Colleague Experiences
Along with enhancing and deepening the classroom learning environment, Peer Colleagues are also teacher-researchers who use the classroom as a lab for pedagogy. The Peer Colleague Program is as much for the development of the colleagues as it is for the first-year students.
Alexa Zappia
Inclusive Childhood Education Major
Class of 2018
Claire Sauter
Media Management Major | Ethics Minor
Class of 2018
As the first Peer Colleagues, Alexa Zappia and Claire Sauter were integrated into their previous First-Year Program English course. This particular course, having enrolled more students than usual, presented the opportunity to initiate the Peer Colleague Program under the commitment of Dr. Jill Swiencicki. Together, Dr. Swiencicki, Alexa, and Claire established a Peer Colleague dynamic.
Their initial expectation of their role was to act as in-class writing tutors, but the role became so much more. Alexa and Claire worked collaboratively with Dr. Swiencicki on planning and executing course material. They met weekly to reflect on and adapt their material given the students’ progress. Most importantly, they enjoyed building trust within the classroom and being a relatable source for problem-solving.
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Over the semester, Dr. Swiencicki, Alexa, and Claire established a frame experiment based on their observations of students’ drafting processes. They were curious about the use and application of visual drafting aids in college-level writing. Already a part of the course curriculum, a drafting aid in the form of a chart was required for Project #2: Examining the Controversy over the Confederate Flag through Multiple Perspectives. The multiple perspectives paper is a challenging essay to which Dr. Swiencicki, Alexa, and Claire hypothesized that charting would improve the organization of perspectives and the composing process. Through different simulations, critical insights were discovered regarding reification and student preferences during the drafting and writing processes.
The PC experience allowed Alexa and Claire to view writing from a new perspective: the teacher perspective. As student mentors and teachers, they were able to play an active role in the pre-drafting stages of the writing process all the way to the final revision and editing stages of students' work. Through this experience, Alexa has practiced classroom teaching and adaptability towards her passion of teaching, and Claire has challenged her own writing strengths and weaknesses as they relate to the field of communications.
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Shannon Dehoff
English Major | Philosophy Minor
Class of 2017
Shannon DeHoff has been a Peer Colleague serving both Dr. Jill Swiencicki’s Research Writing class Food and Culture: You Are What You Eat? as well as Dr. Rob Ruehl’s Learning Community class Philosophy in Context. In both classroom settings, Shannon attended class meetings, facilitated lectures and activities, assisted students in reading and writing assignments as well as developed her own course materials for distribution.
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In Shannon’s first semester as a Peer Colleague, she focused her research on novice students’ perception of the revision process and their ability to effectively workshop and offer support to peers. For this research, Shannon developed a three-part revision workshop where each day students were given different foci for their peer groups. Students followed the workshop with a survey about their experiences, providing great insight about students’ initial perceptions of the process in contrast to their end results. These research findings prompted Shannon to further question what environments best promote student growth.
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For Shannon’s second semester working with the PC program, she was able to use her foundational knowledge from her previous experiences to build a more theoretical and philosophical framework for research. While working with Dr. Ruehl, Shannon examined ideas of literacy, power, and discourse as related to education and pedagogy. Her work explored the ways in which education and literacy have been used as tools by the dominant discourse to maintain inequality and restrict access to power within American society. She concluded that if we seek to mitigate or eradicate the severe inequality that our culture faces, we must use education to instill ways of saying, writing, being, valuing and believing that are different than that of the status quo. Shannon urges that if educators can adopt a pedagogy of feminist ethics and indigenous philosophy, their educational philosophy can bring social justice into the classroom and provide students with the literacy to spread social justice elsewhere.
Irina Ardelean
Biology Major
Class of 2019
Irina served as a Peer Colleague in Dr. Barbara Lowe's Philosophy of Identity Learning Community course where she attended every class meeting with the freshmen students, contributed to and facilitated discussion in the classroom, guided the students with activities, and worked with the students on their writing. In teamwork with colleague Erica Kramarz, Irina held an independent writing workshop for the students for their first paper. Dr. Lowe, Erica, and Irina met every week to discuss what happened during classes and plan for the next few weeks. The meetings have included some of Irina's favorite memories and learning experiences from this program because it was an open space to talk about ideas.
Throughout the semester, Irina also used the classroom to observe student patterns and develop a reading tool that will help lead the students to a richer learning experience and academic success. Developing this tool was a challenge as she began her research into pedagogy. With Dr. Lowe’s guidance, she pursued the end result of a reading guide. Reading has always been natural and enjoyable for Irina, enabling her to interpret more complex theoretical writing. She was tasked with figuring out a way to compress years of reading experience and ability into a two-page guide for students who possibly never read at all.
