Christiane Donahue

Multiple Assessments of a First-Year Seminar Pilot

We found mixed support for a four-credit first-year seminars positive impact on student engagement and academic performance but none for retention or intellectual growth. Our findings support the importance of shifting focus away from retention, increasing clarity about types of seminars, and using multiple measures and alternative indicators of impact.

Writing and Teaching the Disciplines in France Current Conversations and Connections

Writing in the disciplines (WiD) and writing across the curriculum (WAC) are important university-wide intellectual projects often grounded in liberal arts and general education philosophies. In France, WiD/WAC discussions are growing out of the curricular realities of writing as central to success in all disciplines and of a new student population obtaining access to higher education. These curricular issues are framed by a complex history of who takes responsibility for teaching writing and for researching the teaching of writing.This article presents the threads of these discussions at two recent French conferences, where debate about writing to learn, writing as meaning-making, writing in the disciplines, argument strategies across disciplines, forms of voice, intertextuality, and writing as membership in a domain were central. WiD programs of the kind supported by Cornell’s Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines might be quite effective in this very different cultural setting.

Writing, Speaking, and the Disciplines at Dartmouth's Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.

The US field of composition studies and the subfields of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines have focused on the relationships between teaching, language and knowledge. The Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric develops these relationships through courses in writing and speech, student support and faculty development. These introductory notes frame the two articles that follow, reflecting issues within this broader framework that are less studied in writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WiD) literature, but are central to collegial dialogue and intentional preparatory teaching.

Student Writing as Negotiation

This chapter develops out of a broader study of 250 texts which were produced by 11th–13th grade students from both the US and France and were collected over a five-year period. The students were asked to create argumentative texts in which they explored questions about social issues after having read various (full or excerpted pieces of) published texts on these issues. The texts produced by the students are analyzed not as constellations of a stable set of linguistic-textual features, but as the result of a dynamic set of social and rhetorical negotiating moves in the discursive spaces of the school situation. The discussion explores a few of the interesting points of the tension between convention and creativity that have been located in six French students’ texts. Student writers use what M.L. Pratt calls “literate arts” to construct their texts. We can localize these arts in the identification and description of students’ movements of “reprise-modification” (Francois, 1998). This concept is a natural extension of Bakhtin’s dialogics, with each utterance acting as “a link in a chain.” Attention is directed to the identification of those textual movements with which students play with reproduction, reprise of the expected, but also proceed to the invention of the new, and modify the texts they encounter in the act of appropriating school discourse. The writer’s work between the common and the specific is part of the essential nature of school writing. As proposed, this analysis permits a better understanding of how average students’ texts interact with readings and with both cultural and educational commonplaces, working from the already-said and respecting — at least some but rarely all of — the limits of school expectations. This insight into students’ discursive activities subtly changes the way we read students’ work.