Author Archive
Senior-Thesis Writing Groups: Putting Students in the Driver’s Seat
By Elisabeth Miller and Stephanie White
On a Sunday morning in February, five students brave the icy winds howling off Lake Mendota, knock the snow and slush off their boots, and straggle into the student union toward a table near the windows looking over a snowy Memorial Union Terrace. That night, another five students wrap up [...]
Writing Across the Curriculum’s Head Start
Every semester, our Writing Across the Curriculum program gets a head start. The week before classes have even begun, we have the privilege of spending two mornings training up to 75 new Teaching Assistants. These TAs will be teaching writing-intensive courses across the disciplines—courses that fulfill an intermediate communication requirement for undergraduates. In our UW-Madison [...]
A Conversation with Katrin Girgensohn
Here at the UW-Madison Writing Center, we have been thrilled to have Katrin Girgensohn spend the year with us as our visiting scholar from the Writing Center at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. And here on this blog you’ve gotten to see a little of her, too. I’m privileged to get to share [...]
Co-Teaching as Synthesis: Learning to Ask Questions
The students in Professor Rebekah Willett’s first-year course on the Internet and Society are crouched over their desks and laptops, some scribbling, some typing, some doing so fervently, some reluctantly. All are working to formulate a couple of sentences that synthesize two paragraphs of text they have in front of them. I’ve just walked with [...]
