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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007G32WingardSession G. 32: “Hitting the Long Ball: Striving for Process-Oriented Training of Interdisciplinary Writing Teachers”
Reviewed by Joel Wingard This session involved a panel of people from Duke University: their director of first-year composition, two graduate students, and a Teaching Fellow in their first-year writing program. The composition director mostly gave a summary of Duke’s first-year program, including the hiring of post-doctoral Teaching Fellows to staff sections, along with graduate students. The program features themed first-year seminars taught by people from various disciplines. The other three presenters did not have individual papers so much as they talked about different particular aspects of how interdisciplinary instructors are “trained” to teach writing. They first outlined what they called the current model of such training: the “inoculation” model, whereby faculty go through a short pedagogy seminar or workshop, focusing on some aspects of comp theory. They also called this “product-directed training,” meaning that the subject of the workshop was implicitly given priority over students and that the outcome of such a workshop is the product participants make, in terms of a first-year writing course syllabus and assignments. At Duke, they worried about what happens when the first-year writing instructor is not particularly invested in comp/rhet or in teaching writing, as with many of their Teaching Fellows. So they moved to what they called a “process approach,” whereby the temporal dimension of the workshop is extended, to provide for more long-term, sustained reflection, and the content is reoriented to emphasize multi-disciplinarity. They also talked about dialogic mentoring (as opposed to ‘training’), which they described as collaborative, not one-way; intensive; and instantiating a decentering of the authority of the experienced-teacher-as-workshop-leader; in short, the kind of relationships between teachers and students that much comp theory advocates. In somewhat more detail that these summaries, the extension of training over time involved instructors observing each other’s classes and Reflective Practice Groups: self-selected groups of instructors who chose a particular problem or topic for discussion (for example, handling the paper load). The extension also involved a second-year review for which each instructor submits a portfolio of syllabuses, assignments, etc. One presenter noted that this method was process-directed because the contents of these portfolios were continually changing and being revised. Finally, this training is capped by a Fellows Conference at which teachers present about their classes and their pedagogy. The panelists articulated a “big question” that both lay behind Duke’s revision of its training for new writing instructors and needs to be asked by WPA’s in general: How do we encourage teachers to invest in reflective practice long term? At Duke, they wonder what will happen to or with their Teaching Fellows once they complete their fellowship and go off to other academic jobs. One person from the audience of about 15 suggested a longitudinal study or survey of ex-Fellows 3 or 5 years hence might provide useful information on this question, not just for Duke but for any portion of the profession that is concerned with pedagogical training in writing. Comments? |