Workshops and Events

Designing for Human Authorship: Assignments That Make Students’ Thinking Visible Over Time

When: Tuesday, August 25, 2026, 9:30 a.m–10:30 a.m.
Where: The Writing Center, Library, Room 170

In First-Year Writing Seminars, the central challenge is designing assignments that help students practice attention, inquiry, revision, judgment, and intellectual responsibility across time. In this workshop, faculty will consider how assignment sequences can make student thinking visible before, during, and after the production of a final written artifact. We will discuss ways to build assignments that move among reading, annotation, discussion, drafting, revision, reflection, oral explanation, and metacognitive self-assessment. Participants will consider how to foreground process without creating busywork, invite student agency without lowering expectations, and clarify the relationship between AI use, authorship, and accountability.

We will use sample FYWS assignment sequences as discussion starters, including models that ask students to annotate by hand, defend passages orally, test claims through disputation, compare their own interpretations with AI-generated readings, and revisit written arguments through conversation. Participants will leave with practical principles for designing assignments that cultivate the human work of thinking that writing is meant to preserve. Facilitated by Matthew Schultz, Director of First-Year Writing & the Writing Center.

Principled Pedagogy Amid GenAI

When: Friday, September 18, 2026, 1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m.
Where: The Writing Center, Library, Room 170

The Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies Project invites FYWS faculty to think together about refusal as a meaningful and intentional pedagogical stance toward generative AI in the writing classroom. Rather than framing refusal as fear, resistance to innovation, or a punitive ban, this discussion begins from the premise that faculty and students have the right to decline the use of technologies that compromise learning, equity, labor, linguistic diversity, environmental sustainability, or academic freedom.

We will consider the disciplinary foundations that support GenAI refusal in writing studies—including our commitments to cultivating writers’ voices, honoring diverse literacies, resisting linguistic homogenization, and helping students develop confidence and agency through the act of writing itself. Together, we’ll explore how an ethics of refusal can open space for different kinds of learning: slowing down, lingering in uncertainty, valuing struggle as part of growth, and prioritizing human thought and communication over automated output. Participants do not need to arrive with a fully formed position; the goal of this gathering is to create a supportive space to wonder, question, and compare pedagogical choices, recognizing that refusal is neither solitary nor simple, but a shared effort to protect what matters in the teaching of writing. Facilitated by Matthew Schultz, Director of First-Year Writing & the Writing Center.

Beyond Source Evaluation: Meta-literacy and Participatory Knowledge-Making

When: Friday, October 16, 2026, 10:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m.
Where: Library, Room 122

First-Year Writing Seminars have long asked students to find, evaluate, and responsibly use sources. But students now encounter information in environments shaped by search engines, databases, social media, generative AI, and platformed expertise. In this context, source evaluation is still necessary, but it is no longer sufficient.

In this workshop, Vassar’s Academic Engagement Librarians will introduce metaliteracy as a framework for helping students understand themselves as participants in knowledge-making: readers, researchers, creators, remixers, sharers, and critics who help produce, circulate, evaluate, and transform information. Together, we will consider how students learn to ask where information comes from, how authority is constructed, how claims circulate, how platforms shape attention, and what responsibilities writers have when they use, revise, cite, or share the work of others.

Faculty will discuss practical ways to integrate metaliteracy into their First-Year Writing Seminars, especially in assignments involving research, source use, AI-generated material, public knowledge, and contested authority. The goal is to help faculty move beyond “find good sources” toward teaching students how knowledge is produced, mediated, evaluated, and ethically used in contemporary information environments. Facilitated by the Academic Engagement Librarians

For any questions regarding FYWS Workshops and Events, please contact Matthew Schultz, Director of First-Year Writing & the Writing Center.