How does a university encourage high standards of academic literacy while embracing a diverse population of varied linguistic traditions?

That question was at the heart of the 2004 University Writing Center Symposium on Literacy. Held at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum on October 8, the symposium marked the inauguration of Texas A&M’s new writing-intensive course requirement for undergraduates. The symposium was held as part of Literacy Across Cultures, a two-day celebration of literacy with presentations by both local and visiting scholars.

Dr. James Anderson, Vice President and Associate Provost for Institutional Assessment and Diversity at Texas

Dr. Nancy Grimm, Associate Professor of Humanities at Michigan Technological University and director of MTU’s writing center

Director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University

“The UWC Symposium on Literacy presented a great opportunity to bring together faculty and administrators from across campus to explore our assumptions about literacy, particularly as those assumptions relate to diversity,” said Dr. Valerie Balester, Executive Director of the University Writing Center.

“The three scholars we invited to speak,” Balester continued, “share a belief that when a university community embraces cultural diversity, it enhances the development of critical literacy by broadening perspectives and challenging assumptions. These speakers also share a commitment to the idea that writing must play a fundamental role in undergraduate education in every discipline.”

Dr. James Anderson, Vice President and Associate Provost for Institutional Assessment and Diversity at Texas A&M, addressed the need for university leadership to embrace diversity by creating an environment that supports cross-cultural dialogue and critical thinking. Anderson, who came to Texas A&M in November of 2003 after serving as the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs at North Carolina State University, stressed the importance of preparing students to be effective in a pluralistic society. Asked after the conference to reflect on the topic, Anderson observed that it’s not enough for a university to establish literacy requirements; it must foster an institutional respect for literacy.

“It’s the responsibility of TAMU,” Anderson stated, “to help students to devalue the notion that they are taking writing and speaking courses to simply fulfill a requirement. Instead they should assertively choose to engage in writing that is embedded in the disciplines and that signals that the student must account for different contexts, audiences, and purposes.”

“Writing and speaking across the curriculum,” noted Anderson, “should be supported with appropriate resources and linked to initiatives that promote cognitive outcomes like critical thinking and active learning.”

Active learning is also a key concept for Dr. Nancy Grimm, Associate Professor of Humanities at Michigan Technological University and director of MTU’s writing center, who reflected in her presentation on the idea that true learning is less about “covering” material than about giving students the opportunity to engage with subject matter in a way that transforms them. Grimm’s view is in some ways at odds with the desire to hold students accountable to conventional standards.

“Our ideas about literacy are haunted by the assumptions of a monolingual society,” said Grimm. “Too often the word ‘literacy’ is used to signify competent practice of the standard (or dominant) code or the ability to read and write in error-free and ‘coherent’ ways. Literacy is imagined as something that seamlessly transfers from one classroom to another, just as words are imagined as little boxes or containers used to convey meaning and teaching is imagined as covering material.”

For Grimm, that limited view of literacy has little to do with genuine learning.

“For real learning to occur, learners need to travel through the mess of incorrectness and experience the internal incoherence that results when we discover that our current model of the world is inadequate,” claimed Grimm. “Teachers need to distance themselves from a model of literacy that expects just-in-time correctness and coherence.”

In an email interview, Grimm expanded on her idea of the need for a new model of literacy, noting that “lots of traditional writing assignments have functioned as ways to rank or evaluate students by catching errors in their thinking or errors in their language. These are rarely empowering or engaging activities for students (with the exception of the very gifted students who can display their excellence). If faculty can design writing assignments that have a purpose beyond the classroom or that allow students to play with ideas without fear of being ‘wrong,’ then writing will be a way of exerting the power of a new way of thinking.”

Dr. Beverly Moss, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University, focused her talk on the ways in which a university writing center can meet a diverse population’s need for literacy instruction. The issue of diversity and the need to communicate effectively in a variety of contexts are very real concerns for Moss, since the OSU center she directs not only serves university students, but also conducts community outreach literacy projects.

One of the problems Moss works to overcome is having a writing center staff that is overwhelmingly white and middle class serving a population that is significantly more diverse. While Moss actively seeks to hire a more diverse staff, she also trains all of her staff members to appreciate the linguistic strengths of those who speak other varieties of English (Spanglish, Ebonics) or languages other than English.

In an interview after the conference, Moss had advice for those teaching writing in multicultural settings.

