Support for Faculty

Faculty Seminar in Writing Instruction

The Faculty Seminar, made possible by the John S. Knight Endowment, was created in 1986 by former Knight Program director Harry Shaw with the assistance of the late James Slevin, Professor of English at Georgetown University. Over the years, the Faculty Seminar has provided an opportunity for dozens of Cornell faculty to explore the relationship between teaching and writing in their fields while developing and refining writing-intensive courses within their disciplines.

Now facilitated by the Knight Institute staff, the Seminar is held every summer before and during the six week summer session. A two-day workshop before the session begins is followed by four weekly afternoon meetings. Participants are typically faculty who are either planning a new course or revising an existing course. These courses are typically First Year Writing Seminars or Writing in the Majors courses but they need not be. Some participants teach First Year Writing Seminars as part of the Summer Session and/or the Pre-Freshman Summer Program but this is not a requirement.

The seminar serves two primary functions. First, it gives faculty an opportunity and an incentive to reconsider teaching practices. In particular, it gives faculty the opportunity to reconsider the role of writing in both first year and upper level courses. Second, it provides faculty with an opportunity to discuss teaching with a small group of colleagues from a range of disciplines. Departments represented in the last three years include: History; English; Anthropology; Classics; Horticulture; Food Science; Theatre, Film and Dance; Sociology; Philosophy; and Landscape Architecture.

Interested faculty can send a letter of application in response to the Call for Applications, published each fall. Participating faculty receive a stipend (the amount is designated in the annual call for applications). The seminar is typically capped at six.

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.

Please do refer your students but please do not ask them to obtain a tutor's signature. Because tutors work with the entire spectrum of quality in writing, our policy is to encourage rather than to monitor consultation with students. When you remind students about the Service, encourage them to browse these pages, including "How It Works. "

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 Joe Martin.

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.