Writing Across the Curriculum - Callie
I have said before, and I will say again, that a problem with academia in general is its division of interest and expertise into the most specific niche fields. This implies that a person has only one interest or one thing they are good at and can speak to: as we all know, this is absolutely not the case.
We don't see many classics students in the writing center, aside from the occasional reluctant student writing for a gen-ed mythology class. I therefore almost never end up tutoring in my own field. But I have had the opportunity to read papers in biology, public health, poetry, sociology, nursing, and film studies. My interests and breadth of knowledge certainly don't stop at the fall of the Roman empire, and I have really enjoyed getting to interact with disciplines and themes I would never otherwise be reading.
This doesn't mean that I feel 100% comfortable with every student's field or the specific problems that come with them. I do, however, really like having the opportunity to explore them. It also makes me genuinely happy that I get to talk to these students about what they love, and to work with them to make their amazing breadths of knowledge transferable to paper. I wish that, as an undergrad, I had had someone willing to sit down with me and really work through my larger issues with writing.
We don't see many classics students in the writing center, aside from the occasional reluctant student writing for a gen-ed mythology class. I therefore almost never end up tutoring in my own field. But I have had the opportunity to read papers in biology, public health, poetry, sociology, nursing, and film studies. My interests and breadth of knowledge certainly don't stop at the fall of the Roman empire, and I have really enjoyed getting to interact with disciplines and themes I would never otherwise be reading.
This doesn't mean that I feel 100% comfortable with every student's field or the specific problems that come with them. I do, however, really like having the opportunity to explore them. It also makes me genuinely happy that I get to talk to these students about what they love, and to work with them to make their amazing breadths of knowledge transferable to paper. I wish that, as an undergrad, I had had someone willing to sit down with me and really work through my larger issues with writing.
That makes sense that you would wish you had someone like you as an undergrad to talk through your ideas and the best ways to communicate them. You're right that so many students and faculty are interested in more than one field,. Pity that a Research 1 university like ours encourages (forces) us to specialize.
ReplyDeleteWe get a lot of classics papers in asynchronous online tutoring, but they are mostly from Deborah Trusty's Gen Ed classics students. They are comparisons of 2 gods or goddesses or analyses of Greek plays. When you teach classics in the future, please send some other students our way. I'm in an Italian Club with Robert(o) Ketterer, so I should tell him too or ask him to work with writing fellows if he happens to be teaching a course in which they are reading in English rather than Latin. Helena Dettmer and John Finnamore know about us, too. I wonder what percentage of classics courses are taught in English.