NU Writing Talks: Writing to Learn, Engage, and Create
NU Writing Talks
Writing to Learn, Engage, and Create
3, 10, 17, 24 April 2021
The Writing Center Program (WCP) at Nazarbayev University is pleased to announce the first edition of NU Writing Talks, a symposium dedicated to all aspects of academic writing and open to all perspectives on the teaching and learning of English for academic and research purposes in an international context.
The inaugural edition of NU Writing Talks will take place exclusively online, over four consecutive weekends in April. Each weekend will feature a 90-minute webinar with invited speakers from the Writing Center and other disciplines, who will discuss their achievements and challenges in teaching writing for academic and research purposes. The aim of these webinars is to share experience and resources to support a wide range of learning outcomes and activities, across disciplines and institutions.
When they come to University, our students expect to learn to “write academically.” What they often mean by that is a general set of verbal skills that can be applied—like a universal key—to all academic tasks and contexts. What they learn, instead, is that writing is a dynamic and strategic social activity, which unfolds in specific contexts and shapes individual thinking processes as well as collective, institutional ones. Far from being something “extra” that academics do only when prompted and in addition to their regular scholarly and research activities, writing is central to “how things are done” in disciplinary knowledge and academic life more generally. That is why the theme for this year’s edition of NU Writing Talks is “Writing to learn, engage, and create”: by writing, students not only learn foundational concepts and become familiar with basic epistemic and disciplinary frameworks, but also analyze and apply those concepts and frameworks to new problems and situations, and become adept at evaluating and creating claims to knowledge. In short, writing supports the whole range of cognitive learning objectives pursued in higher education and constitutes a major induction into critical thinking.
A detailed program of the four webinars will be circulated closer to the date of the symposium. More information about who we are and what we do can be found on our website, at https://shsswritingcenter.wixsite.com/writingcenterprogram. For questions about the event, we are reachable at writingtalks@nu.edu.kz.