“Look for the meaning first,” Moss advised. She encouraged both students and faculty to give priority to understanding a writer’s message. Her reasoning was as straightforward as her advice: “I think if we focus on the academic conventions, we might miss something wonderful that a student is trying to communicate.”

Moss also encouraged those teaching Texas A&M’s new W courses to realize they know more about writing than they may give themselves credit for.

She also encouraged faculty members to think “about how writing can work in the service of what they do in a class. Maybe there’s something they’re doing where writing might help the students learn the content more thoroughly.”

Moss spoke as well about the role that a writing center can play in the university’s drive to improve literacy. While she noted that the role of a writing center is different at every institution, she believes one of a writing center’s basic functions is to help faculty deepen their understanding of literacy in all its forms.

“Writing centers need to provide places for instructors to talk—that doesn’t happen very often,” said Moss. “People don’t have time to talk to each other. Sometimes just being able to have a conversation can make a difference.”

The 2004 UWC Symposium on Literacy was just that—a chance to have a conversation.

“In a way,” said Balester, “the papers presented at this symposium were the opening remarks in what we hope will be an ongoing and spirited discussion of what it means to be literate and what role culture plays in literacy. The UWC hopes to foster more such discussions in the future.”

“Don’t they get that in freshman English (or high school or middle school)?” they ask with obvious frustration. “And since they didn’t learn it there, can’t they get it once and for all in the writing center?”

While I certainly sympathize with these questions, behind them is an assumption I don’t share: that writing is a skill we learn from the bottom up, one skill at a time. It’s because of this philosophy that in the ’60s, when I attended school, we didn’t start writing full essays until 11th grade.

We were too busy learning the rules of grammar to write. When we finally did write, we still made errors, because learning rules in theory isn’t the same as applying them in practice. Even more troubling, we knew little about the real process of writing, the tangled struggle of drafting and revising that’s so necessary to producing meaningful text.

When colleagues tell me about the inadequacies of their students’ writing, I tell them to suggest their students visit the University Writing Center (UWC). But I also warn them not to expect a quick fix. Learning to write is a much messier process than was believed when I went to school.

Students learn some rules from the bottom up, others from the top down, and they don’t get anywhere without frequent practice and exposure to writing through reading. Furthermore, what constitutes “good writing” changes with the type of document, the intended audience, and the purpose for writing.
The format, diction, and style that work for an English paper may fail in a letter to an employer or a lab report.

So what do the consultants in the UWC do when your students visit? We sit down beside them, ask what they need, read their drafts aloud with them, answer their questions, and give them our opinions.

We model the writing process; we make them aware of the choices all writers have to make and show them that even experienced writers look up how to document sources, consult usage or grammar guides, and get feedback from potential readers. We provide a glimpse of the true complexity of writing and offer tools and strategies that we know from experience help many writers.

For the help we provide in the UWC to be truly useful, though, it has to be help sought by students. They will  never learn conventions about comma usage simply because we say they ought to. They will learn those conventions only when they recognize that if they misplace their commas, they may confuse their readers and lose credibility. In our ideal consultation, we work at the student’s point of need and from the student’s motivation.

At the UWC we want to help students become better writers. But our larger goal is to help students use writing to become better thinkers, to develop a sense of judgment, a critical eye, a knowledge of and willingness to use available resources.

It’s a lifelong learning process, and we at the UWC look forward to assisting you and your students along the way.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation like this:

You’re holding a conference with a student to discuss a draft of his next paper. As the meeting ends, you realize you were so busy helping the student clarify his main ideas that you never discussed the paper’s organizational problems or inadequate research.

A collage of people at the Writing Center, and pieces of information about what we do.

Or this: You’re grading the first essay exams for your course and realize you have several international students who could use help understanding the basic conventions of academic writing in the United
States.

Or perhaps this: You mention in class that papers will need to be documented using APA (or Chicago or MLA or whatever documentation style is favored by your discipline). Several students stare at you blankly, and you surmise they’ve never even heard of this documentation style before.

These are just three examples of times when you’ll likely be relieved to know the University Writing Center (UWC) is here to help your students. The UWC is an important resource for student writers; you’ll want to be sure your students know about its services.

