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last.updated 6.17.08

WAC and WPA Mentoring

Purpose

Throughout the semester we have focused on the teaching of student writers. Yet the doctoral degree that you are earning will position you to market yourself as a future administrator or will position you to be asked to do administrative work, such as directing a writing program, running a writing center, or instituting a WAC program. In these positions you will be responsible for fostering both the professionalism and professionialization of graduate students and instructors across the campus by preparing these constituents to think about the role of literacy in their pedagogies. This, of course, is a different challenge than teaching these literacies practices directly to the students. In today's class, we will talk about these challenges and discuss how strategies for negotiating them.

Discussion I - Guest Speakers: Dr. Neff & Dr. Bostic

ODU professors Dr. Neff and Dr. Bostic will speak about the pedagogical strategies one has to use when mentoring or teaching (future) instructors.

Discussion II - Teaching Instructors

The readings for this week prompt us to think about the pedagogies we use to teach instructors how to think about their literacy instruction. In addition to the guest's questions, we may discuss the following:

• What questions do you have about these articles?
• What are their respective arguments?
• What did you find most interesting about these readings?
• If you were to implement WAC at your institution what would it look like? Describe the pedagogy you might use to teach your peers across the campus about writing.
• What role would multimodalities play in your WAC design? How would you make this argument to professors across the campus?
• On a continuum of practice to theory, where should we situate the instructor preparation experience? Why? Does this answer shift when we look at different contexts, such as four-year institutions, two-year institutions, technical colleges, and institutions of secondary education?
• Who should be the mentor of the teacher preparation situations? administrators? composition specialists? experienced TAs or adjuncts?

Discussion III: Conference Paper

The instructor will talk about the experience of giving conference presentations as a way to prepare students for the Conference Paper assignment.