wp home > junior year writing > sourcebook for instructors > letter from coordinator
Letter from the Coordinator of the Junior Year Writing Program
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to the Junior Year Writing Program and our new instructional Sourcebook!
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is so fortunate to have writing courses specifically designed for each discipline. I have been called on multiple times to consult with universities around the country desperate to improve their students’ writing abilities. Here, we have a built-in mechanism to support the development of our students’ discipline-specific writing skills. Writing courses within each discipline offer students the opportunity to clarify their thoughts and develop their ideas while becoming more articulate about the issues of their chosen fields.
This first edition of the Junior Year Writing Sourcebook was designed to support your work with students. The Sourcebook contains, among other things, a brief history of our nationally-acclaimed program, basic expectations of junior-year writing courses, and samples of successful syllabi and assignments. The ideas presented here – for teaching, assigning, and responding to student writing – are offered as options to consider in your own courses. We have included useful articles about grading writing, grammar, and scaffolding your students’ work from low stakes to high stakes writing.
In addition, the writing workshops we offer periodically are designed to provide hands-on opportunities for you to broaden your teaching repertoire when it comes to writing. This year we hope to build on the success of our writing workshops last spring. Look for upcoming announcements!
Finally, our website offers information about the teaching of writing with links to more in-depth resources. Let us know what other types of guidance, materials, or consultation services would be of interest to you. We are here to promote student writing and support faculty, teaching assistants, and teaching associates in that endeavor. I hope you enjoy our Sourcebook!
Sincerely,
Genevieve E. Chandler, RN, PhD
Associate Professor of Nursing
Junior Year Writing Coordinator
University of Massachusetts Amherst
A biographical note:
Ginny Chandler came to teach junior-year writing through her involvement with Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) and her work with Pat Schneider. She was so taken with the experience of being an AWA workshop participant that she developed a research thread on writing, healing, and voice in her scholarship. The studies, chapters and books authored by her and listed in our bibliography at the end of this Sourcebook are representative of this line of work. Today, she uses aspects of the AWA method in her junior-year writing class while focusing on the content area of nursing ethics. Every semester, she teaches the course to 64 juniors, and in the summer she offers it as a component of the online RN-to-BS Nursing Mobility program. She claims to be far from an English major, but she’s learning every year how to teach writing better. Student writing in her junior year course has resulted in such impressive clinical narratives that the stories produced there have served as a basis for her Ultimate Guide to Getting into Nursing School,due out in September of 2007. And this year, one of her students won the Best Essay award for Junior Year Writing at the Writing Program’s annual Celebration of Writing. So, she must be headed in the right direction!
Updated September 3, 2008
