Tuesday, September 14

Tonight you got to "practice what you read" in the coaching handbook. As I said in class, these chapters have many good tips & strategies for work in all stages of the writing process. You may want to check back on them when you start work in the center.

After getting a taste of coaching - we had a too-short discussion of how institutional cultures - the assumptions, values, beliefs and practices that are the "way it is" at schools and universities. We made a quick list of characteristics of the culture of writing here at Kean University. This is important to reflect on because the culture of writing drives many of the "problems" that walk into a writing center. Some of the features of the academy's culture of writing that we listed on the board include:

• valuing (privileging) if dominant cultural forms for language and genre
• emphasis on correctness
• school writing is valued as a means to a "grade" or a "job" => for it's use (rather than for pleasure or its art)
• teacher centered in terms of content and form (hierarchical, top-down systems for evaluating writing content and form)
• must be "clear" where clear is code for in the dominant language forms

Admittedly, this list focuses on the power relationships within the academic writing culture - and as we pointed out in class - academic writing culture is not really all one thing - it is "both and" for a lot of practices and concepts.

For Thursday:

Blog 3: Write a description of Kean University's culture of writing. I suggested in class that you lurk around one another's blogs - and feel free to riff of ideas you find there. Report your impressions + experiences with what is expected for academic writing, how it is used, what is valued (and de-valued).

For example - at the English Department Retreat it was suggested that we make a department policy to forbid the use of laptops in classes (except when students were working on papers). What values for digital writing are implied by that suggestion?

Read: Guide, Bouquet, p. 41. This is a history of writing centers/labs -and it tells us something about our heritage - and our culture. I said I was going to post the tough words - but now I am thinking I would rather you brought those words to class and we can work out more interactive definitions/explorations through talk.

On Thursday we will dig deeper into connections among writing, institutional culture and what happens in writing centers.

Things are moving right along! Thanks for your good work and see you Thursday.