Faculty, graduates take writing lesson

Pete Yee

TEACHING TEACHERS The U of A’s writing centre is located in Assiniboia Hall.

When professor Roger Graves sends his mechanical engineering students home with their English assignments, their work flow often follows a familiar pattern.

"When I teach, I help students get started on assignments, they go to the University's writing centre for help with their assignments, then they hand it in," Graves explained.

But equipped with his other title as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, he hopes to skip the middle step soon, and see his own students and those of other professors equipped to avoid the writing centre and assignment aid altogether. Starting this year, WAC is offering a series of nine workshops for faculty and graduate students designed to improve staff writing and teaching practices, so that students inexperienced in the rigours of academe might stand a writing chance.

"The first four workshops were aimed at getting instructors interested in writing for their own purposes, right. They want to get stuff published and so on, and to talk to them at a level that makes sense is quite sophisticated," he said. "The next five, I'm trying to get them to take that knowledge and add a sophisticated understanding of writing and apply that to their students work."

Tired of complaints from professors about the insufficient writing abilities of students, Graves set out last year to analyze the way written assignments were being given to students, and collected ever written assignment handed out in the Faculty of Nursing over the 2008/09 scholastic year. What he found showed a gap between what new students were expected to complete and what they were capable of.

"Too often I heard comments like 'Students can't write. They should have learned that in high school.' My response is that we're asking U of A students to do much more sophisticated things than they've ever had to do in high school," he explained.

"When we're getting assignments to U of A students, they don't understand how they're going to be graded on that, because they've never seen one of these things before, and they certainly don't understand the level of sophistication that the instructors are expecting and looking at their writing for."

To remedy this, Graves is advocating for an escalation of the effort professors and graduate students exert in the creation of rubric, the topic for a WAC workshop happening today at 12:15 in the Aberhart Centre.

"The key things is there needs to be some explanation for the criteria for grading, and students need to have that ahead of time. That can always be done better. The key things from educational research is called a grading scheme, which is popularly known as the rubric," he said.

"It announces to the student, 'Here's what I was looking for and here's what you gave me.' It provides focus and areas for improvement. How can you be a figure skater without knowing which moves to do or how much they count for?"

With the remaining workshops, Graves hopes to provide an even greater focus on the same topic, but tailored to graduate students.

"A lot of the grading of first- and second-year courses is done by graduate students. Maybe that could be a focus point for that kind of thing," he concluded.

Once completed, the workshops will be turned into online video-learning modules available through WAC's website, www.humanities.ualberta.ca/WAC.