Peer Pressure, Peer Power
Theory and Practice in Peer Review and Response for the Writing Classroom
Description:... Students are frequently asked to engage in peer review and response activities in writing classrooms across the curriculum. But how can, and why should, teachers make peer response a major part of their pedagogy that really works well for their students and themselves? Peer Pressure, Peer Power delivers original essays that engage tough pedagogical questions from authors who resist easy answers. This collection includes essays that examine the nature of peer response in theory and in practice from scholars representing composition-rhetoric, writing center, and WAC/WID across the country. The book provides new and experienced teaching assistants and instructors, WPAs, writing center personnel, WAC personnel, and service learning personnel with both a theoretical and practical resource for peer response in writing classrooms. But the authors in this collection go a pedagogical step or two further: they map several interconnections between classroom and writing center and other peer tutoring theories and practices, showing the ways that a deeper understanding of peer response can help teachers and tutors provide better feedback to students writing; they suggest the connections between peer response and designing effective writing assignments and rubrics, touching on how important student input really is in all phases of our pedagogy; they bring the value of teaching and learning with student texts to vivid life; and they illustrate specific ways that classrooms and one-to-one and small-group conferences can become highly interactive, synergistic sites for the teaching and learning of writing.
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