Fall 2009 IWR Forum

College Writing and Speaking: Where in the World Are We?
Christiane Donahue, Director, Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

When people talk about what competencies our students require in order to meet the demands of the 21st century, they consider all kinds of important things—but rarely do they contemplate the need for students to internationalize their writing and speaking abilities.  In her thoughtpiece, Christiane Donahue calls for dialogue about such an internationalization.  Observing that the world is constituted of many rhetorics (and many Englishes), Donahue’s thoughtpiece is crafted to engage her colleagues in reflection and discussion regarding the rhetorical flexibility that students will require to successfully navigate in a 21st century global environment. Donahue encourages her colleagues to consider developing, with their students, a deep awareness of these diverse rhetorics, along with the cultures and conventions that shape them.  (Download here.)

Assessment, Then & Now
Karen Gocsik, Executive Director, Writing and Rhetoric

In 1962, Albert Kitzhaber undertook the first comprehensive assessment of Dartmouth’s first-year writing courses.  More than 25 years later, in winter 2009, the IWR began its preliminary work on another assessment project, focusing in its first stage on Writing 2-3.  In her thoughtpiece, Karen Gocsik compares the two assessment projects, inviting her colleagues to consider with her the fundamental questions addressed there: What is writing?  What pedagogies are most successful in teaching students to write?  What is the place and role for first-year writing in the larger curriculum? Ultimately Gocsik advances a view of assessment as an exciting intellectual endeavor that promises not only to energize our teaching, but also to argue for a more vigorous relationship between first-year writing courses and other courses across the Dartmouth curriculum.  (Download here.)

Responsive Audiences, Responsive Speakers:  Engaging Student Audiences in the Speech Classroom
Josh Compton, Lecturer of Speech

In his thoughtpiece, Josh Compton warns that ignoring the importance of the audience in our speech classrooms could result in an apathetic relationship between speaker and audience that makes speech improvement difficult.  On the other hand, recognizing and even celebrating the role of the audience in our speech classrooms helps our students to understand that speech is dialogic, collaborative, participatory, and transactional. Compton further reasons that, "Approaching public speaking as a collaborative encounter has the added benefit of underscoring public speaking as a process. When students engage in public speaking with a goal of learning from the audience—of interpreting feedback as an evaluation of ideas—speech becomes a way of knowing and not merely a way of showing."  (Download here.)    

-Josh Compton prepared this essay for The Brigance Colloquy on Public Speaking as a Liberal Art, hosted by Wabash College in February 2009. 

Readings on Writing:  A Review of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom
Laura Braunstein, English Language and Literature Librarian

Faculty who are interested in facilitating collaborative writing and research have recently been exploring the use of wikis as a way of achieving their course objectives.  The various articles in Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom not only review the practical applications of the wiki but examine their historical, pedagogical, and theoretical contexts, too.  Laura Braunstein’s book review offers the reader a solid sense of the “shape” of the discussion, ranging from David Elfving and Ericka Menchen-Trevina’s illustration of a wiki assignment not working in the classroom, to Thomas Nelson’s claim that the wiki is “a means for revealing to the individual student the constructed nature of knowledge.”  (Download here.)