Context

Your final project for the Practicum is a reflective and analytic essay about your experience as a writing fellow. Having conducted preliminary research and presented your findings, you are now ready to refine your focus and draft your essay!

Assignment

Write an essay that describes and frames up (problematizes) a particular aspect of your experience as a writing fellow. Use your reading and research to analyze this experience, connecting it to similar, global issues in Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Fellows programs as well as conveying its more local implications or significance for UNE.  Interview 2-3 fellows (*at least one fellow NOT in our class–look for an email from me to contact veteran fellows) and shape an essay about how your peers understand and have dealt with/experience on your chosen topic.  There’s room for you to include your own experiences in this project as well. 

*Let’s chat on this.

While you’re working to connect your experience as a fellow with the reading and research/interviewing you’re doing and advancing some ideas on the problem or concern you’re exploring in this essay, you should aim to give over roughly 1/2 of this final writing project to a discussion regarding the ways in which your experience as a WF has:

• impacted your your own work as a writer and student
• set you up for transfer of various skills in another professional or academic setting
• offered you experiences (perhaps unlike your peers) to engage in an interactive, experiential learning environment

Feel free to break the essay into two distinct sections.

Learning Objectives

As an extension of your research presentations, this assignment shares many of its learning objectives. For example, students who complete both will be able to

• Situate their experience as a writing fellow within the scholarship and commentary on Writing Across the Curriculum
• Develop and use a professional vocabulary for talking about their experiences
• Use research to identify and refine a focus
• Locate and evaluate relevant sources

In addition, students who complete the essay will be able to

• Connect their reading and coursework to their personal and practical experience
• Think critically about their practice with an eye towards assessing their own work
• Develop or refine strategies for tutoring in their local context

Requirements and Format

• 4-6 pages, formatted according to MLA guidelines
• 3 relevant sources from the last 10ish years.

Due Dates

NOVEMBER 29: Peer review Pt 2-Paper
FINAL CLASS (DECEMBER 6): Part 2-Essay due.