WAC Talks Back: a Forum with SNC's Writing Center

• Participants: Open to all faculty
• Preparation: Come with your questions
• Day and Time: Friday, February 25, 2011 at 4:00 pm
• Place: Mulva Library Presentation Room (101)
• Length: 1 hour
• Swag: Coffee, tea, and snacks

This workshop will tap into the expertise of the only people who truly see writing from across the SNC curriculum: our undergraduate writing center consultants. A panel of WC consultants will briefly—in no more than 4-5 minutes apiece—talk about persistent issues that they see in student writing, and make suggestions for how faculty could help students address those issues. The the workshop will move toward an open forum where faculty can discuss the issues raised (or new issues) with the consultants.

Preventing and Responding to Plagiarism

• Participants: 20 faculty members
• Preparation: Participants should bring the statements about academic dishonesty from their syllabus and read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education
• Day and Time: Thursday, March 24, 11:00am-12:30pm
• Place: Union Shield Room
• Length: 90 minutes
• Swag: Lunch!
• This workshop will equip faculty to deal with academic dishonesty in their students' writing. We will address the issue of student plagiarism from a number of angles. We will talk about:

• How we define plagiarism (to ourselves and to our students), and whether that definition coheres across genres and disciplines
• How to effectively convey our expectations regarding academic honesty to our students
• How to curb plagiarism through good assignment design
• The benefits and drawbacks to plagiarism prevention software
• How to respond to student plagiarism

Creating Effective Powerpoint Presentations

• Participants: open to all faculty and students
• Preparation: Participants should bring a Powerpoint presentation they’ve used in class (as teacher or as student)
• Day and Time: tba
• Length: 1 hour
• Swag: snacks!

This workshop will help faculty and students improve their skills with an increasingly common genre of modern writing—which they might not even think of as writing—the Powerpoint (or Keynote or Google Docs or Prezi) presentation. We’ve all suffered “death by Powerpoint” when a presenter failed to consider the rhetoric of his or her presentation. Nevertheless, we often fall into the same traps when creating presentations: overloading slides with information, for example, or distracting our listeners with needless special effects.

This workshop will be scheduled in a computer lab: likely Mulva 304. The workshop will start with a 20-30 minute discussion of what makes Powerpoint presentations effective. We’ll move from this discussion to a hands-on workshop in which participants will work to improve the presentations they brought to the workshop.

Little Green and Gold Schoolhouse: Toward a Common Writing Vocabulary at SNC

• Participants: 20 faculty members
• Preparation: t.b.a.
• Day and time: t.b.a.
• Length: 2 hours
• Swag: lunch and $100 stipend

One of the great challenges of Writing Across the Curriculum is giving students a sense of consistency in their writing instruction. Writing classes are spread across disciplines and instructors, many of whom have little formal training in teaching writing. Even when instructors look for similar qualities in their students’ writing, students can miss those shared values because of the idiosyncratic ways teachers discuss writing in class and in assignments. Students benefit when disciplinary discussions of writing are grounded in consistent terminology. We can begin to strengthen the St. Norbert College writing program by learning and beginning to speak the same language with our students.

In this workshop I will introduce the Little Red Schoolhouse program of writing instruction to participants. We’ll discuss the basic premises and terminology of LRS: claims, reasons, evidence, warrants, etc. We’ll discuss how those terms correspond to other common rhetorical terms: how claims relate to theses, for instance, and how they differ. Using a few case studies, we’ll discuss how LRS can be used to discuss writing in a range of disciplines—giving students a consistent set of writing terms with which to describe and evaluate very distinct genres.

Finally, I will introduce participants to redschoolhouse.org, a site they could use to supplement their classroom instruction. Using redschoolhouse.org, faculty could give their students robust instruction in LRS without sacrificing much in-class time.

In general, I will use this workshop to advocate strongly that SNC begin weaving the language of LRS into our WAC program. Such reform would bring consistency to students’ experience in the program, and give students a sense of continuous progress in their writing where now they may see a series of unrelated writing performances.