by Katie Reinberger, Anthropology, ’18-19

As the end of the Fall 2018 semester nears, I have been busy finishing up class projects and preparing for finals. This fall I was not TAing for a writing-intensive class, so it was the perfect semester to take WIP’s writing pedagogy course. This way, I had the whole semester to learn new strategies and tips without worrying about trying to incorporate them immediately in the course I was involved in. Now, I’ve had the chance to evaluate the tools I think will be most effective for the spring course, and I can discuss them with the instructor to figure out a great plan.

In Spring 2019, I’ll be a WIP TA for Bioarchaeology in the Department of Anthropology. It was one of my favorite classes as an undergraduate, and I am excited to see how students will engage with the material through writing assignments. Parts of bioarchaeology, also my field of study, are very technical and driven by the scientific methods, but another important part is the ability to talk about complex and diverse human experiences. This is where writing is immensely helpful for students to organize their opinions and thoughts.

I am excited to see how students will engage with the material through writing assignments.

I am thinking about a couple of the strategies we learned this semester that I am particularly excited about. The WIP TAs who do not have their own classes have many opportunities to develop productive and effective activities to encourage students in the writing process, even if they’re only utilized during outside office hours. While I might not have as much control over what assignments the students will have to write or when projects are due in the spring, I will be very involved in responding to student work, something I have not had as much experience with. I am looking forward to conferences with students to talk about their writing progress and how to involve them more. It was brought up several times and included in our textbook that our comments on student writing should be considered part of a broader dialogue (Gottschalk and Hjortshoj 2004).

Along these lines, a couple of tips they suggested went beyond the basic approach of having students write a note to us about what they think of their drafts to guide me in my revisions. A couple questions they proposed asking the students as they turned it in:

What would you change if you had two more days to work on your paper?

What do you think I will say about your paper?

Once drafts have been turned in, the options for productive conferences are many and include many chances for the students to be involved, rather than just passively receiving our comments and only fixing the few things we decided to comment on. Some of their suggestions are basic things like describe what the students have done in the paper so they can see where there might be holes, but then there are expansions such as describing my experience reading the draft. I have already started implementing some of these tools in peer review with colleagues in my graduate classes, and they have really improved my ability to give constructive feedback to my peers.