Teaching Assistants' Training Program

Description

As university educators, we are tasked with the responsibility of improving and expanding students’ writing skills, a toolkit that also includes critical reasoning, argumentation & rhetoric, and research. When teaching these skills, we often run up against difficult questions: How do we support the development of students’ personal voices while working within university expectations? How might we encourage students to draw from their own experiences and take creative risks while meeting the university’s standards for “rigour”? This two-hour workshop will offer some tentative answers to these questions by drawing from queer pedagogical theory’s approaches to university-level writing and composition. Topics that will be covered include: foregrounding lived experiences and personal voices in essay-writing; drawing from queer theory’s embrace of ephemeral sources to rethink our understanding of “rigorous” assessments; and embracing disagreement and difference as a way of building rhetorical flexibility and skill in undergraduate papers. Together, we will discuss how we as educators might broaden our understanding of what constitutes a university-level essay by drawing from queer composition studies’ unique approaches.