sources they read. We’ll begin by discussing what research tells us about this dialogue and the challenges it poses for different kinds of writers, and then discuss practical strategies for teaching students how to engage in the dialogue in ways that satisfy college expectations. Lunch will be provided. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Award Winning Writing and Speaking: A Panel of Student Prize Winners of Dartmouth Writing and Speaking Contests
Date: Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Time: 12:40 pm – 2:05 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Join students who have recently won awards for their writings and speeches at Dartmouth for a roundtable discussion on how they developed their exceptional work. Topics will include the opportunities and challenges of speaking and writing for different audiences, whether competition affects student writing and speaking, and how we can better make space in our classrooms for creative, innovative work. Josh Compton will facilitate this session. Lunch will be provided. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Understanding and Teaching Analysis and Synthesis
Date: Thursday, January 12, 2017
Time: 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Christiane Donahue
We know that both analysis and synthesis are higher order components in learning taxonomies and that they are essential to a student’s development as a college-level reader, writer, and thinker; they are key features of our outcomes. But what exactly are they? And can we tell whether we are teaching them well—or whether we are teaching them at all? This session will consider the nature of analysis and synthesis and how we might devise methods and assignments that will make their purpose and practice sharper for both writing instructors and their students. Lunch will be provided. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Time: 8:30 am – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Integrating Portfolios and Reflective Writing: A Faculty Panel
Date: Thursday, November 3
Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Join us for a panel discussion about how faculty across the Institute integrate reflective writing and portfolio assignments into their courses. Portfolios are marked by their attention to development over time and multiple opportunities for reflection, and faculty panelists will share how these elements have become important parts of their courses. Panelists will share assignments, rationale, potential pitfalls, and student successes. Following the panel discussion, attendees will work with panelists to brainstorm reflective and portfolio elements for their own course. Lunch will be served.
Perfect Group Projects
Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Time: 12:40 - 2:05 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Yana Grushina, Visiting Assistant Professor, Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, Dartmouth College
While “perfect” group projects might seem elusive, research has shown that groups can make better decisions than individuals, enhance learning, and contribute to psychological well-being of their members. Effective groups run the world; ineffective ones make us want to run out. How do we create group projects that lead to outcomes greater than the sum of the parts? How do we set up such projects and evaluate student work? How do we manage technology use throughout? Not least, how can we become better group members ourselves? This session, led by Speech faculty member Yana Grushina, will engage the participants with these challenges and reveal the opportunities of successful group projects through discussion of cutting edge group communication research, theory-based insights, and plentiful examples. Lunch will be served.
First-Year Writing According to Our Students: What do Student Reflections Tell Us about Their Learning?
Date: Thursday, October 6, 2016
Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Join a group of faculty investigating 2 years of student reflections on first-year writing. Since 2012, dozens of Dartmouth first-year students have participated in a Pilot Portfolio project in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Student participants selected and submitted their best work from their first-year writing courses and responded to reflection prompts about their experience and their development. In this session, faculty investigators will share some trends emerging from these responses. Participants will consider these trends, investigate a handful of rich examples, and discuss ways to harness reflection as a pedagogical tool. Lunch will be served.
