Past Events

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.

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.

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 18^th — 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.