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| Surveying Worlds of Writing With Geography TAs |
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For Geography TA John Isom, it all started when students in his cartography class insisted they were taking classes in his field because they didn’t like writing. “They liked maps,” Isom said. “They liked geography. But they shied away from the writing assignments I was trying to add to the course.” And what writing the students turned in struck him as “dull and formulaic.”
So Isom, an advanced doctoral student studying people-environment relations, thought back to the four years he spent as a writing teacher and writing center tutor at New York’s LaGuardia Community College and organized WinG (Writing in Geography), an intra-disciplinary, TA-run training series focused on key principles for teaching writing in geography.
In the spring semester of 2000, Isom emailed Professor Bob Ostergren, who was then chair, to suggest the department offer training on teaching to all TAs in Geography writing as a process. Because funding was available, Ostergren was open to expanding department-specific training in this way to supplement that provided by the L&S Program in Writing Across the Curriculum. Isom recruited four other advanced doctoral students in Geography - Kim Coulter, Joy Fritschle Mason, Blake Harrison, and Beth Schlemper - to organize a series of brown bags for the fall semester. The brown bags were on creating effective writing assignments across the geography curriculum, using “getting started” techniques such as brainstorming and outlining, and responding to Geography students’ writing. In accordance with TAA requirement regarding training hours, TAs only had to attend two of the three sessions, but many attended the optional brown bag anyway.
Session 1: Designing Effective Writing Assignments
The first WinG brown bag addressed ways in which geographers use narrative, argumentation, description, analysis, and explanation in writing assignments. As a full group, participants discussed recurring themes that define geography and brainstormed about common features that defined writing assignments in the discipline.
Then, participants split up in groups to critique writing assignments — both shorter papers with titles such as “Timber Harvesting Debate” or “Migration and Cultural Identity” and longer, end-of-the-semester research papers —from the points of view of TAs and students. After a plenary discussion of the lessons learned from the small group critiques, the group suggested ways in which an organization like WinG could provide support for TAs planning writing assignments.
Session 2: Helping Students Get Started
Session 2 trained TAs to help student writers begin framing and elaborating their topics (or coming up with topic ideas to begin with) by using techniques such as brainstorming, clustering, and outlining, in that order. Brainstorming begins with writing a broad topic, such as “national forests,” on the board and then prodding students to do a “brain dump” of information based on the topic. A “brain dump” consists of letting students list anything remotely related to the topic; when simulating the “brain dump,” brown-bag participants came up with everything from “lack of government funding” to “lack of clean toilets.” With brainstorming, TAs were urged not to edit or judge the contents or length of the list.
TAs were then shown how to teach students to “cluster” or put the mass of information into groups. Clustering allows the writer to look for connections and chunks of information s/he considers important or worth elaborating. Finally, outlining was modeled as a way to put the clustered information into some sort of order. In addition to furnishing students with a sense of a topic or argument that might be surfacing, outlining gives students opportunities to see where gaps (i.e., opportunities for research) might occur.
Session 3: Responding to Student Writing
Issues surrounding revision and commenting on students’ papers were the topic the of the third WinG brown bag. At this point in the semester, TAs had received at least their second batch of papers and were more than eager to share situations, thoughts, ideas, and problems surrounding the provocative topics of commenting, revising, and grading. Several new TAs lamented the enormous chunk of time responding takes, and the more-experienced TAs were able to suggest tried-and-true tactics such as timing yourself or frontloading your efforts by requiring peer-review or conferences. TAs also discussed ways to encourage substantive revision.
Practical Reflections on a Program Like WinG
Professor and current department chair Jim Burt sees WinG as an important way to professionalize TAs: “As we offer more Comm B and writing-intensive courses, increasing numbers of teaching assistants face the (sometimes abrupt) transition from writer to writing consultant. The Writing-in-Geography workshops have been very successful, both as a jump-start for new TAs, and in providing experienced TAs a chance to reflect on lessons learned and share ideas with others. These sessions have certainly proved their worth for improving our teaching in some key courses.”
“Moreover,” Burt points out, “[the WinG sessions] are highly valued by the TAs, as shown by strong attendance for the [third] optional meeting. Attendance at that meeting was 10, compared with 14 for the previous required meeting. So you could say more than 70% stayed with the program beyond what was required.”
Workshop organizer Harrison believes what was most beneficial about the WinG brown bags was seeing just how much TAs can teach each other. TA participants in WinG brown bags often commented that the sessions gave them an idea of what lay in store for them as they assigned and responded to writing. Master’s student Dan Mensher agreed: “Perhaps the best part the WinG seminars was just interacting with other geography grad students. Not only did this help me, a newcomer to the field, get a feeling for how geographers approach the task of writing, it gave me a real sense of confidence. I was part of a group of experienced teachers who were there to share their experiences and offer hints along the way.” And doctoral student Mike Yochim believed “[The WinG sessions] boosted my confidence."
Isom and Harrison hope they will be able to get a faculty member to be some sort of anchor for the program, even if s/he is only the “keeper of the binder” the TA organizers are putting together for their successors. “Because grad students come and go, programs like WinG will only thrive if they’re institutionalized,” Harrison said.
The WinG TAs encourage other departments seeking to implement training like WinG to use the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program as a resource for both pedagogical and moral support. As a result of WAC presence at the brown bags, several TAs in Geography consulted the WAC Director and Assistant Director on issues that ranged from learning how to deal with the time stresses involved in grading stacks of papers to coaching students on how to understand their assignments.
Beyond the obvious pedagogical payback TAs get from being part of a program such as WinG lie benefits that come from thinking of the ways one’s own discipline organizes information thematically. “As a discipline,” Isom argues, “we’re a well-kept secret in the academy. In geography, we contain within our department climatologists, language geographers, demographers, and people who study the aesthetics of place, so because of this diversity, the writing we want to introduce our students to ranges from the classic scientific experiment to very philosophical essays on the meaning of place. Just in our department at UW, some geographers use poetry; some are writing computer codes and algorithms for a climate model of the Great Lakes. So we’re like a university in miniature, and we have many opportunities to acclimate students to different types of academic writing.”
Acclimating students into a discipline like Geography — or any discipline, for that matter — means exposing them to many different kinds of writing. And the organizing TAs Isom, Coulter, Fritschle Mason, Harrison, and Schlemper represent the range of sub-disciplinary focuses in Geography. The key to the success of a program like WinG is reflecting on what kinds of writing take place in your discipline and then communicating with colleagues and students about those kinds of writing. Doing so not only serves to share pedagogical goals but helps to get everyone (at least close) to the same page.
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