Lucie Berjoan - Blog Post 5

 I found the perspective of the Writing Across Borders video to be incredibly helpful and informative. I was reminded a bit of my time in Amsterdam and being in class with students from a wide variety of countries. Although it wasn't a strict academic setting, there were definite cultural differences that arose and (more often than not) American and European voices were the dominant ones in the conversation. These videos wish that my program had employed a more diverse collection of teaches from countries outside of the Eurocentric academic institutions. While I think it is tricky to formulate one approach to teaching students from different backgrounds, I really resonated with what Vicki Tolar Burton said around 8:02 in part 2 about having an intentional conversation with each of her international students. I think this is a great way to approach the "problem" of cultural diversity and open up conversation about the potential differences that might arise. In a classroom context, it could be beneficial to reach a consensus with the entire class about what expectations for papers, grammar, etc. will look like throughout the course. This would also allow for students from different American backgrounds to voice their thoughts on the matter and allow for a common learning goal regardless of individual backgrounds. In a writing center context, I think it gets a little trickier. Similar to our conversation last week, it's hard to know what to do when the teachers that these students are writing for have varied expectations. I do, however, think it is always a good idea to open up a conversation with the student and ask if they're looking for help with grammar or the concepts or what. 

Comments

  1. ConorSeptember 28, 2020 at 1:51 PM

    Really love the practical focus here! Definitely agree that it seems most valuable (and realistic) to work with each individual student on what they want to work on (after providing as clear as possible the likely outcomes of any given choice).

    I'm very intrigued by the idea of classroom norms for paper expectations that are democratically generated. We made a 'class charter' that way as a rhetoric class this semester and it both encourages and discourages me about the likely success of such an endeavor, haha. I wonder what the proper prep would be for the students and how to create something that would be clear to use in actually evaluating student writing. Lots of fascinating ideas here!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Andrew post 9

I think it's vitally important for writing center staff to keep abreast of writing center scholarship. Because students who visit writing centers vary widely in their proficiency, their motivations for seeking help, and economic/identity categories, and bring in work from disparate disciplines, staff need to be adaptable to multitudinous tutoring relationships and scenarios. Requiring staff to go through practicum courses (held on maybe a biennial basis) and holding regular department forums where tutors can present research or seek counsel would help keep everyone on the same page with regard to the latest findings and debates in writing center theory and practice. However, I don't think that it's reasonable expect that each member regularly conduct their own research, since many tutors are graduate students or full time instructors whose resources are often already stretched thin on account of pressures to produce writing/research in their own field of study. Asking too m...
Read more

Andrew blog post #10

 I'm usually fairly confident working with writers outside my discipline. I think part of that has to do with my own experience as an undergraduate, where I switched majors from political science to literature to philosophy then, finally, to psychology. To my mind, basic critical thinking skills--the kind that I teach my students in my rhetoric classes--apply just as much to qualitative analyses as they do to quantitative/empirical analyses. Questions of audience and purpose factor into effective writing and communication--approaching any paper, regardless of the class that it's for, I always push writers to ask themselves how much information is necessary for them to provide to contextualize an argument, and remind them that each item of evidence they introduce has to be accompanied by an explanation of its relevance to their overarching thesis. One of my writing center students' first assignment for his rhetoric class was to write a paper about his major (bio-medical engi...
Read more

Andrew blog post 4

Perhaps one way to promote appreciation of other "Englishes," as the CCCC statement (as much as they would disapprove of the use of the term) is to recalibrate considerations of style in writing pedagogy, one that demonstrates that what we call "standard English" is but one among many modes of expression that can be modulated according to varying purposes/audiences. Many people, I think, don't particularly enjoy reading academic English, which, besides imposing oppressive standards on marginalized people, is often a clumsy, bland, and inefficient means of expression; writing is most effective when it comes off as the work of a singular voice and intellect.  Students' general education in universities should also include critical studies of how languages are products of conquest. This, of course, has been a constant throughout history--consider how Spanish and Portuguese integrated Arabic vocabulary by virtue of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. However...
Read more