Spent the last few weeks working closely with our writing mentors at Chico State thinking about their role in the success of first-year writers. Grateful in particular to Geoff Bogan and Brittany DeLacy for their participation in our Educator Innovator conversation (with Tom Fox), and Keaton Kirkpatrick for his DMLCentral blog–“Building Community With Peer Mentors”–this week. Fortunate to work with such amazing students at Chico State.
Summary: We discuss teaching writing, teaching science, and how to create classrooms in which students use writing to learn and think scientifically with Kim Jaxon and Leslie Atkins Elliott, authors of the new book Composing Science. Kim and Leslie talk about concrete approaches for engaging students in practices that mirror the work that writing plays in the development and dissemination of scientific ideas, rather than replicating the polished academic writing of research scientists. They also address a range of genres that can help students deepen their scientific reasoning and inquiry.
Excerpt from Show
Leslie Atkins Elliott on using the ubiquitous scientific notebook the way scientists use it:
“For me, when I was in K12 and perhaps even beyond, they were very formulaic. You would need to start with your hypothesis and then list your materials, and then take your notes, and it was pretty rigid in what had to be in there, which is not what scientists’ notebooks look like. It’s pretty easy online now to find examples of really famous scientists’ fascinating notebooks. One of my favorites is Linus Pauling who, he’s scribbling in the middle of the night saying how he’s been thinking about this problem forever and it just came to him that he’s been doing it all wrong and now he has to go back and change the last few weeks of work, and how excited he is….Students are often surprised to see this…to see that they’re not following any kind of rigid procedures….So we start by showing students what scientists’ notebooks look like, and then develop our own rubrics for our own notebooks out of that. The idea is I want to be able to look at your notebook and know you were doing science, what should then we be looking for in your notebook.”
The spring semester in academia is notoriously brutal: conferences, thesis and dissertation projects, graduations looming, and many classes to teach. Years ago, well into a PhD program, my friends and I started to notice a pattern. Around April, one of us would lose it. Our panic rotated through the group, but on any given day, someone would talk about quitting. Sometimes it just sounded so much easier to go back to our day jobs and give up this grad school dream. We kept close: calling each other in moments of weakness and talking each other off the ledge. We created a motto: nobody quits in April.
The rule was that you could quit in June if you still wanted to, after you had showered, slept, and had a glass of wine. If you still wanted to quit then, perhaps the feeling was real and right. But the middle of April, with ten deadlines looming, is a bad time to make a life changing decision. I now repeat this to my own students over and over again in the spring semester: nobody quits in April.
The advantage to this way of thinking was that it also bonded us together, sort of a “you go, we go” attitude toward college. We knew how hard everyone worked and we championed success and consoled each other through rejections. It makes me wonder how we do this in our short time together with students: how do we create empathy so that our interests and successes are tied to each other.
One way I hope we do this in our first-year writing course is to blog together. If we read about the struggles of the first-year, will we see each other reflected in the stories? Will this create empathy for each other? You can find the featured blogs for this week here. What you’ll notice is the universal buzz of the semester. We are all running from one task to the next, hoping to have a few moments of feeling good about the work we are doing.
Nobody quits in April.
Excited to be back in the full swing of the spring semester. I spent the first day of classes completely full of jitters the whole day; funny how that doesn’t go away after 15 years of teaching. I have an amazing group of students in my jumbo first-year writing course: 88 freshmen who are a sea of awesome. I have eight writing mentors who work with me in the space, but this semester I am also running one of our break-out workshops too. This means I have 12 students on Thursday afternoons and we work together on the writing for our course.
We’ll spend this semester thinking about the problems of the freshman year. With 97 of us in the room, we have an opportunity for a rich data set. We’ll blog about “the day in the life” of a freshman, create surveys, follow case studies, read current research, and ultimately create a series of white papers, working to solve the problems of the freshman year on our campus. Students will then be part of one of three teams who turn those white papers into 1) short documentary films, 2) an augmented reality game to be played by incoming freshman, or 3) a website resource for incoming freshmen on our campus.
