FYW Events

UConn Waterbury Students’ Bad Ideas About Writing

by Ellen C. Carillo On February 29, on the Waterbury campus, I hosted an event titled “Bad Ideas About Writing Live!” The event featured the writing of students in ENGL 2013W: Introduction to Writing Studies. Students developed their own “bad idea about writing” and presented them before an audience comprised of staff, students, and OLLI […]

Brown Bag Lunch Reflection

This year, we’ve implemented an event series called the Brown Bag Lunch. Once a month, the First-Year Writing office picks a topic related to teaching and we gather with other instructors to eat lunch and discuss various methods, challenges, or experiences in our teaching. September’s lunch discussed student engagement, October’s discussed how to incorporate games […]

November 2016 Teaching Workshop: Creativity in Critical Writing

It wasn’t too long ago (though, because it took place before the Thanksgiving break, it feels like years have come and gone in the meantime) that FYW held a teaching development workshop on a topic that’s especially dear to my heart, Creativity in Critical Writing. In the workshop, we discussed several important questions, including . […]

October 2016 Teaching Workshop: Habits of Mind

Educational outcomes in traditional settings focus on how many answers a student knows. When we teach the Habits of Mind, we are interested also in how students behave when they don’t know an answer. . . . We are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it.   —Arthur […]

September 2016 Teaching Workshop: Assignment Development

The moving force of inquiry is the existence of questions that are posable relative to the “body of knowledge” of the day but not answerable within it. Inquiry sets afoot a process of a cyclic form . . . —Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy, p. 65 Yesterday, the First-Year Writing Program facilitated a workshop on assignment […]