Funded by undergraduate fees, the UWC offers writing help to undergraduates from all disciplines. The center will assist students with any kind of writing project and at any stage of the writing process. Specifically, the UWC provides help to student writers in three key ways:

• Students can go to the student section of our website, where they’ll find handouts on writing topics
  such as paragraph structure and using quotations. They can also access our extensive webliography, a compendium of online writing and research assistance.
• They can go to our website to submit a brief portion of a paper or ask a specific question through our Online Writing Lab. They’ll typically have a reply from a UWC consultant in twenty-four hours.
• They can make an appointment for a one-on-one consultation with an experienced writing consultant. (The UWC also takes walk-ins, but only on a space available basis.)

Certainly, the one-on-one consultations are at the heart of the UWC’s mission. When your students sign up for a writing consultation, they’ll spend up to 45 minutes with an experienced writer trained specifically to advise and guide students. Our highly professional and dedicated consultants come from a variety of disciplines—chemistry, horticulture, pre-med, anthropology, English. All consultants have been selected because of their writing experience and all are trained to appreciate the unique nature of their role in helping student writers.

What will they do to help your students? Sometimes, consultants are primarily there to listen, acting as a sounding board for the students’ questions. At other times the consultants are the ones asking the questions, encouraging students to move beyond pat answers or oversimplifications. Or they may act as coaches, reassuring tentative writers that their unhappy writing experiences in junior high don’t mean they have nothing to say.

Consultants sometimes act as guides, helping students navigate their way through their research material. They frequently model how to find answers, saying, “I’m not sure I remember the right way to document this source; let’s look it up together.” They even function as diagnosticians, determining that, while a student may say he only needs help proofreading, he also needs help clarifying his thesis. Luckily, consultants also know how to be diplomatic, finding subtle ways to encourage students to reconsider aspects of their writing that need further attention.

Finally, consultants also explain fundamental writing concepts, showing students how to organize their paragraphs or make subjects and verbs agree.

Forty-five minutes isn’t enough time to make any writing project perfect. Nor can UWC consultations possibly cover every aspect of writing: organization, logic, grammar, tone, diction, format, development, research, documentation, and more. What the UWC can do is help your students learn to ask themselves the right questions about their writing and begin to feel confident they can find the answers.

Another integral part of the UWC mission is assisting faculty members with the teaching of writing:

• Faculty members can access the faculty portion of the UWC website to get helpful information on pedagogy, as well as details on the W course requirements and information on how to propose a W course.
• You can request a classroom visit. One of the UWC consultants will give your class a 10-minute presentation about the UWC’s services. Access the center’s website to schedule a visit or to download a PowerPoint presentation to use on your own.
• You can request a consultation with Dr. Valerie Balester, the UWC Executive Director, to discuss effective ways to incorporate writing into your courses.
• You can attend a UWC workshop for faculty, held at various times throughout the year.

For more information about the University Writing Center, visit http://uwc.tamu.edu.

“In their tests, sometimes students just throw this stuff out that they’ve memorized and it’s not connected,” she observes. “They can sometimes just memorize material for the test and still not understand it. By writing a paper, they literally have to understand it.”

Katheryn Dietrich, a senior lecturer who has taught in the Department of Sociology since 1987.

Katheryn Dietrich, a senior lecturer who has taught in the Department of Sociology since 1987, always has made writing a significant part of her courses. Having students write papers is, Dietrich believes, crucial to their understanding of her course material.

Dietrich is particularly committed to using writing in the courses she teaches on sociological theory. As she puts it, “There’s no reason to learn sociological theory if you can’t apply it to the real world.” Dietrich uses her writing assignments as a chance for students to make that application.

“Writing helps students work out in their mind if they really understand the theories,” Dietrich explains. “If they don’t logically understand them, then they really can’t write about them. And so I use the writing as a way to get them to come to me and say, ‘Well, I started to write about this, but I really don’t understand it.’”

When she heard about A&M’s new W course initiative, she was quick to jump on board: “They announced that we were going to have these W courses, and I thought, ‘Well, my students are always complaining about having to write these papers in my course. So why don’t I make mine writing-intensive?’ Because, in all good conscience, I couldn’t teach sociological theory without writing.”

For Dietrich, the process of proposing her course for the W Course Advisory Committee was very straightforward.

“I asked more questions of the committee members than they did of me,” Dietrich recalls. “It was really an information-gathering session for me. I had the proposal and I had ideas, but I wanted to know what the committee members would suggest. I found it a helpful session.”

Dietrich believes she herself learned to write only when she had to do so on the job. “I had very poor writing training in school,” she notes. “But I began in rural sociology as a research associate, and my job was to do research and write papers and articles.” She worked closely with a colleague who was extremely helpful to her.