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Erica Kramarz
Adolescent Education Major
Class of 2019
Erica also collaborated with Dr. Lowe and Irina to serve the students of the Philosophy of Identity Learning Community. As a Peer Colleague, she had the opportunity to do presentations to the class, help with small group work, participate in different activities, and lead her own peer-review extra credit opportunity one night during the semester. Being able to be a Peer Colleague and contribute to the class in a large variety of ways has benefited Erica in terms of experience towards her Adolescent Education major and aspiring high school teacher. She has become more comfortable working with students whose ages range from 17-18 and reflecting her voice and character in her teaching style.
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Her interest in peer review has led Erica to spend the semester researching and creating two different peer review guides for Learning Communities to use while doing an in-class peer review workshop. She has observed and tested her theories through facilitating proper and effective review of classmates' papers using each of the guides. After the students complete peer review, Erica measures the preference and usefulness of the guides by surveying the students. A comparison of the guided drafting process and final papers reveals the effectiveness of each guide.
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Emily Scoma
Business Management | English Minor
Class of 2019
Emily was a freshman student in the Service Scholars learning community during the first semester of the Peer Colleague program, with Alexa Zappia and Claire Sauter as PCs. She learned new writing, organizing , drafting, and revision techniques, and had the ability to ask Alexa and Claire direct questions about school work and service. It was this positive experience that inspired Emily to apply to become a Peer Colleague herself.
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A main focus of the first-year writing program is students working collaboratively in Peer Review sessions. As a PC in the Service Scholar Learning Community with Professor Deborah Vanderbilt, she was interested in observing how the students worked in groups, both small groups of three and as a whole class. Their success as a group was shown most on days where class time was primarily spent having group discussions. Emily researched different theories on Peer Review and Group Cohesiveness, as well as surveying the students on their experience in Peer Review for the semester. The group of Service Scholars as a whole was cohesive and with the right activities. She feels their performance was extraordinary and created a base of practicing peer review for their future writing experiences.
William Wicks
Political Science & HR Management
Class of 2020
As a sophomore, Liam was excited to carry on the tradition of being a Peer Colleague in Dr. Swiencicki’s college writing course - part of the Leadership through Self-Development Learning Community. As a political science major and human resource management dual major, Liam continued to hone his writing and communication skills for the field by working with students in his PC role.
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The context of the college writing course changes each semester but the writing practices, skills, and objectives of the course remain the same. Several timely, powerful social issues were the topic of discussion in the course that Liam facilitated with Dr. Swiencicki. He was quickly impressed with the freshmen students' willingness to participate in course discussion and activities. Then, his role as Peer Colleague was to help the students transition their thoughts into essay writing that accomplished different arguments and perspectives. Liam guided students through different processes of writing college-level essays and provided group workshops and individual feedback to students.
Caroline Paley
Interdisciplinary Major | Chemistry & Spanish Minors
Class of 2020
Caroline's Interdisciplinary major allows her to take different courses that interest her which don't typically fall under one specific major. She has used her time as an undergraduate student so far to take a combination of psychology, sociology, English, and science classes to balance her interests in medicine, advocacy, and literature. Being a Peer colleague was one of her most rewarding experiences at Fisher thus far. She assisted in one of the classes that made up the Learning Community she had just previously completed as a freshman.
The Philosophy of Identity course introduced students to a variety of belief systems, such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Students were tasked to apply these theories to real life case studies through research and group presentation. Caroline offered assistance in peer reviewing by groups and one-on-one. She also led class discussions. Her first experience as a Peer Colleague also led to another opportunity as a PC the following semester. Caroline does not doubt that her experience as a Peer Colleague will continue to benefit her in developing her writing, leadership, and confidence to pursue her interests.
Ally Wichtowski
Inclusive Childhood Education and English major
Class of
Ally was in the Service Scholar LC her freshman year and was very honored to have the opportunity to work with Dr. Swiencicki, Dr. Lowe, and the new scholars in their LC, The Social Self and the Moral Imagination as a sophomore. She is an Inclusive Childhood Education and English major, so being a peer colleague in the Critical Reading and Writing course served as a great experience for Ally. She was able to assist Dr. Swiencicki with lesson plans and instruction, facilitated small group work, and served as a writing resource for the students.
Ally is a tutor in the Writing Center, which proved to be very beneficial to the freshman students. This interaction of her roles as a writing tutor and a peer colleague is what made her experience so unique. Overall, Ally is very grateful for her semester as a PC and enjoyed being a guide to the freshman for their first college writing course.