Writing Across the Disciplines

The Center for Teaching Writing is committed to offering training for faculty in writing across the curriculum. To this end, the Center continues to develop activities and resources that encourage conversations about and support the use of writing-to-learn in content courses from all disciplines. These include annual workshops, grants for the development of a writing-to-learn curriculum, and faculty and departmental consultations.

This site contains a brief introduction to the philosophy of Writing in the Disciplines, along with ideas and resources for integrating writing-to-learn activities into content courses.

Contact John Gage with questions or interests.

Writing Associates

The Writing Associates Program trains advanced undergraduate writers to serve as writing tutors in lower-division English literature courses. Undergraduates admitted to the program must complete English 312, a training seminar. Training includes a survey of writing pedagogy and the techniques and ethics of tutoring. Writing Associates also have the opportunity to participate in apprenticeships, assisting experienced teachers with reading and responding to student writing. This program is of particular value for students who are preparing to become teachers.

Kate Myers teaches the training course and administers the program.

Writing and Technology

The Center for Teaching Writing is committed to working closely with the Composition Program to implement and support technologies that benefit students and teachers of writing.

The Center developed and helps maintain a Computers and Writing Classroom, which uses computers to facilitate and enhance the teaching of written argumentation. This classroom serves 400 undergraduate students per quarter.

Support of Composition faculty and staff also includes a computer workroom; individual consultation on instructional technologies; the building and maintenance of electronic resources for teachers of writing — such as discussion lists where instructors have access to the larger community of composition teachers and an electronic file cabinet of classroom materials; and workshops on educational technologies such as Canvas, teaching with computers, finding and using web resources, building course websites, and integrating discipline-specific electronic tools into a course. The Center also offers consulting for teaching with technology.

Community Literacy Initiative

The University of Oregon Literacy Initiative is a community-based education program of the UO English Department. UOLI was founded in 1998. A college student in a UOLI course completes an internship that dovetails with the course’s curriculum. Practical service in the community enriches academic learning in the classroom. Students can choose from a wide variety of community partners, including K-12 schools, the juvenile detention center, the Boys and Girls Club, the CTL Reading Clinic, Nearby Nature, and Mt. Pisgah Arboretum. Nearly a thousand students have completed the program.  Several have received job offers from their internship sites. Each class requires a minimum of 30 hours’ volunteer work. Alumni of these classes can receive further UO credits for continuing their internships. Currently the UO Literacy Initiative offers two courses: ENG 313, Teen and Children’s Literature, next offered in Winter 2013, and ENG 413, Theories of Literacy, next offered in Spring 2013. ENG 313 satisfies the 1789-present requirement for the UO English major, while ENG 413 satisfies the Theory requirement.

For more information please contact Prof. Elizabeth Wheeler.

General Education Project: Writing Connections

In collaboration with the Composition Program and with the support of the CAS General Education Renaissance Initiative, The Center for Teaching Writing is working to link special sections of Writing 121, 122, and 123 to clusters of thematically related General Education Group Satisfying and Multicultural courses. The purpose is to enable students in these required Writing courses to make intellectual connections in their writing to the other subjects they are studying. In order to foster these connections, we are developing casebooks of readings relevant to these subjects and creating themed writing classes that students might take while also enrolled in the linked Group Satisfying or Multicultural courses.

Conferences and Lectures

The Center for Teaching Writing helps organize and co-sponsors conferences, lectures, and workshops on teaching writing, both on the campus-wide, local level and on the statewide and national levels. These events have included:

• Inclusive Pedagogy workshops and Anti-Racist Writing Symposium, with Asau Inoue, author of Anti-Racism Writing Assessment Ecologies. Fall, 2017
• Writing to Learn Across the Disciplines, an all day workshop for University of Oregon faculty, offered in 1999, 2003, and 2013.
• The Promise of Reason, an international conference of researchers on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecht-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric.  2008.
• The Ninth Annual Oregon Conference on Composition & Rhetoric: “Ethics, Writing, and the Nature of Technology.” Wayne C. Booth, University of Chicago, plenary speaker (April 1998).
• Annual University of Oregon Fall Composition Conference
• Lectures on Writing and Technology by nationally recognized scholars including David Bartholomae (2003)

Consultation

The Center for Teaching Writing offers consultation for writing- and written-argumentation-related instruction and curriculum development in all disciplines. The Center encourages the integration of writing into content courses by offering on-demand, discipline-specific lectures and consultations for individual faculty members or Graduate Teaching Fellows or for teaching teams; interdisciplinary workshops; resource packets; and syllabus and materials reviews.

See Writing In the Disciplines for more information, and contact John Gage with questions or to request a consultation.