Vol. 5, No. 8 (Spring 2024)

Stevie Bell, Associate Professor, York University

Despite how writing instructors like me might feel about writing, students don’t always feel as though it is the most fun aspect of their scholarly or professional lives. Several years ago, in pre-Pandemic times, I initiated a transition workshop for incoming, first-year students focused on sharing a love and enthusiasm for writing. My goal was to reframe writing for incoming undergraduate students as a rich site of interest and community at university. I wanted the Writing Centre’s most public-facing work, our workshops, to do as much as possible to promote prosocial, support-seeking behaviours among students as well as to change the remedial narrative about the Writing Centre.

The 2-hour Pizza Party Writing Workshop attracted 80-100 students that first September and each September thereafter until the pandemic transformed it into an online workshop called “The Lowdown.” The majority of our early September appointments that follow are booked by students saying that they met us at the Pizza Party/The Lowdown and are looking to continue the conversations they began there.

The in-person, on-campus Pizza Party Writing Workshop is designed to maximize engagement and relationship building between attendees and many of our writing instructors. It takes place in a large auditorium with round tables to facilitate small group activity sessions.

After a brief welcome and introduction, students join topic-oriented table activities each run by a writing instructor or two. The table topics typically include:

• Decoding assignment instructions
• Discovering structure
• Developing thesis statements
• Constructing paragraphs
• Engaging with sources & avoiding plagiarism
• Editing sentences

Currently, the workshop also includes a table with information and activities about working with “smart” or “intelligent” writing tools like Grammarly and OpenAI products. The number of table topics is limited by the length of the workshop, and we usually allot 10-minutes per table topic with another 3 minutes for students to rotate. A rotation of seven topics takes about 85 minutes.

For each topic table, the writing instructor spends 3-5 minutes providing some general information (noting that variations exist depending on discipline) as well as suggestions for how (or whether) to focus on the issue at various stages of the writing process. The goal is to introduce the topic and the dispel topic’s myths while inviting the students to dive deeper in 1-to-1 tutoring sessions. We use old-fashioned, tri-fold poster boards to supplement the verbal presentation. We used to provide a handout at each activity table as well, but we now offer a link to the supplementary website we built, The Lowdown on university-level academic writing, when the workshop was forced online due to the Pandemic.

via GIPHY

Then students are invited to engage in a short puzzle or gameful activity related to the topic (see examples on the supplementary website). These activities tend to prompt lots of collective teamwork and camaraderie. This is where we see bonds being formed between student attendees and with writing instructors facilitating the table activity.

Having completed a table activity, students win a ticket. They must earn a minimum of five tickets to get pizza. Eventually, the table activities are cleared away, and students continue their conversations over pizza. In this informal part of the event, writing instructors sit with students and have a chance to contribute to their conversations about transitioning to university life.

When the Pandemic hit, we were obviously unable to continue with the in-person or pizza elements of this workshop. We pivoted to an online workshop, renamed to “The Lowdown on university-level academic writing,” which ran in similar ways using Zoom break-out rooms. The online iteration of the workshop has excellent attendance, and is still the preferred modality of many students. We are looking into opportunities to re-launch the in-person pizza party.

For the online iteration of the workshop, we transformed our materials into the Lowdown website and changed some of the activities there to be do-able via Zoom. During the Pandemic, we began adding video resources to enhance the examination of these topics. This website is now capable of living as a stand-alone resource that can help first-year undergraduate students begin transitioning to university-level writing. Our plan, however, is to continue running The Lowdown and/or Pizza Party Writing Workshop to begin each year with a celebration of writing and talking writing in community. The primary goal is building personal connections between the writing centre and students.

If you’d like to chat about how to transform this workshop in your own context, get in touch!

With thanks to the many writing instructors at York’s Writing Centre who have contributed to the Pizza Party and Lowdown workshop as well as the resulting supplementary website.