EVOCATIVE OBJECTS: RE-IMAGINING THE POSSIBILITIES OF MATERIAL OBJECTS AND MULTIMODAL COMPOSING
Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Time: 4:00 - 7:00 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Presenter: Jody Shipka, Assoc. Prof. of English, Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County
This session will ask us to move beyond thinking with or writing about objects, and will instead, as Professor Shipka puts it, explore “more fully what it might mean to actually compose with objects.” She explains: “By inviting participants to compose complex object-texts, the workshop . . . challenges a tendency in the field to conflate multimodality with digital media or visual-verbal 2D object-texts. Indeed, when they are considered at all, multimodal texts that are strictly analog or hybrid analog/digital creations are not often viewed as being scholarly or academic—they are instead labeled expressive, crafty, arhetorical, or even childlike. This workshop works to trouble those assumptions.” Shipka’s work also addresses the challenges of assessing multimodal compositions; she advocates reflection and self-assessment, among other means, as tools to support robust evaluations of multimodal work. Dinner will be served.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Time: 8:30 am – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Wednesday, June 1, 2016 (during reading period)
Time: 8:30 am – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that are most relevant to participants' upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a few years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Faculty Workshop: Intercultural Communication Competence
Date: Thursday, May 19, 2016
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Presenter: Darlene Drummond
This workshop will introduce faculty to one of the latest and most progressive theories to explain intercultural interactions—Mark Orbe’s co-cultural theory. Exercises, including a personal cultural assessment, will be conducted to help participants gauge where they are and how their position(s) impact class interactions in a multicultural classroom. Lunch will be served.
Faculty Workshop: Writing and Genre
Date: Tuesday. May 10, 2016
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Guest Presenter: Dylan Dryer, University of Maine
What do we know about genres and our students’ writing? Perhaps, more importantly, what do we know about genre knowledge and our students’ writing? How might genre knowledge inform our teaching and our assignments? In this special session, Dylan Dryer will lead faculty in examining these questions. We will also consider some methodological problems regarding genre research that can impact writing instruction and learning. Lunch will be served.
Workshop: Using Keystroke Logging in Writing Research
We are pleased to invite you for a two-day workshop on "Using Keystroke Logging in Writing Research," to be held at MIT in Boston (MA) from April 30 to May 1, 2016. The main objective is to bring together a group of researchers and to introduce them to current methods of collecting and analyzing writing process data. The primary focus will be on the use of keystroke logging (Inputlog). By bringing together a specialized group of motivated researchers, we hope to support and further stimulate process-related research in the domain of writing.
For more information or to register, please visit the workshop's information page.
Benjamin F. Barge and Class of 1866 Prizes for Oratory Speech Contest
Date: April 28, 2016
Time: 4:30 pm - 6:45 pm
Location: Treasure Room, Room 111 Baker Library (east side of 1st Floor, down a hallway)
The final round of this speech competition for the historic Benjamin F. Barge and Class of 1866 Awards for Oratory features students competing for cash prizes by presenting original persuasive speeches to a public audience and a panel of judges. One senior will win the Benjamin F. Barge award, and one junior and one sophomore will win a Class of 1866 award. Each winner will receive a cash prize, and all finalists will receive certificates. A reception and award presentation will follow in the Ferguson Room (Room 206 Baker Library). Free and open to the public.
Faculty Workshop: Discussion Session, Naming What We Know
Date: Thursday, March 31, 2016
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Presenters: Wendy Piper and Christiane Donahue
This will be the pre-meeting for all Writing 2/3, Writing 5, and Humanities 1 faculty who might be interested in joining a spring term reading group led by Wendy Piper. The text for this group will be Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, a collection of short statements by some of the most active researchers in composition studies on foundational concepts in the field. The book’s introduction will be circulated before the session; faculty can join the reading group after the session. Lunch will be served.
Faculty Workshop: Fear Shot: Inoculating Students against Public Speaking Anxieties before Presentations
Date: Thursday, March 3, 2016
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Decades of attitudinal inoculation research have confirmed that we can protect against persuasive attacks in much the same way we can protect against viral attacks—through pre-exposure to weakened forms of the attack. More recently, inoculation scholars have tried inoculation-based messaging against unconventional attacks, like the temptation to engage in academic misconduct. In this interactive Institute for Writing and Rhetoric-sponsored session for faculty, Josh Compton will share preliminary results of a recently completed study on inoculating college students against unhealthy public speaking anxieties prior to their in-class presentations and share ways that we can talk with our students about their speeches, their preparation, and their roles as audience members and classroom collaborators to lead to better speaking and learning experiences. Lunch will be served.
