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200-Level Dance: Dance in World Cultures (Writing- Intensive)WRITING DANCEProfessor Judy Van Zile has been teaching "Dance in World Cultures" at UH Mānoa for 27 years. She finds that now, even if she teaches the class without a WI designation, she uses many writing-intensive techniques anyway. Writing forces her students to participate and to think. This way of teaching has led Van Zile to believe "I act as a facilitator, not a teller." Through the many writing activities Van Zile assigns, she says, "the class almost always pulls out the important information on their own. I may just have to help them organize it a little." Van Zile's course illustrates one way that instructors can
Each of these features of Van Zile's class is discussed below, followed by a reprint of the course syllabus, included below. Varying the Type and Length of AssignmentsVan Zile uses several writing activities during class to foster student learning and also assigns six different formal writing projects of varying length and complexity for students to complete outside of class. In-class writing. Van Zile's informal, in-class writing encourages students to listen carefully and to organize their thoughts about their learning. These activities are not graded and help prepare students for the formal writing about dance they will undertake outside of class. Van Zile's in-class writing activities include:
(For a general discussion of in-class and writing-to-learn strategies, see the Mānoa Writing Program's Writing Activities to get Students Thinking and Learning.) Out-of-class writing. Van Zile's six formal writing assignments vary from one to two page autobiographical statements about each student's personal involvement with dance to longer reports on live performances and on research using written and visual texts. The expectations and evaluation criteria for each formal assignment are carefully described in a single handout, Written Project Instructions (below), which students receive at the first class session of the semester. Using six different formats, Van Zile assigns 17 separate papers. These assignments include:
Van Zile uses the in-class and shorter out-of-class writing as building blocks for longer formal assignments. So, for example, she first requires a one-page live performance report that begins with "a one-paragraph factual statement identifying what you saw; the remainder describing your personal reaction to what you saw." A second live performance report must be two pages long, include the same information as the first but also relate what was seen to the concepts discussed in class, that is, begin to show elements of a critical analysis. A third and final live performance report must be three pages long and explore the same areas as paper two but display greater detail and critical depth. Another technique Van Zile uses asks students to write a sequence of nine reports on films in the nine major geographical areas of dance that the course explores. Each of these papers is only one page in length but includes a bibliographic citation, a personal response, a brief summary and a discussion of the "relationship between what you saw and what has been covered in class." Though the length and content requirements remain unchanged, Van Zile expects students to show increasing critical skills as they practice in this format. She thus counts each paper more than the one before. She assigns two points for the first report, one for content and one for form. For each subsequent report, the number of points in each category increases by one, so that the last report is worth 18 points. Responding to Student Writing: Content and Form Van Zile evaluates content and form separately in the varied writing activities she assigns. She grades for content almost exclusively early in the semester and then gradually counts off more and more for grammatical and mechanical errors. Content for Van Zile refers mostly to the factual information, theories and analyses students compose. She expects the sophistication and depth of these to become increasingly complex as the semester progresses. During the early weeks of the semester Van Zile gives students guidance and time to improve on what she calls the "form" of each student's writing. Van Zile defines form in her syllabus as "organization and writing clarity--does the report flow comfortably from one topic to the next? are ideas and information understandable? are words spelled correctly, sentences punctuated correctly, grammatical matters attended to, paragraphs divided appropriately? etc." Van Zile circles problems with mechanics and grammar on the early sets of papers she receives but does not deduct much from student grades for these types of errors. She finds this technique encourages students to begin to identify their own weaknesses and to seek out the textual and/or human resources they need to learn how to make successful revisions. As the semester progresses, Van Zile more often puts checks in the margin so that students must determine their weaknesses themselves. By the end of the semester, once students have had the opportunity to improve, Van Zile counts organization, mechanics and grammar in her evaluation of student papers almost as much as she does content. Course Syllabus
Written Project Instructions
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