Anna Ekert-Centowska, Sprachenzentrum UZH und ETH Zürich

Writing Fellow Training at the Life Science Zurich Graduate School is a two-semester blended course offered as part of the transferrable skills curriculum. The aim is to prepare Writing Fellows (WFs) — trained peer-tutors whose role is to establish writing as a communicative task by engaging in a dialogue with writers and providing formative feedback. WFs coach students in writing the scientific and technical documents required for their studies. They providing feedback related to how content is perceived and consider linguistic, formal, and editorial aspects in the process. WF training covers feedback techniques, the understanding of the writing process, and composition. WFs can be assigned as Teaching Assistants to writing-intensive courses where they give oral and written feedback on drafts, may provide advice on how to formulate writing assignments, and, in this context, contribute to the assessment of such assignments.
This documentation describes the design process of WF training emphasizing close collaboration between writing instructors and discipline-specific experts. I also discuss the relevance of the training in the context of feedback literacy and the process of forging academic identities through dialogic peer-feedback. I end by reflecting on establishing Communities of Practice among doctoral students, its benefits and potential barriers to development.