IUPUI | Professor Jason Aukerman

Take out a pen and paper and get ready to write. This is a free-write session, so make sure that your pen is moving for the entire time. Do your best to stay on topic.

What is “good writing”? (2 minutes) What are your concerns about writing at the college level? (3 minutes) What are you going to do to make sure that you succeed at college-level writing? (4 minutes)

Writing at IUPUI What are your expectations? Form a small group (3-4 students). Share your ideas from the writer’s marathon and create a collaborative response to each of the three questions. Report.

In academic work, essays are not written to prove grammatical prowess or syntactic proficiency, but to share important new insights, to contribute to ongoing conversations, to reveal an otherwise hidden position or viewpoint.

Students will need intellectual agility; they will have to think around topics, beyond themselves, beyond their initial assumptions to simply get along in a fast- changing cultural landscape. Those who can say only what they think will get left behind.

Our Expectations Those who can invent new intellectual postures for themselves and others will thrive. So writing instructors at IUPUI (and other universities) value inventive, rich, deep, intensive, analytical and critical thinking.

What am I trying to demonstrate here? The goal isn’t to state what most people, or even what some people, already think. Rather, it is to bring hidden layers to the surface.

How do you get to that kind of thinking? It begins with asking questions. For example: What is a customer? What is a student? How are customers and students alike? Different? Why is it important to make this distinction?

In your group, apply inventive thinking to this idea: Should today’s student be considered a university’s “customer” ? What is a customer? What particular behaviors are associated with being a customer (i.e. the customer is always right)? What is the difference between a student and a customer?

Synthesizing your opinion with another perspective: Benlow

Synthesizing your opinion with another perspective: other studentsother students

How does this photo illustrate what Benlow communicates in his essay? Jot down quick thoughts.

In the next few days, as you learn more about the university and the semester ahead, keep in mind this concept of “student as customer” vs “student as producer.” See what new ideas and insights occur to you—take notes. Bring those notes to our next session.

What, if anything, did you learn today that is a new idea for you? (2 minutes)

What new concerns do you have about writing at the college level? or… How have your initial concerns changed in the last hour? (3 minutes)

What will stick with you from this workshop today? (4 minutes)

* Hold on to your writings from this session. You might be able to use some of this in your daily journal entry for today!