By Amanda Detry and Molly Rentscher.
Each new semester in the Writing Fellows Program presents a range of exciting opportunities and challenges. Having served as Writing Fellows for the past few semesters, we have collaborated with many faculty members and worked with students of all writing levels and abilities. Amid such diversity, however, every writing appointment is shaped by two core values. First, Writing Fellows help students see revision as an essential part of the writing process. Second, Writing Fellows believe in producing good writers—not necessarily good writing—by offering students tools and examples for improving their work.
When we were given the opportunity to facilitate the Rose Pathways Writing Project, we expected the experience would be similar to our work as Writing Fellows. Rose Pathways is a weekly one-credit writing seminar for current and former residents of the Chadbourne Residential Learning Community here at UW-Madison. We begin each class by sharing dinner with our students, which helps us establish a sense of community. Next, we teach a mini writing lesson (on essay organization, thesis statements, citations, or a similar topic) in response to our students’ specific questions or concerns. Finally, we spend the majority of class facilitating a peer-review workshop: each week, two students present their drafts and receive constructive feedback from their peers on range of higher- and lower-order concerns.
At first, we thought our role in this process would be much the same as our role as Writing Fellows, but perhaps a bit more directive. Like Fellows, we would create an agenda, facilitate a conversation about writing, and perform careful readings of students’ work, but we would also play a slightly larger role in structuring, guiding, and engaging students in that conversation.
For the most part, this has been true. What we didn’t immediately foresee, however, is the role our students would play in developing their own language for this conversation. As our students engage with the ideas and writing of their peers, they have found new ways to talk about writing—a skill they will carry with them into their future coursework.
Three brief stories from class stand out to us:
Story #1: Midway through class one week, a student expressed frustration about an upcoming assignment. The prompt was confusing, and she couldn’t organize her ideas, so she turned to the class: “Where do I start?” We instantly turned on our facilitator brains, prepared to lead a conversation about the direction this student should take with her work; the resulting conversation was so natural, however, that our efforts were scarcely needed. “What are your main ideas?” “Have you considered presenting one aspect of your thesis first, and then follow it up with the other part?” “I think you need to frame your paper around a central topic. . . .” Listening to our students talk about the structure of an assignment, with no prompt in front of them and only a limited understanding of their classmate’s ideas, revealed the extent to which our students were beginning to take ownership of the writing process and the enthusiasm with which they approached the task.
Story #2: On the first day of class, we ask each of our students to present two drafts over the course of the semester. Recently, however, we’ve found students jumping on the opportunity to present more than twice, or to workshop a paper multiple times. Considering the fact that many of our students used to write papers “the night before they’re due,” as they confessed at the beginning of the semester, this transformation demonstrates their new level of engagement with the writing process and the value they see in completing assignments ahead of time, with careful thought.
Story #3: Each week, we begin our peer-review sessions by inviting each student to constructively praise that week’s writer. During one of our first sessions, the praises rolled in for a particular student’s draft: “You have great voice throughout this paper!” “Your ideas are well-developed; you make a strong case, and I trust what you have to say.” We returned to the writer, who gave a shy smile: “Wow—I didn’t expect to hear so many good things about this paper.” Slowly, slowly, the students of Rose Pathways are helping each other believe they can contribute to academic discussions, and that they have a unique, powerful, and important voice to share through their writing.
As Writing Fellows, we are used to working with individually students on their own writing assignments. The Rose Pathways Writing Project, however, has taught us the immeasurable value of a larger community of writers: a place where students share their work, think critically about their peers’ writing styles, and contribute to an ongoing conversation about forming, reshaping, and communicating one’s ideas through the written word.