“I would write something,” she remembers, “and he would take it and critique it and give me lots of feedback. Then I’d rewrite it. It’s that rewriting process that I think is absolutely invaluable. That’s how I learned to write, and now I love writing.”

Dietrich is looking forward to teaching her W course in a future semester and giving her students a chance to learn for themselves the importance of revision. While some instructors of W courses worry about grading papers, Dietrich has found a tool that makes responding to written work much easier for her: WebCT.

“Using WebCT is so much simpler than grading papers by hand,” she explains. “My problem was always that I had to write in the margins and I never had room and the students couldn’t read my handwriting. I also had to carry these stacks of papers around. Using WebCT is less intimidating than seeing those stacks of papers.”

Or rather, don’t grade all of it.

Many instructors whose courses depend on writing have concluded it’s not necessary to grade every piece of written work students produce. In fact, students often learn more when their writing isn’t graded. Assignments not meant to be graded, usually referred to as “low-stakes” writing, can include:

• journals
• responses to readings or class discussions
• peer commentary on first drafts
• mini essays or “micro-themes”
• dea-generating techniques such as freewriting or brainstorming.

Low-stakes assignments can serve a variety of purposes.

First, they allow you to judge how well students understand course material; by asking your class to write answers to a few questions about a reading or compose a journal entry summarizing a lecture, you get a quick snapshot of the students’ comprehension. Such writing can even be done in class.

Low-stakes assignments also help you introduce students to forms of writing specific to your discipline. Low-stakes assignments in a new genre provide a welcome chance for students to practice before having to demonstrate their ability for a grade. Students also are more likely to experiment with style and tone or explore unfamiliar content when there’s no grade hanging over them.

This type of writing work gives you a general sense of a class’s strengths and weaknesses as writers. Do the majority of your students know how to narrow a thesis statement or integrate quotations from their research into their own paragraphs? If not, you can spend class time reinforcing those concepts.

Finally, such assignments provide an opportunity for students to generate topics for longer, graded assignments. You might ask students to try idea-generating techniques, such as freewriting or brainstorming, to see which best suits them.

But if an assignment isn’t graded will students bother to do it? Maybe not, which is why some instructors award points for completion of such assignments, in lieu of, or as part of, a class participation grade. Instructors may also elect to comment very briefly—a question or two in the margins, for instance—to let students know their work is being reviewed.

Others ask students to swap papers with classmates—sometimes so they can offer comments, but sometimes simply to give students a chance to see the work of their classroom “colleagues.”

Can low-stakes writing be assigned in a W course?

“Absolutely,” says Dr. Valerie Balester, Executive Director of the University Writing Center and Chair of the W Course Advisory Committee. “According to the suggested guidelines for a 3-credit- hour W course, about 2000 words—or 8 pages—should be graded, finished writing. That should still provide plenty of opportunity for low-stakes work.”

“The established criteria,” Balester continues, “also require W course instructors to provide writing instruction. Low-stakes assignments—such as having students experiment with a new writing style or offer peer comments on one another’s first drafts—are great opportunities for hands-on writing instruction.

“Also, those kinds of assignments mesh perfectly with one of the key ideas behind the W courses—namely that writing improves with practice.”

For more information on low-stakes assignments, visit the University Writing Center’s website at http://uwc.tamu.edu. Under the Faculty heading, you’ll find a Pedagogy section on low-stakes assignments.

The members of the W Course Advisory Committee would like to acknowledge the following faculty members—the first to win full approval for their W course proposals—for their commitment to making writing a priority at Texas A&M.

Wendy Boswell
Management

Diana Burton
Forest Science

Richard Curry
Hispanic Studies
Katheryn Dietrich
Sociology

Deborah W. Dunsford
Agricultural Education

Leslie Feigenbaum
Construction Science

Susan Fiechtner
Accounting

George Fowler
Information and Operations Management

Claude Gibson
English

Ray W. James
Civil Engineering

Dan Lineberger
Horticultural Sciences

Roel R. Lopez
Wildlife Science
Powell Robinson
Information and Operations Management

Karen-Beth Scholthof
Plant Pathology and Microbiology

David Sciulli
Sociology

Eric Simanek
Chemistry

Michael Stecher
Mathematics

Darla-Jean Weatherford
Petroleum Engineering

Richard White
Soil and Crop Sciences

Patricia Wiese
Teaching, Learning and Culture

Thomas Yancey
Geology & Geophysics