Cary Moskovitz: Learning Concepts Through Writing
Cary Moskovitz, a fellow in the http://www.ctlw.duke.edu/ Center for Teaching, Learning and Writing, won the Duke University Award for Excellence in Teaching Writing. His writing class focuses on public controversies involving science.
The annual distinguished teaching awards sponsored by Trinity Colelge and the Center for Teaching, Learning and Writing were awarded Wednesday, April 23, at a ceremony at the Washington Duke Inn. Below, Cary Moskovitz, one of the teaching fellows winners, discusses his teaching philosophy:
An underlying goal and driving principle of my writing classes is to have students engage scientific concerns in their writing. Rather than only taking up, for example, ethical or public policy concerns related to science, I want to give students an opportunity to confront the science itself, and to confront it in a more disinterested and critical way than in the science classes they might be taking concurrently. I try to accomplish this by having students work directly with primary science literature - reports of research written by the scientists themselves for the scientific community.
My principal writing objectives for my students are for them to learn to better craft arguments that are both sophisticated and coherent. I address these goals both in my design of assignments -- concentrating on one or two rhetorical or stylistic concerns at a time -- and in the selection of texts supplementing the primary sources. These supplemental sources include scientists' arguments about the interpretation of scientific evidence such as letters, commentaries and editorials from science journals. Through them, students are provided with competing claims and differing interpretations of scientific evidence as well as with examples for the kinds of rhetorical and stylistic moves we work on during the course.
In a discipline-based writing course, I believe students must understand some fundamental concepts well enough to write with a reasonable sense of authority. The challenge then is to carefully select a limited number of these concepts so that "content mastery" does not overshadow the students' development as writers. In my courses, students write about such issues as the environmental effects of genetically modified corn or the risk of using a cell phone while driving, so they need a rudimentary understanding of some statistical concepts. Therefore, I have selected a handful of key ideas for us to work with in class (e.g., the meaning of statistical significance, p-values and confidence intervals), recognizing that while students will likely not understand or will make errors in judgment about statistical matters we do not cover, they will able to write critically with some ideas of probabilistic evidence without this dominating the course. I try to maintain this balance by having many assignments in my courses tied directly to specific writing concerns, close reading practices and disciplinary concepts.
In my writing courses I have tried to capitalize on the interest in science that students bring to my classes to help them develop as both careful readers and thoughtful, deliberate writers, but the payoff of a successful writing course is not found within the course itself. Ultimately, I hope that my class will affect how my students think about both reading and writing well beyond their time with me.
Teaching Awards
The David and Janet Vaughn Brooks Award
The Robert B. Cox Award
The Howard D. Johnson Award
The Richard K. Lublin Award
Naomi Quinn, cultural anthropology
The Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching (Graduate School)