Public Q&A with Presidential Speechwriters
Date: Thursday, February 25, 2016
Time: 4:00 – 5:00 pm
Location: Room L01 Carson Hall, Dartmouth College
The Institute for Writing and Rhetoric will host two presidential speechwriters for a public Q&A session. Don Baer (President Clinton) and Clark Judge (President Reagan) will talk with the Dartmouth community in Carson L01 on Thursday, February 25th, from 4-5pm. For more information, see: http://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/presidential-speechwriters-speak-dartmouth
Faculty Workshop: Teaching Writing, Faculty Disciplines, and Adaptable Knowledge
Special Guest Presenter: Chris Anson, Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University
Date: Thursday, February 18, 2016
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Writing courses at Dartmouth are taught by faculty with a very diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds. Students therefore experience within their first Dartmouth year the need to adapt the reading, writing and speaking knowledge they develop in one course to the new demands of the next course (as well as to courses they are taking outside the first-year writing sequence). This Institute for Writing and Rhetoric session will explore our disciplines and our disciplinary identities as faculty, and the way these identities shape what we value and teach, in relation to what we know from research and practice about how to best foster students’ ability to develop writing knowledge they can successfully adapt across contexts. Lunch will be served.
Faculty Workshop: Arguing about Argumentation
Date: Thursday, February 4, 2016
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
What are we asking for when we ask students to write an argument? Within a narrow understanding, we might understand argumentation to mean the delivery of a set of rhetorical moves: claims, grounds, warrants, evidence, reasoning, concessions, refutations. More broadly, we might hold that everything is an argument, that all texts necessarily constitute argumentation. This session for faculty will consider this range of understanding and explore its consequences for teaching argument. The workshop is sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, and lunch will be served.
Faculty Workshop: Grading Student Writing
Date: Thursday, January 21, 2016
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
This workshop for faculty, sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, will focus on the difficult task of assigning grades to student writing. We assign, we read, and we respond to student essays. But the most challenging moments often occur when we grade those same essays. In this session, we will work to reduce some of the angst and uncertainty that comes with grading by considering our evaluation rationales and exploring the common ground of our grading practices. Lunch will be served.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Thursday, November 19, 2015
8:30 am - 1:30 pm
DCAL, 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that participants have declared most relevant to their upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, diagnosing and responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a couple of years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Faculty Workshop: "Claims and Evidence in Students' First-Year Projects"
Thursday, October 22, 2015
12:00 – 1:30 pm
DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Presenter: Christiane Donahue
Our learning outcomes call for students to support claims with evidence. What do we mean by evidence? What kinds of evidence matter to us? This interactive session, sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, will begin with a brief review of what Institute studies have revealed about kinds of evidence our first-year students use in their work, and will focus on deliberating together about types of evidence as related to genres and disciplines and about how to foster students’ ability to flexibly adapt to the evidence demands of different contexts. Lunch will be served.
Faculty Workshop: Teaching Team Writing
Monday, October 5, 2015
4:00 – 5:30 pm
DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Presenters: Jane Kokernak and Jessie Stickgold-Sarah (MIT) and Melissa Herman (Dartmouth)
Collaborative work has many benefits, from accomplishing large tasks to developing richer results. As instructors, we want our students to experience these benefits and go beyond task sharing. In effective collaboration, students motivate, learn from, and teach each other. Our recent research indicates that scaffolding team structure and processes leads to stronger, self-directed teams. In this workshop, sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, we will examine key concepts of collaboration and share tools for teaching. Participants are encouraged to bring an assignment for student teams. Refreshments will be served.
Faculty Workshop: "Tools for Multimodal Composition"
Date: Thursday, October 1, 2015
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Presenter: Megan McIntyre.
This interactive workshop, sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, will focus on tools for crafting multimodal texts. Participants will discuss the ways in which multimodal composition encourages rhetorical flexibility as well as how students might use multimodal inquiry and composition to explore and develop arguments. Participants will then experiment with five free web-based tools that offer particular affordances for writing courses. Participants will leave the session with hands-on experience with at least one tool as well as descriptions of at least four others. Lunch will be served.
