What Makes Writing Meaningful for University Students?

Registration is now open for the Campus Writing & Speaking Program’s Fall Workshop: “What Makes Writing Meaningful for University Students?” with Dr. Anne Ellen Geller, Director of Writing Across Communities at St. John’s University. The workshop will be held on Thursday, November 14th from 1-3pm in Tompkins G125. 

In this workshop Dr. Anne Ellen Geller will share findings from the Meaningful Writing Project—a study of the writing experiences over seven hundred seniors at three universities. Geller will suggest ways faculty teaching at all levels in all disciplines and professional programs can shape writing assignments to offer students opportunities for agency; for engagement with instructors, peers, and materials; and for learning that connects students to previous experiences and passions and to future aspirations and identities. Faculty who attend will reflect on the writing assignments they currently give in their courses (or would like to give in their courses) to consider how to more consistently value the power of students’ personal connections, how to build meaningful writing processes into and across a semester, and how to make certain what students are writing now speaks to what they hope and plan to write in the future.

Read about The Meaningful Writing Project at: https://meaningfulwritingproject.net

Click here to register for the workshop: https://forms.gle/cDxvXfJd1CEchWVj6

Additionally, we will be hosting an informal meeting with Dr. Geller for graduate students and other interested parties from 11-noon in Tompkins 131-B.

Dr. Geller is Professor, English, St. John’s College and Director of Writing Across Communities, St. John’s University. Her research focuses on student and faculty writers, writing centers, and writing programs across higher education. She is the co-author of The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education (Utah State University Press 2016) with Michele Eodice and Neal Lerner. The Meaningful Writing Project reports on research originally supported by a 2010-2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication Research Initiative Grant, and portions of the research have been published in the American Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Peer Review, and, most recently, in Research in the Teaching of English, the flagship research journal of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is also a co-author of The Everyday Writing Center (Utah State University Press 2007) and the co-editor of Working With Faculty Writers (Utah State University Press 2013).