Instructions and Rationale for the Weekly Recap Activity | Canadian Writing Centre and Writing Instruction Clearinghouse
Instructions and Rationale for the Weekly Recap Activity
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The practice of creating weekly recaps where students write class notes with their peers is great for faculty who would like to make their courses more accessible while promoting low-stakes collaborative writing among students. These student-authored notes are meant to complement the faculty’s slides and/or other resources created by the faculty, providing the student perspective on each week’s class. It is always interesting to see what course content students highlight in their notes, allowing a sneak peek into their minds.
To provide some background, weekly recaps were born out of necessity during an academic term when the university’s Accessibility Services unit could not recruit volunteer notetakers for students with accessibility needs in my class. At that point, it became clear that my students and I, as a community of writers, needed to in-source our class notes instead of relying on outside factors.
Each week, the weekly recap practice allows a pair or a small group of students, depending on the class size, to assume responsibility for taking extensive notes for their peers with accessibility needs or those who simply cannot make it to class in a given week. Since students have to do this only once a term, they usually do not perceive it as an extra burden, and the fact that I incorporated it into their scholarly engagement grade motivates them further.
Bio: Oguzhan Tekin is a teaching-stream assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy, University of Toronto, Mississauga. He is a sociolinguist whose current research interests include second language writing, critical language awareness, students’ sense of belonging, attitudes toward writing, language and identity, and writing for social change. Recently, he has explored intergroup attitudes and contact between international students and host communities. His research has been published in various journals (e.g., Frontiers in Psychology, Canadian Modern Language Review), and he has presented his work at several professional conferences (e.g., American Association for Applied Linguistics, TESOL International Association).
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- creatorOguzhan Tekin
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