First-year Seminar Faculty Half Day Workshop
Friday, September 11, 2015
12:00 pm - 4:00pm
DCAL, 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that participants have declared most relevant to their upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, diagnosing and responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a couple of years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
First-year Seminar Faculty Half Day Workshop
Thursday, June 4, 2015
8:30am - 1:30pm
DCAL, 102 Baker Library
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that participants have declared most relevant to their upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, diagnosing and responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a couple of years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Communicating with Our Students: New Ideas, Productive Practices
Thursday, May 21, 2015
12:00 - 1:30 pm
DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
In this session, Deanna Dannels, Professor of Communication at North Carolina State University, will lead a workshop focused on key takeaways from her recent book, Eight Essential Questions Teachers Ask: A Guidebook for Communicating with Students (see the TOC at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199330999/). After a brief presentation, Professor Dannels will work with participants to deepen understanding of particular questions relevant to the writing and speech classroom. Participants will read the short introduction to the book in advance and will be asked to identify the questions most relevant to their teaching. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and co-sponsored by DCAL. Lunch will be served.
Multilingual First-Year Writers: Paraphrase, Translation, and Sources
Thursday, May 7, 2015
12:00 - 1:30 pm
DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
In this session, Christiane Donahue will present highlights of current research about multilingual writers in first-year writing courses: the resources they bring and the challenges they face, in particular in terms of working with source material. Participants will engage in some multilingual composing activity during the session (no knowledge of a second language required!) and will develop specific activities to use in the classroom focused on interaction with course readings and with research activity. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Lunch will be served.
Fear(s) of Public Speaking in the Classroom: How to Talk About It and What to Do About It
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
12:30 - 2:00 pm
DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Whether we’re asking our students to prepare capstone end-of-term speeches or guiding regular in-class discussions, our students’ fears of public speaking are often inevitable factors of classroom communication. Even in speech classes, we sometimes struggle with the best ways to talk about these fears and the best ways to help our students work through them. In this session, speech professors Josh Compton and Yana Grushina will share some of their experiences with helping students with their fears of public speaking and will talk about what some of the latest research has found about best classroom practices to promote healthier, more effective public speaking environments. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Lunch will be served.
The 2015 Benjamin F. Barge and Class of 1866 Prizes for Oratory Speech Contest
Thursday, April 16, 2015
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Treasure Room, Baker Library
Free and open to the public.
Come see the student finalists give short speeches on a variety of interesting topics in a competition for cash prizes. Reception and award presentations will follow.
Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, the Benjamin F. Barge Fund and the Class of 1866 Fund.
For more information visit: http://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/curriculum/prizes
First as Tragedy. Then as Farce. Then as Tweet. – Toward a Theory of Social Media Praxis
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2014
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 pm
Occom Commons, Goldstein Hall, McLaughlin Dormitory Cluster, Dartmouth College
Free and open to the public.
Join us for a conversation with Eric Jarosinski, Editor of @NeinQuarterly, the Internet's leading "Compendium of Utopian Negation," about his use of social media to form a unique online community interested in Critical Theory, culture, literature, art, German grammar, and other assorted specters haunting Europe.
Of the many academics who have turned to social media in recent years, Eric Jarosinski has quickly become one of the most visible. Inspired by an interest in modern European culture and politics, his satirical daily commentary on world events has clearly demonstrated the unique potential of a platform such as Twitter to reach new audiences outside of academia. At the same time, he has also worked to breathe new life into classical forms such as the philosophical aphorism by adapting them to a new technology and a dramatically transformed social context.
