Syllabus

Writ 160: Writing Center Consultation

Scheduled Time: M/W 3:30pm-4:45pm
Location: HSSB 1214
Enrl Code: 49825

Class Google Shared Drive
Group Details

Dr. Elizabeth Saur
Email: esaur@ucsb.edu
Office Hours (in person or via Zoom): Thursdays 12:00pm–1:30pm or by appointment
Zoom Office: Just follow this link to chat: https://ucsb.zoom.us/my/bethsoffice (Zoom Meeting ID: 220-954-0603)

While I hope we can all work productively with the policies and descriptions I have included here, I fully recognize the reality that we will encounter various challenges along the way. If you are having difficulty with either an assignment or a technology, or if you have any other concerns, please let me know. We can work together to find creative and purposeful solutions for whatever challenge or issue you are experiencing.

Texts and Required Resources:

• Access to our course site on WordPress at writ160.bethscourses.com (where all of the readings, prompts, schedule, etc. will be posted)
• Access to our shared class Google Drive folder
• Access to the OWL at Purdue (owl.purdue.edu)

_{Quick Syllabus Navigation}

---

Course Description:

Writing 160 focuses on the theory and practice of writing center consulting work. With this in mind, the course will cover basic practices for working with student writing and writers, theories of writing and of tutoring, working with multilingual writers, working with students labeled “basic writers,” online tutoring, and more. In particular, this course will focus on issues, theories, practices, and policies that influence not only the most effective practices of tutoring writing, but also the writing process itself. In other words, this course will help you develop as a writing tutor/teacher, mentor, collaborator, reader, while also helping you develop as a writer. In order to explore these concepts in a way that considers a wide variety of perspectives, we will be doing a lot of discussing, collaborating, and sharing. Of course, we will also be doing a lot of writing.

Because I know the student audience for this class varies quite a bit, I want to ensure that I cast the work and theories of writing centers as relevant to your diverse interests. Please make a deliberate effort to make this course space and curriculum your own. With this in mind, I invite you to re-situate any of the course projects so that they better fit your future purposes and aims. 

Course Outcomes:

---

Grading

In Writing 160 this quarter, we will be using a contract grading approach to determine your final grade. Contract grading avoids the use of grades and/or numbers on assignments. For more information on contract grading, go to this page.

In this class, your final course letter grade will be determined by your labor, by completing assignments and participating in the course. This doesn’t mean that the quality of the work matters less, as we will regularly discuss the quality of your writing. Rather, it means that we will focus on improving writing through hard work and collaborative efforts (as opposed to comparing the quality of your work to your classmates or an abstract notion of standards).

When it comes to evaluating writing, my goal is to create opportunities for receiving and providing feedback that will foster your growth as a thinker and writer. That is, we will try to create a class where you, your classmates, and I function as allies and collaborators, rather than adversaries working against each other for grades or approval by teachers. Taking grades out of the class, I hope, will allow you freedom to take risks and really work hard. Taking risks (even when they don’t work out as we hope) can show us our weaknesses, misunderstandings, and provide opportunities to grow and change.

Furthermore, since I won’t be assigning a number or letter grade to anything and since my feedback will be less frequent than your peers’, this makes your colleagues’ and your own assessment and revision advice all the more valuable. This will help you listen carefully to others’ differing judgments and build self-assessment strategies that function apart from a teacher’s approval. I want you to learn to assess the worth of those judgments for your work and make informed, careful decisions in your writing that you can explain to others. Such assessments will require time and critical thinking.

(Side-note: If you’re looking to game the system and do the least amount of work to get the highest possible course grade, this is not the class for you. If you genuinely want to improve yourself as a writer and reader, are willing to apply effort toward that improvement, and accept the idea that your labor in service of that goal has value, then this is the class for you.)

The Short Version: Getting a B

The standard grade for this course is B. You earn a B if you:

• put in time and effort,
• attend at least 80% of the class sessions,
• attend at least 1 individual conference with me,
• participate in all (or nearly all) of the weekly work,
• and complete all major assignments.

Grades of B depend on you meeting with me at least once individually throughout the quarter, having no more than three missing participation notebook or dialectical journals, no more than two make-up assignments, and no missing major assignments.

+/- Grades.

