I-212 Course Goals and Content

The work of the SAW program is informed by the dynamic history of research, theories, and scholarship about collaborative learning produced by scholars and practitioners within the discipline of Writing Center Studies. This course draws on the field’s most influential work to assist students in 1) developing reflective practices for effective mentorship, and 2) engaging with, responding to, and revising contemporary arguments.

Students are introduced to significant research, theories, and scholarship in education, psychology, philosophy, sociology, politics, communications, and other fields to interrogate questions about the origins of thought, the production of knowledge, the acquisition of language, and the nature of learning.

Students study the cognitive processes that differ between the production of written and spoken language, and reflect upon the diversity of approaches that must necessarily be tailored to each learning context.

Students explore theories about the relationship between self-efficacy and learning, zones of proximal development, and the function of conversation, and they devise practical approaches for translating those theories into successful one-on-one practices with peers.

Students consider the many challenging ways that cultural differences, linguistic differences, and racial differences will influence a mentoring session—in terms of the mentors’ and students’ relationship to the writing/speaking project and in terms of their interpersonal dynamics together.

Students learn to situate their work within its broader institutional, historical, social, and global contexts, considering the political implications of their decisions for how to advise their peers. These discussions bring them into contact with significant discourses such as cultural studies, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and other frameworks integral to analyses across the disciplines.

Students develop their own writing and speaking abilities through projects that ask them to explore how their own experiences have shaped their attitudes about language, how the values of different disciplines lead to the creation of diverse conventions, and how their practical experiences mentoring have been informed by (and in turn inform) the theories of collaborative learning they have been studying.

This is not a “training class”; there is no step-by-step “how to” manual or set of quantifiable competencies that students acquire. This is also not a remedial class nor is it a class intended for students to learn how to help other students with remedial issues; the theories of collaborative learning studied in the course extend across all disciplines and levels of ability. This is not a class on the history of “rhetoric” nor is it a class on “what good writing looks like” (i.e. a student’s strong writing skills are not sufficient to “place out” of the class). A student could elect not to work for SAW after taking the course and would still have had an enriching educational experience.