Use this space to provide an overview of how you are reading your own work and what you want your other readers to know about where your final project is at. 

Please post your response to these questions no later than Friday. Relatedly, make sure you've gotten your draft to your readers by that date as well. 

1.  What are you trying to prove in your paper--what is your argument and how are you proving it?
2. What do you feel is working well in your paper and why?
3. What are you less confident about in your paper and why? What feedback can we give you that will help you to approach a final revision?
4. Are there things that you know you want or have to do in this draft but are not done yet that you think we should know about as we read?

Your answers to these questions will guide the workshop. So try to be as thoughtful and as complete as you can be. 

AND ONE FINAL NOTE: Make sure you get your draft to your readers no later than Friday so that folks have time. Please know that your draft doesn't have to be totally finished, that's what that last question allows for. The more complete it is, the better the feedback you'll get, but don't let not being totally done prevent you from getting your draft to your colleagues. 

A refresher: here are the reading groups for next week's class.
Sara: Dawna & Kasey
Kasey: Cassie & Peyton
Peyton: Nick & Devon
Devon: Peyton & Nick
Nick: Kasey & Cassie
Cassie: Sara & Dawna
Dawna: Sara & Devon

ON THE NIGHT OF OUR WORKSHOP:
We will be meeting in person, so, if possible, you can bring a hard copy of the paper and the comments to give to the writer. You can choose to do this electronically, but make sure you are able to talk about the feedback you have for them. 

Final papers are due to me no later than 6:00 on 6 May 2024. 

I encourage you to read my Monday Update for this week at some point, because there I talk about my own limitations in this field as well as offer some updated theory/pedagogy from the field. 

I know that in our class conversations many of you have talked about the linguistic diversity in your classrooms--some have it; some don't. It's also my sence that most of the conversation is in a deficit context--not because you see multilingual writers as less than, but that the classroom makes it nearly impossible to value their considerable linguistic skills. 

For today's post, I invite you to imagine writing assignments not managed by policy, tests or administrators, that would value and celebrate linguistic diversity in a classroom--whether you have multilingual students in the class or not. As you conceive of your idea, please identify the parts of the reading that support your idea. If there is some kind of technology (tonight's other theme) that might help you to do this, write about that as well. 

As usual, after you've posted, please read and respond to your classmates--critique, expand, change their ideas. But, remember, no groaning about what's not possible. Think only about some edenic classroom where all things are possible and the supply closet is endlessly stocked. 

So far this semester we've considered who the writer is  and the what the process of production looks like for different writers at different inflection points in their lives (our own included). This week, we are looking more directly at the texts that get produced, which leads us to a discussion of genre.

Bartholomea's central argument is that school writing is a very particular genre--that, in fact, school, the university, is a genre of behavior--and  that, for many students, it is like another language. We can see this as the next step in the evolving effort in the discipline to understand who our student writers are, what they need. 

Bartholomea is old school about it. Adler-Kasner/Wardle come at it from a very different perspective--genre is a threshold concept because if we understand genre as a writer, we will learn the characteristics of that genre regardless of what kind of genre are writing in. 

For tonight's post, please trace how each other contributes to a useful definition of genre. Once you've posted that, read through your colleague's post and respond in writing about how you see or don't see or wish you saw genre functioning in your own classroom with your own students. 

Due to the limitations of time this class, I'm hoping to have both a theoretical and a pedagogical conversation all at once.