Talking about writing - designing and establishing writing feedback and tutorials to promote student enagement and learning

Other conference contribution, 2019

Doubtlessly, using teachable moments is an efficient approach to promote student learning, and few occasions lend themselves better to this than when teachers and students meet to talk about students’ writing. However, these conversations may be difficult to establish and even if the intention of the feedback given to the students is to be formative and useful, there is a risk that it is perceived primarily as summative rather than something that expands the students’ understanding of writing and writing processes. Therefore, we would like to provide examples of a variety of tutoring and feedback designs for academic writing that are used to promote students’ further development as writers. The examples come from several different courses and writing interventions across the disciplines at a university of technology with both group and individual tutorials, peer and teacher feedback, self-assessment and reflection, as well as different setups for feedback on individual and group assignments.

The background for this presentation is shaped by many years of negotiating and designing writing instruction, feedback and assessment practices within STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). A variety of setups for writing assignments and writing processes have been tested, and have resulted in practices that approach skills and understanding of academic and disciplinary writing in different ways. In this presentation we will discuss how tutoring and feedback practices have been adapted to different teaching situations depending on scope and variation in genres and writing assignments, as well as on logistics and numbers of students. The aim for this presentation is not to provide a solution or a state-of-the-art description of how to design writing tutorials and feedback, instead we hope that the examples and ideas behind our different setups will generate a useful discussion on tutoring, writing pedagogy and didactics.