+/- grades will be assigned at my discretion. They will be used in cases when 1) your assignments and participation suggest you labored above and beyond the expectations (+); 2) the quality and completeness of your major projects, smaller assignments, and participation is lacking in one way or another (-).

---

Course Assignments

The work for Writing 160 consists of weekly short writing and collaborative discussions, three major assignments, and optional additional work. We will discuss the individual criteria for each assignment as the courses progresses; however, all work for this course should meet the requirements established for each assignment, should demonstrate understanding of audience, context, and purpose, and should be considerate and respectful of others. (Each of these elements is described on its own page accessible from the menu on this site and linked below).

Weekly Work

• Group Discussion
  This quarter, I will sort people into small discussion groups. (There should be 3 – 5 people in each group, depending on the final class enrollment numbers.) You’ll be meeting with your group once a week as part of our Wednesday sessions together. These meetings will involve everyone in the group meeting together, completing various activities, and discussing readings and assignments.
  —
• Participation Notebooks
  Each week, you will submit a participation notebook after you meet in small groups. In this notebook, you will briefly cover your group discussion, whatever you found interesting or meaningful, and whatever questions you have. Some weeks I may also ask you to include specific additional writing in your participation notebook: the results of a brainstorming session, a major assignment prompt rewritten in your own words, a few sentences responding to a specific question about a reading, etc.
  —
• Dialectical Journals
  By Friday of each week, you’ll contribute at least 4 entries to your assigned dialectical journal about the readings and discussion for the week in Google Drive. Two of those entries will be a quote / paraphrase of a text or something that was brought up in group discussion (left side of notebook) and a response to a quote / paraphrase (right side of notebook). And two of those entries will be a response to a peer’s response (a comment in the margin). Given how integral these are to the success of the course this quarter, there are high expectations for your participation here, but do not worry—we will go over these much more in detail, and I believe you will find this space very productive for your own thoughts and approaches to the readings and conversations for the quarter.

Major Assignments
(These need to be completed to pass the course or get a “B”)

• Two Individual Consultations with Reflections
  As with so many things, one of the best ways to understand the work of a Writing Center is to experience it. With this in mind, you will do individual consultations in which you are the “consultant” at least twice this quarter. You can work with whomever you want, but at least one of your consultations should be with another student in the course. Following your consultations, you will write a 800-1000 word reflection on the experience. There are four Individual Consultation deadlines listed on the schedule, and you are welcome to turn in your consultation reflections by any two of these four deadlines.
  —
• Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review
  Informed by the insights you gain from the readings, discussions, and your experiences as/with tutors, we will begin diving into the research process about halfway through the quarter. For this major assignment, you’ll be crafting an annotated bibliography and literature review that will feed into and inform your final research project for the class. This is both to help you become familiar with this genre and to help you narrow down your own research pursuits.
  • Annotated Bibliography
    We’ll go more into the details of this assignment as it draws closer, but your annotated bibliography should have 7-8 sources and each annotation should be around 200-250 words. This will involve researching a discipline or context of your choosing but also writing center scholarship from open access journals, such as Praxis and The Peer Review, or resources available through UCSB’s library, such as The Writing Center Journal and a variety of online publications.
  • Literature Review
    The literature review should work to help synthesize the information you gain from the annotated bibliography by putting your sources in conversation with one another, identifying moments of disagreement or contradiction, highlighting thru-lines in the conversation, etc. Really, it’s a chance to write out and explore how all of your research is working together – to give you a sense of the conversation that exists around your chosen focus. Ultimately, you should write a 1000-1200 word literature review that works to demonstrate your critical engagement with your sources and your sources engagement with one another.
• Research Project
  Throughout the quarter, we will be reading a wide variety of scholarship about Writing Centers – about their philosophies, practices, work, purposes, approaches, etc. At the same time, you’ll be thinking through and writing a 2400-3000 word research project that basically responds to the question: “How can Writing Center Studies either influence or be influenced by another discipline and/or context?.” Ideally, the annotated bibliography and literature review should help set you up well for this, as your research for those documents should influence the direction of your final project heavily. (*Note: If you would like to pursue different modes or mediums for this final project, just let me know. I’m open to thinking through things in new and creative ways.)
  

