|
Writing in the Majors began and continues as a complex research project on the uses of language in learning among the disciplines. Over the years, teachers involved with the program have in many ways reinvented language instruction, in a great variety of forms, to meet learning objectives in their own courses and disciplines. Writing in the Majors has served as a clearing house for these ideas, with recognition that there is no single Right Way to write or teach. When specific innovations that worked in one course seem relevant to another, we pass the idea along. Because the program was designed to stimulate variety, we haven't tried to develop routine solutions to goals and problems throughout the curriculum.
Over these years, however, we have observed patterns in this variation: issues, problems, and strategies that turn up with some consistency. About these patterns we can generalize to some extent. For example, research paper assignments pose essentially the same challenges for teachers and for students throughout the curriculum, and from the evidence in dozens of courses we both explain the typical problems and describe strategies that work best for solving them. Given the investigative nature of the program, we call these generalizations "findings," and in this section you will find the first of them. More will follow.
|
|
| © John S. Knight Institute Last Updated April 2006 knight_institute@cornell.edu | |