Composition Learning Community holds sixth Student Writing Showcase
Friday, December 1, from 12-2 p.m., the Composition Learning Community (CLC) presents its sixth Student Writing Showcase, themed "Making Connections".
The semi-annual event will be held in the Student Center in Hillberry A,B, and C. Instructors, peer mentors, and students will be on hand to welcome visitors and talk about their experiences in composition courses at Wayne State. Table displays will showcase undergraduate student research and writing.
The CLC was founded in 2015 by Composition lecturers Nicole Varty, Amy Latawiec, Jule Thomas, and Adrienne Jankens, after the group spent two years studying and piloting peer mentoring and learning community practices in composition classes with the support of Humanities Center Working Group grants in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015.
The mission of the program is "building a community within which students talk about, talk through, and reflect on the lived experience of Composition at Wayne State University." The CLC's goal is "to support students' enculturation and engagement in general education composition courses." This work is done in three main contexts: in individual classrooms, within the CLC as an organization, and in the broader university and civic communities.
In Fall 2017, the CLC includes 12 instructors, 12 peer mentors, and over 500 students in ENG 1010, 1020, 3010, 3020, and 3050 courses.
Dr. Nicole Varty, who is teaching two online sections of ENG 1020 in the CLC this semester, says the Student Writing Showcase serves an important function for the WSU community, providing "a window into the composition classroom, a glimpse of writing instruction at WSU that visitors cannot get anywhere else."
Haley Sharrow, a sophomore Nutrition and Food Science major, currently works as a peer mentor for Dr. Adrienne Jankens's ENG 1020 classes, after being a student in Dr. Jankens's ENG 3010 class in Winter 2017. Working with the CLC, Sharrow says that "[M]aking connections is a valuable part of this process. It gets me involved with the campus, students and faculty more than I would have been if I wasn't a part of the CLC."
Fall 2017 is the CLC's first semester supporting students in online or hybrid composition courses. Dr. Jule Thomas, who teaches a hybrid ENG 3010 course, with the support of peer mentor Raeanne Payne, notes that the peer mentor support in her class has helped students become "more aware, more willing to interact, more willing to collaborate, more willing to push through their levels of comfortability, and more successful overall with their writing and research."
The CLC is supported by the Wayne State Learning Communities Initiative and the Composition Program.
