The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington

The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington

3. Snapshots of our Literacies

The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington

Michelle Cox [+-]
Bridgewater State University
Michelle Cox (PhD, University of New Hampshire) is an Assistant Professor of English and Writing Across the Curriculum Program Director at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, where she teaches second language sections of composition and a range of undergraduate and graduate writing workshops and seminars. Cox, who specialized in Composition Studies, has co-edited two collections on second language writing and has published other works in that area and on workplace writing and composition pedagogies.
Katherine E. Tirabassi [+-]
Keene State College
Katherine E. Tirabassi (PhD, University of New Hampshire) is an Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Thinking and Writing Program at Keene State College, where she teaches composition/literacy theory and writing. She has published articles on archival research, composition pedagogy, and writing center theory/practice. Her dissertation, “Revisiting the ‘Current-Traditional Era’: Innovations in Writing Instruction at the University of New Hampshire, 1940–1949” received the 2008 CCCC (College Composition and Communication Conference) James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Description

In “Snapshots of Our Literacies,” Michelle Cox and Katherine E. Tirabassi present a creative non-fiction writing project based on personal narratives that has been used successfully in the first five weeks of university writing courses in a variety of pedagogical settings, including English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. The students craft “snapshot essays” as brief descriptive narratives responding to writing prompts that are focused on writing, reading, discourse communities, and literacy. Through the process of drafting and feedback from peers and instructors, students build up their essay with the support of detailed instructions. This workshop based project, which was developed as a way to counteract students’ resistance to revision, also serves to move students away from the five-paragraph essay still mandated in many high schools in the United States, and (in the case of ESL classes) to go beyond the sentence-level focus of much second-language writing instruction. The students are thus socialized into the discourse of universitylevel writing while drawing on their own varied literacies to assist in the transition.

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Citation

Cox, Michelle; Tirabassi, Katherine. 3. Snapshots of our Literacies. The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 41-61 Jun 2011. ISBN 9781845534530. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=25908. Date accessed: 21 Nov 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.25908. Jun 2011

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