Today we’re starting our WordPress sites, so soon we will introduce 88 new bloggers to the world. I hope you’ll read about their campus lives: they are all first generation students and they have amazing stories to tell. And if you are so inclined, introduce yourself and discuss ideas they are researching with them.
#suchexcite
Excited to be back in the full swing of the spring semester. I spent the first day of classes completely full of jitters the whole day; funny how that doesn’t go away after 15 years of teaching. I have an amazing group of students in my jumbo first-year writing course: 88 freshmen who are a sea of awesome. I have eight writing mentors who work with me in the space, but this semester I am also running one of our break-out workshops too. This means I have 12 students on Thursday afternoons and we work together on the writing for our course.
We’ll spend this semester thinking about the problems of the freshman year. With 97 of us in the room, we have an opportunity for a rich data set. We’ll blog about “the day in the life” of a freshman, create surveys, follow case studies, read current research, and ultimately create a series of white papers, working to solve the problems of the freshman year on our campus. Students will then be part of one of three teams who turn those white papers into 1) short documentary films, 2) an augmented reality game to be played by incoming freshman, or 3) a website resource for incoming freshmen on our campus.
Today we’re starting our WordPress sites, so soon we will introduce 88 new bloggers to the world. I hope you’ll read about their campus lives: they are all first generation students and they have amazing stories to tell. And if you are so inclined, introduce yourself and discuss ideas they are researching with them.
#suchexcite
Excited to be back in the full swing of the spring semester. I spent the first day of classes completely full of jitters the whole day; funny how that doesn’t go away after 15 years of teaching. I have an amazing group of students in my jumbo first-year writing course: 88 freshmen who are a sea of awesome. I have eight writing mentors who work with me in the space, but this semester I am also running one of our break-out workshops too. This means I have 12 students on Thursday afternoons and we work together on the writing for our course.
We’ll spend this semester thinking about the problems of the freshman year. With 97 of us in the room, we have an opportunity for a rich data set. We’ll blog about “the day in the life” of a freshman, create surveys, follow case studies, read current research, and ultimately create a series of white papers, working to solve the problems of the freshman year on our campus. Students will then be part of one of three teams who turn those white papers into 1) short documentary films, 2) an augmented reality game to be played by incoming freshman, or 3) a website resource for incoming freshmen on our campus.
Today we’re starting our WordPress sites, so soon we will introduce 88 new bloggers to the world. I hope you’ll read about their campus lives: they are all first generation students and they have amazing stories to tell. And if you are so inclined, introduce yourself and discuss ideas they are researching with them.
#suchexcite
Excited to be back in the full swing of the spring semester. I spent the first day of classes completely full of jitters the whole day; funny how that doesn’t go away after 15 years of teaching. I have an amazing group of students in my jumbo first-year writing course: 88 freshmen who are a sea of awesome. I have eight writing mentors who work with me in the space, but this semester I am also running one of our break-out workshops too. This means I have 12 students on Thursday afternoons and we work together on the writing for our course.
We’ll spend this semester thinking about the problems of the freshman year. With 97 of us in the room, we have an opportunity for a rich data set. We’ll blog about “the day in the life” of a freshman, create surveys, follow case studies, read current research, and ultimately create a series of white papers, working to solve the problems of the freshman year on our campus. Students will then be part of one of three teams who turn those white papers into 1) short documentary films, 2) an augmented reality game to be played by incoming freshman, or 3) a website resource for incoming freshmen on our campus.
Today we’re starting our WordPress sites, so soon we will introduce 88 new bloggers to the world. I hope you’ll read about their campus lives: they are all first generation students and they have amazing stories to tell. And if you are so inclined, introduce yourself and discuss ideas they are researching with them.
#suchexcite
Thanks to Jeff Layne from CSU, Chico’s Regional & Continuing Education for making our Digital Humanities Panel Discussion available for viewing. Link here to our talks and panel Q&A.