Designing a Writing-Based Course: An Online Workshop

This three-week online workshop offers a guide to designing a Reading and Composition course centered on the practice of academic writing. Its goal is to help participants create materials they can use in structuring their R&C courses. The workshop aims to offer strategies that challenge undergraduate students to work with complex texts and ideas in a manner firmly centered around the actual practice of writing. By the workshop’s end, instructors will have created three documents which they can put to immediate use in their R&C course:

  • A course overview describing goals for the semester
  • One of the main writing projects of the R&C course 
  • A semester schedule that marks not only deadlines but also the ongoing work students will do, both in class and out, on their writing projects.

This workshop aims to supplement, not replace, the training in the teaching of writing offered by many departments at Berkeley. Each UC Berkeley student receives a stipend of $500 upon successful completion of the workshop.

The workshop is led by Professor Joseph Harris, 2017 Koshland Fellow Howard Fisher, and ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with Art of Writing Alex Creighton.