Sarah Lee is a Junior double majoring in Philosophy and Economics. She was awarded a Spring 2019 Conference Grant which she used to attend the Southeastern Writing Center Association Conference.
I had the opportunity to attend the 2019 Southeastern Writing Center AssociationConference, held at the DoubleTree Myrtle Beach Oceanfront Resort. There, I spent three days going to sessions about a range of issues related to and located within the Writing Center, meeting students and faculty from across the Southeastern U.S., and of course, presenting my own research about genre theory and informing tutoring practices with knowledge of genre – “Writing in Philosophy Courses: Writing Conventions, Analysis, and Strategies.”
My research was borne out of an interest in using the language of writing conventions to improve our understanding of the specific genre of Philosophy, and I wanted to provide updated resources for our own Emory Writing Center to inform tutoring and writing in Philosophy, a discipline that tends to evaluate student progress based on their ability to write about what they know.
Emory’s Philosophy department is unique in that it tends to skew toward Continental Philosophy, rather than Analytic. I won’t belabor the differences between the two in this blog post, but I wanted to create a resource that could address the unique and specific types of thinking and writing that were being asked for in these Emory Philosophy courses. Many of the students I had personally worked with in the Writing Center on Philosophy assignments were students who were just starting out in Philosophy, so I compiled sources and conducted my research with this population in mind.
Across several months, I interviewed professors in the department at Emory, and I surveyedboth linguistic research on disciplinary writing and existing handoutson writing in this discipline. (There are so many of these resources in so many across a number of different fields online if you are ever confused about writing in a course you’ve never taken before!) When it came to the conference, I had to exercise another important but tricky skill in research – learning to condense large chunks of information into a short and interesting presentation for the audience.
After my presentation, I had a nice conversation with another undergraduate student tutor in the audience about the differences between his school, his Philosophy program, and his university’s Writing Center. We exchanged some ideas for how to improve tutoring with genre knowledge in mind in the future while still allowing the student to have ownership over their work, and we compared the concerns students tended to come into the Writing Center with. He also happened to be a Philosophy subject tutor, in addition to a writing tutor, so he described how he felt his roles were different based on which job he was doing.
To me, the best part of going to a conference like this one is to meet all the interesting people who show up. (How often in your life do you get to be at an event full of strangers who have the same interestsas you, who have spent months of their time invested in developing these interests, and then attend the same event as you to meet people like you?) After the work I put in on a topic I was pursuing because of my interest in it, the great pay-off was being able to go to this conference and speak to and exchange ideas with so many new people about exactly what it was that I was doing.
Before I went, I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was the first conference I had ever traveled for, and I was travelling alone to boot. I put myself out there, presented my research, and got to know a lot of new people who I probably never could have met – let alone had great conversations with – without this conference experience.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Conference Grants.
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