Neal Lerner

Paula Gillespie

Grounded in current writing center theory and practice, The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring provides students with a comprehensive introduction to effective tutoring. Throughout the text, readers hear the voices of tutors and writers in first-person peer tutor accounts, reflective essays, and transcripts from actual sessions. Within each chapter, techniques, models, and exercises provide instruction appropriate for any level of tutoring.

The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring

Jennifer Craig

Mya Poe

Case studies and pedagogical strategies to help science and engineering students improve their writing and speaking skills while developing professional identities. To many science and engineering students, the task of writing may seem irrelevant to their future professional careers. At MIT, however, students discover that writing about their technical work is important not only in solving real-world problems but also in developing their professional identities. MIT puts into practice the belief that “engineers who don't write well end up working for engineers who do write well,” requiring all students to take “communications-intensive” classes in which they learn from MIT faculty and writing instructors how to express their ideas in writing and in presentations. Students are challenged not only to think like professional scientists and engineers but also to communicate like them.This book offers in-depth case studies and pedagogical strategies from a range of science and engineering communication-intensive classes at MIT. It traces the progress of seventeen students from diverse backgrounds in seven classes that span five departments. Undergraduates in biology attempt to turn scientific findings into a research article; graduate students learn to define their research for scientific grant writing; undergraduates in biomedical engineering learn to use data as evidence; and students in aeronautic and astronautic engineering learn to communicate collaboratively. Each case study is introduced by a description of its theoretical and curricular context and an outline of the objectives for the students' activities. The studies describe the on-the-ground realities of working with faculty, staff, and students to achieve communication and course goals, offering lessons that can be easily applied to a wide variety of settings and institutions.

Case Studies from MIT

Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering

Natalie Kuldell

The science of biology celebrates the discovery and understanding of biological systems that already exist in nature. In parallel, the engineering of biology must learn how to make use of our understanding of the natural world to design and build new useful biological systems. "Synthetic biology" represents one example of recent work to engineer biological systems. This emerging field aims to replace the ad hoc process of assembling biological systems by primarily developing tools to assemble reliable-but-complex living organisms from standard components that can later be reused in new combination. The focus of this book is "genome refactoring," one of several approaches to manage the complexity of a biological system in which the goal is to redesign the genetic elements that encode a living form--preserving the function of that form but encoding it with a genome far easier to study and extend. This book presents genome refactoring in two ways: as an important aspect of the emerging field of synthetic biology and as a powerful teaching tool to train would be professionals in the subject. Chapters focus on the overarching goals of synthetic biology and their alignment with the motivations and achievements in genome engineering; the engineering frameworks of refactoring, including genome synthesis, standardization of biological parts, and abstraction; a detailed description of the bacteriophages that have been refactored up to this point; and the methods of refactoring and contexts for that work drawn from the bacteriophage M13. Overall, these examples offer readers the potential for synthetic biology and the areas in need of further research. If successful, synthetic biology and genome refactoring could address any number of persistent societal needs, including sustainable energy, affordable and effective medicine, and green manufacturing practices. Table of Contents: Tools for Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology / Bacteriophage as Templates for Refactoring / Methods/Teaching Protocols for M13 Reengineering / Writing and Speaking as Biological Engineers / Summary and Future Directions / Appendix A / Appendix B / Appendix C

Neal Lerner

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