Responding to Writing: Theory and Pedagogy

Catalog description

Although many of us have experiences being taught to write, helping someone else improve their writing in ways that respect their agency and cultivate learning is often not intuitive. In order to learn about ethical and educational methods of tutoring, this course introduces scholarship on tutoring, writing centers, and writing pedagogy. We will be critically thinking about your own writing process and experiences, responding to another’s writing, and reading about collaborative learning strategies, multilingual writing challenges, ethical considerations in peer tutoring, and the ways in which race and other facets of identity affect tutoring and learning. With an emphasis on the connection between theory and practice, you will get tutored, observe and reflect on tutoring sessions, practice reading and responding to sample student writing, and develop your own tutoring pedagogy—a theory of tutoring that considers the relationship between tutoring practices and the values those practices imply. The aim of the course is to cultivate knowledge and flexibility in the use of tutoring strategies for supporting agency and growth in diverse writers working on a variety of genres from across the disciplines.