Taking a pedagogical turn: What happens when the student/teacher conference moves to the center of the basic writing course.

摘要

This dissertation examines the redesign of a basic writing course at a large, urban, majority-minority public university in Miami, Florida. In the redesigned course, there are no regular class meetings at all. Instead, small groups of five students meet with a teacher in “writing circles,” where they workshop papers. The content of the course is provided by a third-party software program in a dedicated computer lab. The redesign project is examined in light of the particular institutional history of Florida International University, with special emphasis on the roles of space, time, and face-to-face interaction in the teaching of writing to a richly diverse student body.; Support for the course redesign is adduced from the work of other scholars in social linguistics, Teaching English as a Second or Other Language, classroom discourse analysis and composition theory. The study finds that the changes in the delivery methods of the course can benefit teachers, students, and the institution.