Across disciplines, synthesizing information to draw conclusions is a valued skill but challenging for instructors and students. Faculty have well-formed ideas about the relevance and importance of concepts, ideas, and processes, to the point that thinking synthetically comes easily. By contrast, undergraduate students are still making sense of the tacit expectations of their disciplines, and may have difficulty distinguishing signal from noise. 

In this interactive workshop, we will discuss 'synthesis' in the context of participants' courses and curricula, consider the dimensions of effective synthetic thinking, and build activities and writing assignments to promote synthetic thinking for novice and developing students.

Facilitator: Dan Emery, University of Minnesota*

Audience: Faculty, instructors, and graduate students
Format: On-campus workshop

*Our guest presenters are candidates for a position as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. We encourage members of the University community to attend all three sessions. For questions about these guest workshops or other TWW events and programming, please email wac@umn.edu.