In addition to his work online, Jarosinski also writes a weekly column for the leading German weekly Die Zeit and the prestigious Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad. His work has been featured in numerous international publications –including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Der Spiegel – and his first book, Nein. A Manifesto., will be published this fall. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, DCAL, Dean of Faculty, German Studies, Leslie Center for the Humanities, and Philosophy
140 Characters in Search of a Reader: Twitter as Way of Learning and Mode of Expression
Date: Thursday, April 9
Time: 12 - 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
In our age of positive thinking, Eric Jarosinski’s fictitious "Compendium of Utopian Negation" on Twitter has garnered over 100,000 followers in 125 countries. As @NeinQuarterly, Jarosinski is now one of the most influential cultural voices on social media. Once an Ivy League professor, he tweets about philosophy, language, literature, European politics, and everything in between. He is followed by several heads of state, as well as a host of journalists, academics, students, and other people who like to think. At this workshop, Jarosinski will talk about the art of the Twitter aphorism, discuss the formation and complex dynamics of an online community, and share his ideas about using Twitter to engage students with each other and the "world's global consciousness" (as Twitter has been described). Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Lunch will be served.
What Is a Good Question?
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
12:30 - 2:00 pm
DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
Questions are used ubiquitously in social life, and they are also common teaching and learning tools, but how often do we consider the nature of what makes a good question? How do we recognize good questions, ask them, and teach our students to do the same? What are good question-centered assignment designs for the writing and speaking classrooms? Drawing from a recent book by David A. Westbrook, "Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters," which tackles the nature of "conversation as method" by focusing on dialogue as a vital way of knowing across the disciplines, this session will explore classical and contemporary uses of questions in teaching, research, and daily life. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Lunch will be served.
First-year Portfolios: Insights into Student Learning and Experiences
Date: Thursday, February 5, 2015
Time: 12 - 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, Room 102 Baker Library
First-year students in the Institute’s pilot portfolio project collect their work from Writing 2-3, Writing 5, First-year Seminar, and Humanities 1-2, identify what they consider to be their best work, complete end-of-term self-reflections, and meet with their FYS instructor early in the FYS to share their best work sample. Three faculty members have studied the 2014 portfolios, looking at: 1) the effect of student perceptions of similarity/dissimilarity between the first and second courses on their adaptation of knowledge across these courses; 2) student writing quality in relation to students' self assessments; and 3) student self-efficacy beliefs in relation to academic writing performance. In this Institute-sponsored session, we will informally discuss what they have learned, look at examples of the work and reflections, and consider how it might inform our teaching. Lunch will be served.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Thursday, November 20, 2014
Time: 8:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: Baker Library Room 213
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that participants have declared most relevant to their upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, diagnosing and responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a couple of years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Annotated Bibliographies: Preparing for Research, Doing Research, Imagining Research
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2014
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Rockefeller Center, Class of 1930 Room
This session, co-hosted by librarian Laura Braunstein and the Institute’s Christiane Donahue, will focus on annotated bibliographies in writing courses in the form of both informal and formal assignments. We will discuss various roles for research in first-year writing courses and work through ways to develop annotated bibliography activities or assignments in various class configurations. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Lunch will be served.
Public Listening: What the Latest Research Tells us About How, When, and Why Audiences Listen to Presentations
Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
In this interactive session, Josh Compton will share what some of the latest research tells us about the listening habits of audiences, including how, when, and why people listen, and the effects audience responses have on the speech experience. How can we better prepare students to listen well when they are audiences for their classmates? How can we help student speakers to better respond to their classroom audiences? Can a good dialogic experience between speaker and audience lead to better dialogues in classroom discussions, peer review sessions, and beyond--and if so, how can we help to foster this? Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Lunch will be served.
The Writing Conference: Micro-Teaching, Macro-Effect
Date: Thursday, October 2, 2014
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
Writing conferences have been at the heart of first-year writing instruction for decades. They are generally rich, time-intensive, and complex. Are they equally effective for all students, and if so, how? What works best in a conference? This session, led by Christiane Donahue, will emphasize the importance of conferencing and explore ways to maximize a writing conference’s effects, to employ them within and outside of classes, and to imagine adaptable configurations for them in different class structures. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Lunch will be served.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Time: 8:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
Registration is required for this event.
