Goals

Best practices for teaching college writing courses are highly contested, dynamic and fraught, and the role of reading in college writing instruction is not at all clear. The changing nature of literacy in the 21st century guarantees that this landscape will continue to shift as instructors work hard to make informed decisions based on disciplinary traditions, cultural responsiveness, and what we know about how learning works.

In this course, we will focus our learning on the Reading Apprenticeship framework, and threshold concepts of writing studies. We will:

• Explore the notion of “apprenticeship” for college readers and writers

• Experience and reflect on various kinds of metacognitive reflection in order to build knowledge about how to support reading and writing development

• Generate new materials within supportive community

Design Principles

Design principles for this online course reflect those that also guide our face-to-face professional development activities and are parallel to the pedagogical approach implicit in the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework.

These principles include:

1. Learning is social, and literacies are social practices.

2. Readers make their own meaning of texts, in conversation with others.

3. Readers are able to deepen their understandings of complex domains by working with multiple texts and multiple types of texts on a topic and by applying new knowledge in their own local contexts.

4. Texts in different disciplines require different ways of reading and thinking, thus professional development (and/or classrooms) should provide readers with experiences that enable them to become more conscious of the ways they and others read different texts (and read them differently).

5. Instructors in all disciplines can enhance students' access to challenging academic texts by engaging them in the four dimensions, inquiry, extensive reading, and metacognitive conversation. Enhancing all students' access to challenging texts is an important component of equity.