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Reframing Student Writing in Writing Studies Composition Classses 81 continue the discussion of writing strategies and patterns of organization —what does or doesn’t work and why.” Interestingly, none of the respondents explicitly prioritized the instructive value of the direct feedback given to student authors. To us, this unanimous emphasis reflects a shift from a view of improvement built around approximating an unchanging standard (what in this paper can be “fixed”?) to a view of improvement that values sensitivity to writing as a practice of thoughtfully navigating the wide range of possibilities for communicating in a given context. One of our survey responses included a detailed process for peer review designed explicitly to “help the reviewers learn by using the knowledge they have about writing and also learning about what writing can be from their classmates’ papers.” In the practice described, students work in pairs to collaboratively review other students’ essays and then coauthor a piece of feedback explaining to the author what they think are important strengths in the piece, what they like about its approach to the topic, and suggestions for further development of these strengths. In addition to the student paper being reviewed here, the collaboratively written response to the draft can be thought of as a piece of writing from which the students can learn. The teacher’s comment highlights this collaborative peer-to-peer writing as important: A lot of times when students are working on their responses together, I see them teaching each other about writing. They say things like “let’s just get a version down on paper and then we can adjust it” or “I like the idea of what we’re trying to say, but maybe we could say it a little more gently or more encouraging.” At times like that, I feel the richness of the peer review process. The students see other ways of trying to do the assignment and they get to practice using their writing carefully and with others as they respond to their peers. To us, this approach to peer review exemplifies how a writing studies pedagogy can work to close the gap between theory and practice through activities other than reading composition scholarship. The student reviewers, working as a team, are able to help each other appreciate aspects of the text they are reviewing that, as individuals, they might not have noticed. In addition, this process can be used to unseat student attitudes that imagine a single, stable academic discourse as the normative standard and thus view any piece of writing as something that is either “right” or “wrong.” In contrast, this process exemplifies another 82 TEAC H In G WI T H ST U D En T T ExT S of our respondent’s explanations of peer review as challenging the ideal of the perfect paper written alone: By sharing work throughout the term, people use communication and editing skills to work cooperatively and get ideas through this interactive experience . Rather than come into the class with the perfectionist model of paper writing, we work from free-write to completed paper as a team. This allows people to suspend their perception of some innate writing abilities for which they possess either a deficit or a gift. Attempting to discern the most effective characteristics of a piece involves developing the sensibilities necessary to better assess one’s own writing—seeing writing as a dynamic activity of responding to and shaping an audience’s expectations. Thus, in addition to having practical value as an activity that can help students improve their writing in terms of its surface features, peer review can help improve student writing in the sense of helping students better understand writing as a social activity of negotiation both in terms of content and style. Share and di ScuSS ParT i al draf T S and M i cro - T exT S To hei gh T en awarene SS o f alT ernaT i ve ST raTegi e S In addition to assignments involving more or less whole drafts of papers, almost all respondents to our survey worked with shorter, partial papers written by students. These texts, including introductions to papers, thesis statements, single paragraphs or pages of papers, conclusions, single sentences, and citations, were treated in two ways, both aimed at increasing awareness of alternative writing strategies. First, teachers made use of these texts as isolated examples of prose features that worked toward helping the whole class write successful papers. Typically, this kind...

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