Writing Pedagogy

The Serie Center provides faculty with numerous opportunities to reflect on and invest in their writing pedagogy. We regularly utilize both our own colleagues and outside experts to lead hands-on workshops that familiarize faculty with best practices and strategies for cultivating students’ writing habits and skills. We develop tools and resources that faculty can use to enhance their teaching, such as Write Well Microlectures and Teaching Writing: Complete Lessons and Resources (gdoc). Brigetta (Britt) Abel (German Studies) is Director of Writing and coordinates Macalester’s writing initiatives, Abel provides one-on-one consultations for individual faculty in all disciplines. She supports the general education writing requirement and the assessment of students’ writing and communication skills. She provides focused training for embedded student writing assistants and preceptors across the disciplines.

• Writing Resources for Students and Faculty
• Responsive writing instruction (gdoc)

Writing General Education Resources 

• General Education Designation Forms
• Gen Ed Writing Rubric (Rubric based on the writing gen ed requirement; feel free to use and/or modify)
• Writing Assignment Prompt Checklist (reminder of important information to cover in your writing assignment prompt)

Anti-racist writing pedagogy

• Ten Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in our Classrooms (Catherine Savini, Inside Higher Ed, January 2021)
• Beyond Just: Toward an Antiracist Writing Pedagogy at Macalester (Jake Mohan, August 2020)
• ​Working with Multilingual Writers at Macalester (Jake Mohan)
• How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy? (Asao B. Inoue, 2019)
• “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words” (from bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, 1994, pp 167-175)
• Vershawn Young: Code Meshing (brief introductory video); see also Young’s piece “Should Writers Use Their Own English?” (Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies Vol 12, Issue 1, Article 10, 2010)
• Jamila Lyiscott (two videos)
  • “3 Ways to Speak English”
  • “Why English Class is Silencing Students of Color”

Questions?

If you have questions about any of these writing-related initiatives, please contact: Britt Abel Director of Writing [email protected].