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that participants have declared most relevant to their upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, diagnosing and responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a couple of years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Thursday, May 29, 2014
Time: 8:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
Registration is required for this event.
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that participants have declared most relevant to their upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, diagnosing and responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a couple of years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Space, Design, and Format: Key Principles and Teaching Practices
Date: Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Time: 12:30 – 2 pm
Presenter: Josh Compton and Alan Taylor
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
Whether it's about creating Powerpoints, multimodal composing, analyzing images, or just formatting writing more effectively--we all think about space, design, and visual persuasion. However, legendary scholar of design and visualization, Edward Tufte, argues that many of our attempts to foster learning and transfer information are actually counterproductive. In this interactive session sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, two colleagues who recently attended a Tufte workshop will share some of what they learned about space, design, and visual persuasion. Lunch will be served.
First-year Writing and Canvas: New Strategies, New Possibilities
Date: Thursday, April 3, 2014
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Presenters: Claudia Anguiano, Ashley Kehoe, and Doug Moody
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
The College has made the decision to move from the Blackboard Learning Management System to the Canvas system (see http://sites.dartmouth.edu/canvas/). Among the new features Canvas enables is the option to connect courses’ learning outcomes to specific activities and assignments. Several Institute for Writing and Rhetoric faculty are among the early adopters for Canvas. This session will offer examples from these faculty and from members of the Instructional Design team (Educational Technologies) of the kinds of uses of Canvas we have begun to adopt in first-year writing courses, and will show faculty the learning outcomes function. The session will conclude with brainstorming about how this function might support both the use and the revision of our course outcomes. Lunch will be served.
Library Research in First-Year Writing: Outcomes and Expectations
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2014
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Presenters: Laura Braunstein and Jill Baron
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
What do we want students to be able to do as a result of our library research sessions in first-year writing? This workshop, facilitated by librarians Laura Braunstein and Jill Baron, will offer examples of successful library-faculty collaborations to foster a conversation among faculty and librarians about common outcomes and expectations for library research in first-year writing courses. In this Institute for Writing and Rhetoric session, we will share and discuss effective library research assignments from Writing 2/3, Writing 5, and First-year Seminars. Lunch will be served.
Adaptable Writing Knowledge? Case Studies from Dartmouth Research on First-year Writing
Date: Thursday, January 30, 2014
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Presenters: Jed Dobson, Christiane Donahue, Lisa Lopez Snyder, Doug Moody, and Jenn Sargent
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
The Dartmouth Davis Study of First-year Student Writing collected and analyzed student essays from 2010-2013, studying patterns each year in 700 student essays across the first year courses. Results from that study have been reported on in previous Institute workshops. This past summer, Institute faculty read 25 case studies drawn from this larger study: essays from the same 25 students from the beginning to the end of their first-year sequence. We compared student strategies for introductions, conclusions, source use, and source integration from their Writing 2-3/5 to their First-year Seminar. In this session, offered by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, writing faculty Jed Dobson, Doug Moody, Lisa Lopez Snyder, Jenn Sargent, and Christiane Donahue will share highlights of what they learned and how it can inform our efforts to teach students writing strategies and choices that can be re-used and adapted in new contexts. Lunch will be served.
Teaching and Learning Analysis in Student Writing
Date: Thursday, January 16, 2014
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Presenter: Christiane Donahue
Location: DCAL, 102 Baker Library
The heart of good academic writing is often described as strong analysis. But what exactly do we mean by analysis, and how might we teach students to analyze? Where does this ability fit in the broader set of abilities we hope students in first-year writing courses will develop, refine, and then adapt in future contexts? How might we scaffold this learning within a given writing course and across first-year courses? This session, offered by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, will focus on planning and designing ways to teach analysis that enable adaptability across contexts. Lunch will be served.