---

Additional Work Options
(3 of these are required for an “A” or “A-” in the course)
follow the links for more info

• Two Extra Individual Consultations
  For this additional work option, you can conduct and write reflections for two additional consultation sessions. This means you would need to complete an Individual Consultation and Reflection by every deadline established on the prompt and schedule. (This counts as one additional work assignment. In other words, you need to complete both consultations and reflections to receive credit for this assignment.)
  —
• Analytical Reflection of Recorded Consultation
  For this additional work option, you will be recording one of your consultations–either video and audio or just audio–and analyzing the recording to write a 1200-word reflection on the experience. In essence, this is similar to the standard reflection you’ll be writing for your consultations, but it should also include specifics from the session recording to help provide a richer and more developed understanding of your tutoring practices. (*Note: This would instead of one of your standard consultation reflections, not in addition to.)
  —
• Individual Writing Tutorial at C.L.A.S. and Reflection
  A lot of the work we’ll be doing this quarter will explore how theory and practice can inform one another. This additional work option assignment gives you the opportunity to experience a writing tutorial first-hand–as the student. Essentially, you should schedule a writing tutorial appointment with CLAS, attend that session, and then complete an 800-1000 word reflection about the experience. While this reflection can be written informally, it should draw connections between your experience and the topics and issues we discuss in class throughout the quarter. The final deadline for this project is Week 8, though it can be completed at any point in the quarter prior to then.
  —
• Writing-Related Handout Creation/Revision and Reflection
  As we’ll discuss this quarter, writing centers provide countless resources to students across campuses. Part of this work includes the development and distribution of handouts designed to helps students with specific aspects of the writing process. For this additional work option, using the C.L.A.S. website as a reference, you will either create a new writing-related handout or heavily revise an already existing writing-related handout. While the topic of your writing-related handout is up to you, ideally, your handout could be included as one of C.L.A.S.’s resources for future students. In addition to the final version of the handout, you will also write an 800-1000 word reflection about the process – explaining the choices you made and why you made them. The final deadline for this project is Monday of Finals Week, though it can be completed at any point in the quarter prior to then.
  —
• Writing Tutor Interview and Reflection
  So much of how writing center work gets done is influenced by the experiences and advice from others who have gone through it before (including this course). With this in mind, for this additional work option, you will conduct a 20-30 minute in-person interview with a writing tutor and write a 800-1000 word reflection that highlights and synthesizes key takeaways from the conversation and seeks to find connections to the class material. The final deadline for completion of this assignment will be Week 8, though it can be completed at any point in the quarter prior to then.

---

---

Course Policies

Course Site / Daily Schedule

The daily course schedule and assignment prompts will be available on our course website at https://writ160.bethscourses.com. Keep in mind, the course schedule is tentative and is subject to change based on the needs and interests of the class, as well as what is going on in the world. You are responsible for regularly checking the schedule for updates. I do my level best to communicate all the logistics of the course (deadlines, updates, changes, procedures) through both email and at least one weekly video. Please, for your sake and mine: check your email and read emails from me completely.

Complete Work 

Major assignments and weekly work are considered “complete” if they satisfy the criteria outline on their prompts. For example, if an assignment asks you to provide an analytical reflection and you instead only offer a summary of what happened, that assignment would not be considered complete. Similarly, if you write a last-minute and ill-considered draft that does not seem to be a good-faith effort to satisfy the prompt, that would not count as a “complete” assignment, and I would ask you to try again. (Contract grading means that in that case, the assignment would only count as either “complete” or “make-up” (depending on the circumstances) rather than receiving a lower grade.)

Make-up Work

As part of the contract grading approach, you may find deadlines slightly more forgiving than in other classes. Refer to the contract grading page for further explanation of make-up work, but basically it is considered a “make-up” assignment if it is turned in after it is due on the schedule. That said, if you know (or suspect) beforehand that you will need more time, please get in touch with me. While I have created deadlines (to help make it all manageable for you), I also want to be flexible. I know many of you are dealing with a lot: the regular responsibilities of school, but also taking care of yourself, physically, mentally, and emotionally; dealing with technology access issues and challenges, etc. What is important here is communication: please let me know as soon as you can and update me whenever you can. Do your best to let me know in advance if you anticipate needing extensions or other accommodations so we can work together to help you figure it out.

