This paper describes the collaboration of a Writing Center director and a professor of a Fisheries Biology course in support of a research paper entitled, "The World Without," which asks students to convince readers of the likely ecological consequences associated with the extinction of a finfish species or aquatic habitat. Opportunities…

The blog and distance learning: the former can enhance, enlighten, and elevate the educational experience for the student and the teaching experience for the instructor. And blogs are especially suited for the asynchronous environment where nearly everything is written and remains throughout the course, so students can continually refer to the…

Research on student learning in organic chemistry indicates that students tend to focus on surface level features of molecules with less consideration of implicit properties when engaging in mechanistic reasoning. Writing-to-learn (WTL) is one approach for supporting students' mechanistic reasoning. A variation of WTL incorporates peer review and…

Writing centres play a vital role in supporting all forms of student academic writing in higher education (HE) institutions, including digital writing projects (DWPs)--multiliterate and multimodal, often video-and-audio-based projects, produced using digital technologies. The importance of writing support for multimodal composing is evident in…

Writing conferences are rich pedagogical settings to explore explanations. In contrast to teachers, writing consultants are usually peer tutors, straddling the roles of instructor and fellow student (North, 1984). This creates a unique situation where consultant-writer dyads must interactionally manage questions of expertise and authority (Carino,…

Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university's…

Students who receive instruction in discipline-specific communication perform better in introductory and upper-level STEM courses. In this study, researchers investigate how writing center intervention can aid STEM faculty in revising assignment rubrics and conveying to students the discourse conventions and expectations for writing tasks. The…

We describe a pair of fully integrated courses designed to teach biology to non-majors in a manner that connects authentically to the liberal arts. The co-taught courses were organized around the question: What does it mean to be human? Students investigated this question in the context of three topics: dis/ability, race, and sex and gender. In…