Higher Education Events

How can we foster student engagement in the classroom--making reading and writing about literature an exciting enterprise? This session explores how to create dynamic classrooms proposing that, as students do more and more work online, the in-person and in-real-time space of the classroom can be harnessed for new forms of engaged learning.

In this session, we will show you new methods for teaching argument in ways that go beyond the "persuasive argument" strategies found in almost all argument textbooks. Today's outdated textbooks offer methods that were developed centuries ago, specifically for spoken monologues and written essays. We will show you how to teach your students "generative" argument strategies such as framing, identification, negotiation, and narrative, which work better in today's networked and socially-mediated environments.

This presentation will discuss best practices in combining Developmental English and Reading courses while incorporating technology. The planning and implementation of Integrated Reading and English courses, along with data collection, will also be discussed.

Well over half of the students on a college campus have taken courses to remediate them in math, writing, or reading. As professors, we may be familiar with their academic background, but we might not realize the affective issues that could impede their success. In our session, we will discuss the cultural and sociological factors that can stunt student success, and we will offer ways to help students succeed in spite of their challenges

While the movement toward integrating reading and writing curriculum is clearly happening across the country, there is still a tendency to teach reading and writing that is disengaged from meaningful academic content. This trend toward integration presents an opportunity for developmental educators to align their curriculum more closely with what is expected from students in 100-level content courses. We believe that students will be more academically prepared to meet the rigorous requirements of these content courses and will be more engaged in the learning process if they are exposed to real academic content while they are still in remediation

Have you read one too many personal narratives about high school graduation? Developmental writing instructors often focus on narrative and descriptive writing and first-person reflections. You might want to introduce writing from sources but aren’t sure how to do it. Maybe you hesitate to delve into quoting and paraphrasing at the developmental level. This presentation will provide tips and techniques to beef up developmental writing assignments and give them an academic focus. We will discuss ways to ease students into college-level writing by using readings as models and sources of content

Teachers of writing courses now live in an age of acceleration. Unfortunately, some students seek shortcuts, skim reading materials, and discount the writing process. Our challenge is to maintain course rigor and standards in this environment. In the webinar, we’ll discuss how to impart in-depth analytical and critical thinking skills in basic writing and college composition courses. We’ll also provide some usable methods and strategies to slow down and challenge students to do the thinking and writing they need to be successful in our courses and their careers.

The workshop will recognize the challenges facing instructors teaching integrated reading and writing courses and demonstrate how scaffolded instruction can address those concerns. Challenges include teaching within an accelerated time frame, moving students from literal comprehension to critical thinking, and encouraging students to become more independent thinkers and writers. Scaffolded instruction leads students from less to more difficult and challenging tasks while providing them with diminishing instructional guidance

This presentation will consider the new WPA standards as they apply to the field of composition, with special emphasis on multimodal approaches to writing. We are facing an entirely new breed of students who have grown up as visual and verbal learners, so we need to help them join the academic conversation from their most accessible point of entry. To this end, we must consider multimodal reading and writing as an integral part of academic literacy

We all know it: commenting on student writing is the most important—and most difficult and time-consuming—work that we writing instructors do. With increasing class sizes and course loads, managing the writing of comments in ways that work both for student and instructor borders on impossible. So what if we just stopped writing on our students’ papers? What happens when we replace written feedback with spoken comments? In this webinar, I’ll explain how adopting audio commenting has transformed my work. I’ll share a variety of audio feedback strategies and make the case for putting down the pen for good

Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is one of our field’s most enduring and influential guides to prose style. Williams approaches style from a linguistic perspective: he identifies features of sentences, passages, and documents that lead readers to experience writing as clear, coherent, and graceful, and he shows writers how they can use these features to make their own texts more readable.

The presentation will focus on the vital role that engagement plays in a composition course. When students have a vested interest in the subject about which they are writing, they are much, much more likely to invest time and energy into their work. When they care about the subject about which they are writing, they want to do their best because the writing matters to them; they are writing to communicate ideas that are important to them—not simply writing to complete the assignment and earn a passing grade.