Five English faculty presented at the 2009 North Carolina Symposium on Teaching Writing held Oct. 16-17 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The symposium, titled “Perceptions and (mis)Representations: Writing in Secondary and Post-Secondary Classrooms,” facilitated discussions about student writing in high school, community college, and university environments.
- Murphy Townsend and Greg Hlavaty presented “The New Materiality: Acquiring and Applying the Changing Resources of Twenty-first Century University Libraries.” This presentation detailed their innovations in teaching college freshmen to use the varied resources of the university library.
- Megan Isaac and Michelle Trim presented “Stressing Invention: Cultivating Investment in Writing after Years of Testing.” This paper reported on research investigating student responses to invention strategies used in both the high school and college classrooms in order to argue the value of devoting more class time to helping students develop writing topics.
- Paula Patch presented “Composing Across Contexts: Understanding the Transfer of Writing Strategies from First-Year Composition to Other First-Year Courses,” which presented the findings of classroom research conducted to determine how, when, and why students use certain writing strategies learned in first-year composition in other first-year courses.