Invitational Feedback: Creating a Transformative Classroom Environment
Date: Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Time: 3:00 pm - 4:30pm
Location: DCAL (Room 102 Baker Library)
It can be challenging for faculty, whether teaching speech or writing, to give constructive, honest, and engaged feedback around critical discussions of topics like race, gender, or sexuality. In this Institute for Writing and Rhetoric session, Speech professor Claudia Anguiano invites dialogue about vulnerable feedback and evidence of how varying comfort levels can impact our classroom interactions and our success in communicating our feedback. The mode of communication that will be presented, based in an invitational rhetoric framework developed in the field of Speech, is characterized by a respectful response to diverse environments and offers useful considerations for communicating with our students. Refreshments will be served.
First-year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Date: Friday, October 25, 2013
Time: 12:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
While this small-group workshop will address issues common to all first-year seminar faculty, it will be customized to consider in particular those issues that participants have declared most relevant to their upcoming seminars. Our discussions might therefore include matters like assignment design, diagnosing and responding to student papers, designing research instruction, incorporating peer review into the writing classroom, or any other matter of interest to the participants. Although this workshop is designed for faculty new to the FYS program, experienced faculty are also welcome, in particular faculty offering a new version of a seminar, or coming back after a couple of years not teaching a seminar. Lunch will be served. Sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
Student Voices on Transformative Writing Knowledge: Sharing Students’ Reflections from the Portfolio Project
Date: Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
The Institute for Writing and Rhetoric invites a small sample of first-year students, each year, to keep portfolios of their work across their first-year writing course sequence, to reflect on their best writing from each course, and to talk about what they see connecting the work in Writing 2-3 or 5 to the First-year Seminar. In this Institute for Writing and Rhetoric session, colleagues Josh Compton, Michelle Cox, Asia Rowe, and Christiane Donahue will share insights from students’ voices in the portfolio project and lead a discussion about how these insights might shape our teaching. Lunch will be served.
The Art of Presidential Speechwriting - Public Talk
Date: Thursday, October 10, 2013
Time: 4 - 5 pm
Location: Room L02 Carson Hall
The Institute for Writing and Rhetoric will host "The Art of Presidential Speechwriting" sponsored by the Year of the Arts series. Two presidential speechwriters--Don Baer (Bill Clinton) and Michael Gerson (George W. Bush)--will give a talk to the Dartmouth community in Carson L02 on Thursday, October 10th, from 4-5pm. For more information contact: Claudia Anguiano, email: speech@dartmouth.edu
All faculty, staff and students are invited to attend.
“That Was a Great Discussion!” Scaffolding to Transform Discussion in a Writing Course
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2013
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
Last year, writing faculty worked together on understanding how to “scaffold” writing assignments in ways that optimize students’ ability to grow as writers from the beginning to the end of a course. Discussions in our writing courses, generally linked to the material we ask students to read or to related topics, are most often considered successful when they are lively, students are engaged, and new ideas and understandings emerge. But they can also be designed to scaffold growth in writing and reading. This session, offered by the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, will introduce participants to a couple of key ideas about “scaffolding” and then turn to planning and designing class discussions for maximum effect and complexity. Lunch will be served.
Enabling Flexible Writing Knowledge: The Assignment ⇔ Grading Relationship
Date: Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Location: DCAL (102 Baker Library)
We know generally what we value in students’ work, what serves as the basis for the grades we assign. Different assignments might enable different abilities, however; values change across contexts; grading often seems to run counter to our overall goal of helping students to improve. In this Institute for Writing and Rhetoric session, we will consider the relationships among assignments, grading criteria, grading processes, and “good writing.” How can grading support students’ ability to flexibly adapt their growing writing knowledge across assignments? What are students learning from our grading? Participants will work with assignments and grading criteria from their courses. Lunch will be served.