{"id":53,"date":"2017-09-19T14:15:12","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T14:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.berea.edu\/bereawritingguide\/?page_id=53"},"modified":"2018-06-06T09:12:54","modified_gmt":"2018-06-06T13:12:54","slug":"deeply-integrate-writing-course","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/legacy.berea.edu\/bereawritingguide\/planning-your-syllabus\/deeply-integrate-writing-course\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Deeply Integrate Writing in Your Course?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]This seems like a reasonable question to address as we consider the outlines of a course syllabus: why not include writing merely as a work-product, but not as a part of the processes of thinking about and formulating responses to complex ideas? In other words, why consider writing as a principle element of the practices of the classroom? Here \u2014 with full credit to Brad Hughes, Director of the Writing Center at Wisconsin, and my mentor as a graduate writing instructor \u2014 are a few good reasons to make writing fundamental to your course:<\/p>\n

Writing deepens thinking and increases students’ engagement with course material. Good writing assignments prompt students to think more deeply about what they’re learning. Writing a book review, for example, forces students to read more thoroughly and critically about what the book suggests and where, if any, of its limitations might be. As an old saying goes, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”<\/p>\n

In fact, research done by Richard Light at Harvard confirms that “students relate writing to intensity of learning in courses. The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students’ level of engagement–whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students’ self-reported level of interest in it–is stronger than any relationship we found between student engagement and any other course characteristic” (The Harvard Assessment Seminars, Second Report, 1992, 25; Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds<\/em> [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001], 64).<\/p>\n

Writing can improve our relationship with our students. When students write papers, we get to know them and their thinking better; they’re more likely to talk with us after class, or come to our office hours to share a draft or seek advice.<\/p>\n

Writing gives us a window into our students’ thinking and learning. Through our students’ writing, we can take pleasure in discovering that students see things in course readings or discussion we didn’t see; students make connections we ourselves hadn’t made. And through our students’ writing, we also discover what confuses our students. Admittedly, we’re not always eager to discover the gaps in our students’ knowledge, but it’s our job to expand that knowledge and improve students’ thinking.<\/p>\n

Writing assignments can improve our classroom discussions. By forcing students to keep up with readings, regular writing assignments can prepare students to participate in discussion.<\/p>\n

Writing assignments provide us with an opportunity to teach students to organize ideas, develop points logically, make explicit connections, elaborate ideas, argue points, and situate an argument in the context of previous research\u2014all skills valued in higher education.<\/p>\n

Students remember what they write about\u2014because writing slows thinking down and requires careful, sustained analysis of a subject. No matter how many years it’s been, most of us can remember some paper we wrote as undergraduates, the writing of which deepened our knowledge of a particular subject.<\/p>\n

Our students and we remember what we’ve written, in part, because writing individualizes learning. When a student becomes really engaged with a writing assignment, she has to make countless choices particular to her paper: how to focus the topic, what to read, what to make the central argument, how to organize ideas, how to marshal evidence, which general points to make, how to develop and support general ideas with particulars, how to introduce the topic, what to include and what to omit, which style and tone to adopt. . . .<\/p>\n

For these reasons and more, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) recommends writing-intensive courses as one of its high-impact practices–instructional methods proven to help students learn subject matters across the curriculum, at every level of higher education.<\/p>\n

Finally, though it’s much more than this, writing is a skill–a skill that atrophies when it isn’t practiced regularly. Because learning to write well is difficult and because it requires sustained and repeated practice, we need to ensure our undergraduates write regularly, throughout the curriculum, in all majors. It’s the responsibility of all of us to ensure that students learn to think and write clearly and deeply.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]This website is a collaboration between Berea College professors Anne Bruder and Jason Cohen. As you will notice throughout these webpages, our work here has been more about aggregation than original invention. We have made every attempt to give credit to other instructors and friends of other instructors. One of the joys of teaching is the generosity we all seem to show one another in sharing materials. This webpage is a product of that spirit.<\/em>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]This seems like a reasonable question to address as we consider the outlines of a course syllabus: why not include writing merely as a work-product, but not as a part of the processes of thinking about and formulating responses to complex ideas? 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