Backing up Work

Please make sure to have a plan for backing up all of your digital work in multiple places in case of computer failure. Please also make sure to save all of the work you complete for class.

Respect / Community

This class will rely heavily on active involvement from everyone. While we will often engage with challenging material in this class, personal insults or attacks on an individual person’s race, class, gender, sexuality, or disability will not be tolerated. In other words, be courteous and respectful to those around you. This course will benefit you most if everyone is actively and productively involved in the learning process.

Academic Integrity / Plagiarism

 My assumption is that the work you submit is your own original work — that is, produced originally for this class. To copy someone else’s work without acknowledging that use is an act of academic as well as professional dishonesty, whether you borrow an entire project or a single sentence. This includes any collaboration you might do with ChatGPT or other language processing models. These forms of dishonesty constitute serious breaches of academic integrity. If you have doubts about whether or not you are using your own or others’ work ethically, please ask me.

That said, we are now entering into involved in an unknown, exciting, and anxiety-producing space when it comes to human collaboration with generative artificial intelligences. Rather than ignore or attempt to reject this reality, I find it best to learn productive ways to work with it. So, with this in mind, you are welcome to use GAI models to help you with your writing process; however, I expect you to be completely transparent in how you do so. That is, any time you opt to collaborate with ChatGPT or any other language processing model, you need to include an AI Transparency Statement along with your final draft.

When you have used artificial intelligence–at any stage of the writing process–you should also include a statement that answers the following questions:

• First, has any text been generated using AI?
• Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score.
• Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text.
• Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion?

Full Disclosure: This statement was taken from the Guardian article by Kester Brewin, Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too.

Academic Support and Access

I am available to help you with your writing. Please feel free to drop into my office hours or contact me via email; I am happy to work with you in whatever way facilitates your work in this class.

• Writing support is also available at CLAS (https://clas.sa.ucsb.edu/subjects/writing-languages); 893-3269. Peer tutors provide individual assistance to students on writing assignments, ESL, and languages across the disciplines — any writing at any stage of the writing process. Tutorials are available on a drop-in or by-appointment basis. Additionally, CLAS offers many small-group workshops that are helpful to all students who would like to learn and try out new approaches to studying and writing. Visit the CLAS website or stop by the Student Resource Building 3231 for more information.
• Disabled Students Program (DSP) provides a wide array of academic support services to eligible students with documented disabilities. These services include note takers, readers, sign language interpreters, facilitation of access, and adaptive computing equipment. If you have a disability and would like to discuss accommodations, please contact them (893-2668) directly and/or me as soon as possible.
• Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) is committed to providing timely, culturally appropriate, and effective mental health services. All registered students are eligible for services at CAPS. You can find their site at https://caps.sa.ucsb.edu/. Please take care of your whole self while you’re in college (and afterwards). We all need help to do that sometimes.
• The Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity works with students, staff, and faculty to ensure that LGBTQ identities, experiences and concerns are represented and addressed at UCSB. The center aims to create a vibrant and engaging environment through social and educational programming, volunteer and leadership opportunities, a comfortable and welcoming social and study space, and professional and student staff members for support and advocacy. For more info, please see https://rcsgd.sa.ucsb.edu/.
• First Generation Students: Over 40% of UCSB students will be the first in their family to graduate from a four-year college! The university has some great resources for first generation students here: https://www.ondas.ucsb.edu/.
• Associated Students Food Bank: The Food Bank is a free service that offers food, toiletries, and other basic need items. They also have a Seed Bank program where you are given everything needed to start a garden. Please check out their website at https://foodbank.as.ucsb.edu/ for the full range of services. Registration is easy and the staff is ready to help you access some amazing resources.

On a Final Note

Please know that I am available to help you with your writing throughout this quarter. Feel free to utilize my office hours or contact me via email; I am happy to work with you in whatever way facilitates your work in this class. But also please know I am also available if you just need someone to chat with. I recognize that none of us exists in vacuum, that we are all people beyond our identities of “student” and “teacher,” and that there is a lot to be gained from just having someone listen. So, don’t hesitate to reach out and we can chat in person or on Zoom (or FaceTime or Skype or Google Hangouts, etc). There’s no need to go through it alone.