University of Arizona Writing Program Principles of Teaching Writing
At the University of Arizona, our career-track faculty and graduate teaching associates in Applied Linguistics, Creative Writing, Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition are experts in writing, reading, and language. We approach writing instruction from the premise of diversity and inclusion. Even though we acknowledge the power of Standard Language ideology and its pervasiveness in English language instruction and writing curriculum design, we believe that language is neither fixed nor stable but fluid, and always evolving.
What we believe writing is and what writers do:
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Writing is a technology that creates and conveys new knowledge and understanding.
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Writing is situated in social, cultural, economic, and academic contexts.
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Writers scrutinize power structures and critically interrogate societal inequities such as but not limited to racism, sex and gender discrimination, ableism, and xenophobia.
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Writers tell stories, explore ideas, make arguments, and engage in dialogue about serious issues and questions about humanity.
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Writers select and adapt genres that best match purpose, audience, subject, and medium.
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The most effective writing results from engagement with subject, exigency, feedback, and actual audience.
What we believe about reading and writing:
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Writing and reading depend on one another, actively co-creating meaning.
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Reading is actively and laterally applied in writing to augment an always-growing body of cultural production.
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When we read and write, we form interpretations that are grounded in the complexities of cultural ideologies and personal identities.
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Writers are educated and transformed by narratives, by genres, striving always to integrate them in an effort to produce new knowledges.
What we believe about teaching writing:
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Writers develop at different times, in different ways, and bring different resources with them.
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All writers have more to learn, and teachers can help students grow as writers.
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Writing assignments emphasize the rhetorical nature of writing.
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Writing teachers foster collaboration, invention, planning, peer review, revision and sustained reflection in order to address writers’ needs over time.
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We provide frequent, timely, and context-specific feedback to coach the process of writing rather than simply identify errors.
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We explicitly teach writing as a social act through awareness of writing across contexts.
Teaching is a self-reflective and critical practice. We, at the University of Arizona Writing Program, affirm students’ right to their own language and embrace the English language as infinitely diverse in its meaning-making capacity and varieties of articulation and inscription. We believe in the power of language to compose the future in which students want to live.
Last Updated: June 29, 2018