The Efficacy of Varying Small Group Workshops in the Composition Classroom

This I.R.B. approved study takes a look at the efficacy of small group workshops in the composition classroom and whether it is more beneficial for a student to remain in the same small groups between drafts, or whether it is better to change small groups and get a new set of eyes on a new draft. In my first-year English Composition course, ENG 103: Writing About Writing, I take a look at two different assignments, the Personal Narrative and the Research Paper, and how they changed over three drafts. Altering the group workshops for the first and second drafts, I administered surveys to scale how helpful the workshops were. To verify the results, I chose four different sets of essays to look at as case studies and break down how the drafts changed depending on the workshops. In the end, this study attempts to show how altering how small group workshops are run can be beneficial for the writer

Program Profile 8: Chapman University: Bridging the Gap with Action Research

In the English Department at Chapman, all graduate students are eligible to apply for positions as GTAs after they have completed a graduate seminar in teaching composition. Those who are offered and accept GTA positions take a second graduate seminar, composition pedagogy and research practicum, simultaneously with their first semester of teaching. In order to encourage GTAs to develop identities as teacher-scholars, GTAs develop IRB-approved action research projects (Buyserie; Hawkes; Hudson et al.; Souleles) as their major work in this second seminar. These action research projects allow GTAs to research a question they have about the teaching of composition, using their own students as the sources of their data. Thus, they are learning how (their own) teacher-knowledge can be a source of expertise in the fields of pedagogy and composition, and the action research project becomes a central component of and bridge between their teaching (their identities as teachers, since they initiate, shape, and undertake the research as the instructor of their first-year composition class) and their scholarship (their identities as students, since they are learning how to undertake an action research project and are completing it as a graduate student assignment). Many GTAs have gone on to use their action research projects as the basis for MA theses and conference papers.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_books/1039/thumbnail.jp