UGA WIP TA Guide: TA Role

WIP Teaching Assistants: Your key role
in the writing-learning intersection

The Writing Intensive Program for which you have been selected is one of the Franklin College of Arts and Science's most important and innovative programs. As part of the college's efforts to enhance the undergraduate learning experience at the University of Georgia, the program aims for no less than to elevate and enhance the importance of writing in the disciplines. As a writing intensive teaching assistant, you are an important part of that effort because, while some institutions with writing intensive programs offer substantial stipends or release time for participating faculty, the Franklin College offers promising graduate assistants who are educated intensively in writing in the disciplines pedagogy. Previous WIP teaching assistants going on the academic job market report that this training and experience in writing in the disciplines is a boost to marketability that interests interviewers. Moreover, WIP TAs report that learning to teach the writing process and working with student writing in the disciplines improves their own writing skills.

The Writing Intensive Program believes that writing has never been more important: to higher-order thinking, to learning, to university performance, and to students' post-university careers. The program also believes that since writing is so important, and since writing as knowledge is shaped in disciplinary contexts and marked by discipline-specific conventions, writing instruction must continue beyond Freshman composition. Based on extensive writing research, the program emphasizes that the way to teach students to write effectively in the disciplines is to engage students in meaningful, staged, and sequenced writing assignments and to teach them a process for writing tasks. This entails giving students more opportunities for guidance, feedback, and revision, and this is where writing intensive teaching assistants enter in.

Writing intensive courses offer more opportunities than non-writing intensive courses to guide and respond to student writing. As one WIP faculty member comments, framing a main benefit of the WIP, "Specifically, it allowed me to provide more feedback on their assignments than I could have provided otherwise." By supporting WIP faculty and offering guidance and feedback on student writing, WIP teaching assistants make this possible.

The WIP mission: a communication task
In its mission to make writing central to undergraduate education in the disciplines, the WIP encourages a new recognition of the role of writing in the learning process and a deeper recognition of the importance of writing to thinking and communicating in all of the disciplines.

The following cornerstones of writing in the disciplines philosophy and research inform our communication to faculty, teaching assistants, students, and administrators and serve as pedagogical steering points for our program:

1) Writing promotes, deepens, and improves learning of the "subject matter" of any course and metacognitive abilities of critical thinking and problem solving.

2) Writing teaches discipline-specific ways of thinking and communicating, including the writing skills that are important to performance in disciplines, professions, and careers.

3) Teaching writing in the disciplines, from microbiology to music, means teaching the writing process and its processes.

WIP criteria: operative elements of a WIP course
In the environment of an actual WIP course, these principles tend to need a great deal of explanation and reinforcement. Helping faculty communicate these insights to students is one of your main tasks as a WIP TA. We believe that by stating reasons for writing, the principles above also state the main benefits of attention to writing in the disciplines. Evaluation surveys (Spring 1999) indicate that as many as 80% of WIP students perceive that writing intensive courses deliver on these claims. As you will see, the above principles inform writing intensive course planning, syllabi and course materials, writing assignments, feedback strategies, and overall program pedagogy. Grounded in writing in the disciplines theory and research, they are the basis of faculty and teaching assistant training, and they provide criteria for writing intensive courses, which, in general, all aim to

1) Involve students in writing assignments that promote learning.

2) Stage and sequence those assignments (instead of, for example, requiring one long term paper evaluated only at the end of a course for a final grade).

3) Increase opportunities for guidance, feedback, and revision.

4) Teach the writing conventions that are inseparable from modes of inquiry in a discipline.

Goals for WIP TAs - you make the difference
Your goals as a WIP TA are to help faculty deliver the above WIP course elements and, specifically, to help faculty provide students with more guidance and feedback -- a more intense engagement with the writing process in disciplinary contexts -- than would be possible in a non-writing intensive course. Along with faculty who invest in student writing, clear communication of the philosophy and benefits of writing in the disciplines and innovative, relevant, and staged writing assignments, WIP teaching assistants are the key differential -- the added factor -- that allows the writing in the disciplines experience to work at UGA. As a WIP TA, you are an essential part of writing intensive course design.

Using this guide
Linked to the WIP Faculty Guide, this guide for WIP TAs addresses the main points of writing in the disciplines pedagogy and your role in supporting a writing intensive course. It is based on a great deal of writing in the disciplines theory and research that is condensed here for accessibility. Like the faculty guide that it augments, the WIP TA Guide draws extensively on The Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines, the main text used in ENGL 6910 and the main reference source for the WIP at UGA, and it also features in-the-trenches advice from WIP assistants. Designed as a downloadable handbook that works on paper as well as online for TAs in our program, this guide asks you to scroll a bit more than most Web-based documents, though it features linked text when useful.

Along with close review of the Bedford, to learn about the Writing Intensive Program, the best thing for you to do is to print this guide and the Faculty guide and to study them, along with other pages describing why the program teaches writing as it does. Students in your writing intensive courses may be directed to the 2-page guide for WIP students, which responds to some of their questions about writing intensive instruction and, hopefully, makes your job easier.