Summer Webinar Series: Writing in the School of the Environment

In our second webinar in the series, Professor Brock MacDonald will explore challenges and tools for interdisciplinary writing. This webinar will be an engaging opportunity to meet and connect with students, faculty and other members of our community over the topic!

Learning in an interdisciplinary field, students in School of the Environment courses must tackle writing assignments in many genres, from formal academic research essays and reports to various kinds of documents aimed at non-academic audiences. Besides requiring well-organized, well-supported, and well-written arguments, many of these assignments pose the special challenge of integrating scientific information with political, cultural, and ideological concerns and perspectives. In this webinar, we’ll consider these and other aspects of writing on environment courses and discuss resources and strategies for success.

About Brock MacDonald

Brock joined the staff of the Woodsworth College Writing Lab (as it was known then) as a part-time instructor in 1989, and became Director of the Academic Writing Centre (as it’s called now) and a full-time member of the Woodsworth faculty in 2004. Between the early Nineties and 2004, he also worked on teaching and learning initiatives for the Faculty of Pharmacy, taught at the UTM Academic Skills Centre, and taught writing courses for both undergraduate and graduate students in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. In recent years he has been involved in several pedagogical projects in the Faculty of Arts and Science, including a two-year study of writing in the Department of Geography, an initiative to improve essay writing in Philosophy, and the development and coordination of the Faculty’s Writing-integrated Teaching (WIT) program. Besides his ongoing Writing Centre work, he regularly teaches courses on literature, popular culture, and music in Woodsworth’s Academic Bridging and First Year Foundations programs, and he has served as the College’s Vice-Principal since 2014.