The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington

The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington

12. Using Writing Across the Curriculum Exercises to Teach Critical Thinking and Writing

The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington

Robert Smart [+-]
Quinnipiac University
Robert Smart (PhD, University of Utah) is a Professor of English and Department Chair of the English Department at Quinnipiac University, where he teaches advanced writing, Irish and Gothic Studies courses. Smart is the founding editor of The Writing Teacher (National Poetry Foundation), co-editor of Direct From the Disciplines (Heinemann, Boynton-Cook, 2006), and author of The Nonfiction Novel (UPA, 1984). He has published on Irish and Gothic Studies in several anthologies, and in Postcolonial Text.
Suzanne Hudd [+-]
Quinnipiac University
Suzanne Hudd (PhD, Yale University) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Quinnipiac University, where she teaches courses in social stratification and research methods and co-chairs the Writing Across the Curriculum Program with Robert Smart. She is currently engaged in a year-long sabbatical project, with funding from the American Sociological Association, in which she is researching the pedagogical goals and praxis of writing in sociology.
Andrew Delohery [+-]
Quinnipiac University
Andrew Delohery (MA, Western Connecticut State University) is the director of The Learning Center at Quinnipiac University, where he manages programs for academic support and retention. Delohery, who teaches in Quinnipiac’s first-year composition program, coauthored Using Technology in Teaching (Yale University Press, 2005) and contributed to Direct from the Disciplines (Heinemann, Boynton-Cook, 2006). He also serves on the Editorial Board of The Learning Assistance Review, the journal of the National College Learning Center Association.

Description

In the second chapter in this section, “Using Writing Across the Curriculum Exercises to Teach Critical Thinking and Writing,” Robert Smart, Suzanne Hudd, and Andrew Delohery present a “concentric model” of critical thinking. This model postulates a hierarchy of linked cognitive tasks, moving from prioritization (deciding the order of importance of ideas), to translation (putting those ideas into one’s own words), and then to analogizing (comparing ideas from one source with those from another, including one’s own experience). This model is used as the basis for creating writing prompts for informal writing tasks, otherwise known as “writing-to-learn” (WTL) tasks. Such tasks are linked to the wider goals of a class, and can be used to provide a basis for working on longer formal papers within a specific discipline. In this chapter, Smart and colleagues show how this approach is applied in faculty workshops and in an upper-division class for sociology students. Their specific examples demonstrate how powerful the concentric thinking model can be as a basis for writing in the disciplines, and also how it can be adapted to different contexts in which critical thinking and mastery of academic discourse are required.

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Citation

Smart, Robert; Hudd, Suzanne; Delohery, Andrew. 12. Using Writing Across the Curriculum Exercises to Teach Critical Thinking and Writing. The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 219-237 Jun 2011. ISBN 9781845534530. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=25917. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.25917. Jun 2011

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