2011 First Annual Summer Seminar for Composition Research

Dartmouth College is hosting its first annual Summer Seminar for Composition Research, July 31st-August 12th.

Composition research focuses on studying the nature of writing, reading, and inquiry; effective teaching approaches; and successful writing strategies in various contexts.

Twenty-seven researchers from across the U.S. and overseas will spend two weeks at Dartmouth. They will learn together about specific research methods, work with both Dartmouth faculty and national writing researchers, and refine individual research projects on topics such as:

• Student perception of the relationship of general education writing to discipline-specific writing
• How adding public speeches to first-year writing affects the quality of student work
• The effect of distance education on writing faculty workload

Areas of inquiry include questions like:

• Are advances in technology fundamentally altering the ways we conceive of the text-based production and distribution of knowledge?
• To what degree does attention to three components of critical thinking in an assignment sequence--analysis, synthesis, and evaluation--successfully improve students’ critical thinking?

Seminar participants will present their work in 15-minute segments, followed by 10-minute question periods on Thursday, August 11th 9:00 am - 5:00 pm and Friday, August 12th, 9:00 am - 3:00 pm in Room 041 Haldeman. Members of the Dartmouth community and the general public are welcome to attend these presentations. The schedule for the final presentation topics may be downloaded as a PDF here (revised Thurs. 8/11/11).

The Institute is grateful to Bedford St. Martins, sponsor of the Summer Seminar sessions on the use and evaluation of effective statistics and statistical processes in composition research.

To download the 2011 full announcement and description, click here (PDF) (MSWord).
To download the 2011 application, click here (PDF) (MSWord).

2011 registration materials for accepted applicants:
2011 Registration Information Sheet (PDF) (MSWord)
2011 Registration Payment Form (PDF) (MSWord)

For news coverage of this event, see here.

Sponsored by Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, the National Council of Writing Program Administrators, and Bedford/St. Martin’s Publishers.