Report on AY 2024 Winter Term Brown Bag Lunch & Learn (2024/12/10)

In addition to facilitating the proactive sharing of skills and specialist knowledge among faculty, Brown Bag Lunch & Learn (BBL&L) seeks to enable faculty members to learn from one another’s classroom experiences, including both things that went well and not so well, and meet colleagues from outside their own programs and departments. Furthermore, BBL&L aims to provide opportunities for faculty members to share information with one another as well as with staff members.

BBL&L #34: December 10, 2024
Theme:Critical free-writing to help students in the early stages of identifying and narrowing their topics
Facilitator: EVANS, Simon (Lecturer of English for Liberal Arts Program)

Participants: 3 faculty members including the Director of CTL, and 3 staff members who manage BBL&L

This session introduced the method of “critical free writing”, which was actually introduced in a research writing class in the English for Liberal Arts (ELA) program. Critical free writing in this session is an activity in an early stage of essay writing, in which students have 10 minutes to list assumptions and questions about a certain topic and 25 minutes to describe as many of their own thoughts on the topic as possible. This process was repeated at least once a week outside class in the first five weeks of the course, and the results showed a positive impact on students' essay orientations and formation of a tentative thesis. In the discussion that followed the presentation, there was a lively discussion on such matters as the conditions under which critical free writing can be effective.