Erica P. Griggs and Dr. Dennis Wright, Church History
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is a growing movement in colleges and universities throughout the country. This movement encourages writing-to-learn exercises as well as professional writing training in all fields of study at the university level. Brigham Young University has been engaged in this movement since the early ’90’s.
About two years ago, Dr. Dennis Wright and I launched an effort to bring this movement to BYU’s Religious Education Department. It involved a writing handbook for the faculty as well as a Web page for students. However, one major deficiency we found within the department was the lack of grading done by instructors. Most religious education instructors let their undergraduate TA’s grade their papers.
The ideal solution to this would be to have the instructors reclaim the responsibility of reading and responding to student papers. Indeed, Dr. Wright and I tried to emphasize this in everything we developed for the faculty. But in an attempt to work within an imperfect system, I devoted my ORCA to developing a TA training guide that instructors would be able to offer their TA’s each semester.
This process included talking to religious education faculty and TA’s, holding training sessions with the TA’s to see where they needed improvement, and working closely with the director of Writing Across the Curriculum, Elizabeth Hedengren. I also research and studied tutoring (there are no TA guides available) tactics in WAC handbooks.
In my training guide, I tried to teach religion TA’s to trust their own voice. The role of the TA is very ambiguous because he or she holds so much responsibility with very little authority. For this reason, I directed TA’s to take on the authority of being a peer reader. I wanted to get away from the tendency to give grades without any helpful response from the instructor or the grader. Thus, I encouraged the TA’s to work closely with their instructor, but to ultimately trust their own responses to the paper and write them down for the student.
To give the TA’s something substantial to work with, I coordinated my training guide with the student Web page, “The Seven Deadly Writing Sins,” which teaches students how to avoid some of the most common errors in religious education papers. I coupled my examples of possible TA comments and responses with the writing samples on the Web page. My main concern was to teach TA’s how to be specific, honest, and encouraging to their students. Comments on papers are meant to inspire further thought and further writing, not stifle student creativity or tell them what terrible writers they are.
Other reasons for this approach include the following: teaching TA’s how to justify the grades they give papers; making TA’s and instructors both aware of the need for writing to be a learning exercise and not simply another grade; and giving TA’s the opportunity to build upon this training. As they will all be working with different professors and different classes, I didn’t want to prescribe any one grading method. Instead I wanted to give them something that would complement all grading styles, making any graded paper more useful to the student who receives the grade.