Wednesday, October 14

You signed up for coaching times - they are posted at google.docs.
I have made you all collaborators - so you can change your times online and everyone can see them. (Click here to go to the document. After you edit - be sure to save). You can adjust and re-assign yourselves by editing your hours. (If you have trouble send me an email and I will change them.) Hopefully you will have everything figured out by Friday - at which point Ryan will put the hours in the system & I will send them out to instructors so they can tell their students.

We spent most of the class talking about Shamoon and Burns' discussion of when to deviate from writing center "orthodoxy" and take more directive approaches. They pointed out that directing students to models, using "master class" approaches, and providing "edits" may be appropriate when students are not "experts," when they need to learn a new "subject position" (way of representing themselves - a new "persona"), or when they are new to academic literacies (or any other set of conventions for writing). In our wrap-up discussion we identified groups/individuals who might benefit from more directive approaches as including:
- ESL learners
- returning adult students
- new students
- students from "non-mainstream" cultures
- differently abled students who might need more information or cues in social or academic conventions

For Monday:
Blog 9: Do some writing about what interests you in terms of a research project.

Look through the Barnett & Blumer text (all of those essays are about "writing center research") and check out the sample reserch papers and the writing center publications (links at the bottom of this blog). Hopefully you will be able to choose something that interests you.

In class we will go over how to set up a session, and review the forms you need to present to the student (if you are taking data). I will also introduce your research project and we will get started on the planning process.

Have a great weekend.