Spent the last few weeks working closely with our writing mentors at Chico State thinking about their role in the success of first-year writers. Grateful in particular to Geoff Bogan and Brittany DeLacy for their participation in our Educator Innovator conversation (with Tom Fox), and Keaton Kirkpatrick for his DMLCentral blog–“Building Community With Peer Mentors”–this week.…
Leslie & I On BlogTalk Radio
Summary: We discuss teaching writing, teaching science, and how to create classrooms in which students use writing to learn and think scientifically with Kim Jaxon and Leslie Atkins Elliott, authors of the new book Composing Science. Kim and Leslie talk about concrete approaches for engaging students in practices that mirror the work that writing plays…
Nobody Quits in April
The spring semester in academia is notoriously brutal: conference presentations, thesis and dissertation projects, graduations looming, and many classes to teach. Years ago, well into a PhD program, my friends and I started to notice a pattern: around April, one of us would lose it. Our panic rotated through the group, but on any given…
Blogging with my peeps: first-year problems
Excited to be back in the full swing of the spring semester. I spent the first day of classes completely full of jitters the whole day; funny how that doesn’t go away after 15 years of teaching. I have an amazing group of students in my jumbo first-year writing course: 88 freshmen who are a…
Digital Humanities Panel
Thanks to Jeff Layne from CSU, Chico’s Regional & Continuing Education for making our Digital Humanities Panel Discussion available for viewing. Link here to our talks and panel Q&A.
Sabbatical Starts: For Once, the Journey May Actually Be the Reward
There is a tattoo on my left forearm, copied from borrowed letters in my grandmother’s handwriting, that reads “the journey is the reward.” The tattoo is both a talisman and a reminder: seeing my grandmother, Lois’, beautiful script is comforting and empowering, and the phrase–focused on the journey and not the destination–functions as a sort…