In studios, students gather to learn and practice under the direction of teachers who are experts in their crafts. Participation and collaboration between teachers and students, and among groups of students, are encouraged and supported. Further, studios are designed around topics and sets of questions that shape the reading and writing of the course. The goals of the course, detailed below, are such that all student writers, from relatively inexperienced to quite skilled and sophisticated, can participate and learn. Through a combination of formal instruction and guided practice, we expect students to emerge from any of the various versions of WRT 105 understanding that 1.
Writing enables learning.
We use writing as a means of learning and active intellectual engagement. Studio practices such as annotating, paraphrasing, summarizing, journaling, and responding provide students ways to engage complex texts in the writing course and other courses. Brainstorming, freewriting, listing, categorizing, hierarchizing, clustering, mapping, and many other studio practices serve as organizational, analytic, and interpretive tools. Writing is a complex, dynamic process as well as a concrete finished product. We compose multiple pieces, such as notes, annotations, journal entries, informal responses, lists, dialogues, etc., some of which will find their way into more formal essays, and all of which stock a storehouse of raw material from which more polished writing might be crafted.