Teaching of Writing in the Disciplines for
Faculty of Health Sciences
Dr. Rachel Riedner, Associate Professor of Writing and Women’s Studies, Executive Director of the University Writing Program, The George Washington University
The workshop focuses on curricular development of Writing in Disciplines (WID) for the faculty of Health Sciences.
WID pedagogy is motivated by the idea that academic writing practices are not generic but are instead the products of disciplinary traditions and conventions, together with debates about those conventions within disciplinary communities and departmental faculties. Strong WID courses link writing instruction inextricably to the specific “thinking and doing” of the discipline and to the particular curriculum of a department. Students most effectively learn to write when writing is integrated into their coursework and when faculty expectations and disciplinary values are made explicit.
This curricular framework is best developed by faculty/staff themselves through disciplines’ distinctive analytical tasks (e.g. discussing results in Biology vs. close reading in Humanities), diverse genres and audiences (e.g. project proposals in Architecture vs. technical meta-data in Computer Science), and divergent research and writing purposes (generating new knowledge in the Humanities and Pure Sciences vs. persuasion in Business).
The presentation elaborates upon the challenges and rewards of WID pedagogy with a focus on practical classroom activities that support WID curricula for faculty in Health Sciences. Because successful WID courses are collaborative and faculty/staff generated, the workshop will include activities that support writing curricula in these disciplines.
This workshop will emphasize the following: