Teaching writing

ITaLI's Teaching Masterclass series is a venue for inspirational and successful teachers to share effective approaches and best practices for teaching. The aim of the series is to assist attendees in learning tangible, practical skills that help them build on their existing expertise to excel in teaching for 21st-century students.

This masterclass will cover contemporary writing pedagogy using an extended analogy that compares the ways in which writing is like cooking.

Outcome: The session aims to equip participants with the knowledge and strategies to:

• Understand how writing works through the writing-thinking-learning connection (Writing makes thinking visible and deepens learning)

• Convince their students that coherent, compelling writing will guarantee their students’ survival in the academy and success in their future profession/s

• Encourage students to enhance their writing self-efficacy (gain confidence in their competence)

• Convince students that knowledgeable and incremental practice in writing the documents required in their discipline will improve the effectiveness of their writing for their purposes and their readers

• Provide useful guidance and feedback on their students’ writing via a style-analysis matrix and rubrics.

Presenter: Associate Professor Roslyn Petelin designed and initiated the award-winning postgraduate program in Writing, Editing, and Publishing at The University of Queensland (UQ) and has received teaching excellence awards from the Faculty of Arts (2009), UQ (2009), and the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (2011). She edited the Australian Journal of Communication from 1988–2013 and has co-authored two books, The Professional Writing Guide: Writing Well and Knowing Why (Allen & Unwin) and Professional Communication: Principles and Applications (Pearson). Her new book, How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing, (Allen & Unwin) was published in 2016.

She pioneered Writing-across-the-Curriculum in the Australian university arena in the early 1990s at Queensland University of Technology. In 2014, she designed a MOOC (massive open online course) WRITE101X English Grammar and Style for the edX consortium that has attracted more than 450,000 students over five offerings. Her recent articles on grammar and punctuation in The Conversation have attracted close to 200,000 readers. She consults locally, nationally, and internationally on corporate and academic writing.

To find out more about ITaLI's Teaching Masterclass series or to express your interest in presenting a masterclass, please visit http://itali.uq.edu.au/teaching-masterclasses or email Dr Hassan Khosravi at h.khosravi@uq.edu.au