Support for Faculty

Faculty Seminar in Writing Instruction

The Faculty Seminar in Writing Instruction provides a small group of Cornell faculty with an opportunity to explore the relationship between teaching and writing while developing or refining new or existing courses. Participants receive a $2000 stipend.

Facilitated by Dr. Elliot Shapiro, the 2013 Faculty Seminar will consist of an intensive two-day workshop held on May 30 and 31, followed by two half-day meetings scheduled for June 4 and 6. The seminar will have no more than eight participants.

Participants are typically either working on a new course or revising an existing one. These courses may be designated as writing courses but they need not be.

Since 1986, the Faculty Seminar in Writing Instruction has provided dozens of Cornell faculty members with an occasion and an incentive to reconsider teaching practices and to examine the role of writing at every level of the university curriculum. The seminar also gives faculty an opportunity to discuss teaching and writing with colleagues from a range of disciplines. Departments represented among Faculty Seminar participants in recent years include: Africana Studies; Anthropology; Asian Studies; City and Regional Planning; Classics; Communications; Education: English; Food Science; German Studies; Government; History; Horticulture; Human Development; Landscape Architecture; Molecular Biology; Music; Performing and Media Arts; Philosophy; Physics; Romance Studies; Science and Technology Studies; Sociology.

We welcome applications from faculty of any rank; we particularly invite applications from faculty who are new to Cornell.

If you have questions about the seminar, please contact Elliot Shapiro.

Faculty Seminar 2013

Essay Response Consultation Program

First-Year Writing Seminar instructors interested in free, private consultation are invited to participate in the Essay Response Consultation program. In this program the tutor reads a set of papers on which you have commented, and then meets with you for a one-to-one consultation about questions and insights regarding response to student work.

Less formal, unscheduled consultation is also possible; when a brief, informal meeting in the midst of responding to a set of papers could clear up temporary confusion and restore a balanced perspective, drop by any of the Walk-In Service locations during our regular hours.

If you hear of any other strategies that have worked particularly well, please share them with us so we can pass them along to others. And if you wish to arrange for either an Essay Response Consultation or for some special assistance for a student during the semester, please contact Tracy Hamler Carrick .

Other Programs for Faculty with Graduate Students

During the academic year, faculty members from the departments offering First-Year Writing Seminars act as course leaders for graduate students who are teaching seminars. Course leaders continue the support and training begun in "Teaching Writing" by holding regular staff meetings, visiting classes, reviewing papers comments, and so on.

An important mechanism for encouraging a heightened level of self-awareness surrounding questions of disciplinarity and the teaching of writing has been the "Peer Collaboration" program for graduate students, a program previously initiated by the current director as a course leader in Comparative Literature which has since been instituted across the Institute as a whole. The peer collaboration program has the pedagogical advantage of encouraging teachers from within each discipline to define and discuss their own terms for what constitutes successful writing in their chosen fields. Collaboration among peers from within the same field, as well as across fields, has the additional advantage of avoiding unhelpful disidentifications with authority figures from other fields (English in particular) which a writing-in-the-disciplines based approach must circumvent if it is to avoid unproductive forms of discipline-based resistance. During the year, Teaching Assistants may collaborate with other, perhaps more experienced Teaching Assistants as part of a recently developed peer-collaboration program. Projects might include visiting each other's classes, team-teaching, or acting as guest instructor. Faculty act as consultants, approving the proposals for peer collaboration, attending one or more lunch meetings, and submitting the final reports from the collaboration to the Knight Institute Office.