Wabash Writing Project

directed by Dr. C. Benedicks
Assistant Professor of English, Wabash College

 

"Those notions see composition as a ‘basic skill’ that students should have attained by the end of their first year in college at the latest—first-year composition is essentially remedial—just as Harvard [where college composition courses originated] saw it in 1874. From that perspective, academic literacy is something students should have when they arrive at college. If they don’t, then one or two courses are deemed sufficient to bring them up to speed—never mind that any complex ability that we do not fully possess, like speaking French or playing the piano, will not be mastered so quickly."

—Mark Richardson, "Writing is Not Just a Basic Skill"

At the end of the two-year Wabash Writing Project, the goal remains: How to get more intentional and explicit writing education to more students? As a result of the current project, we know more now about students and faculty practices and attitudes. We know more about what students learn and don’t learn about writing. We have come through a year of faculty development designed around writing. Most of us at Wabash would agree that writing is not a basic skill, and that it must be the responsibility of the whole college. As we come to the end of this project, we now look for ways to turn our new-found knowledge into sustainable structures and practices that will help students become better writers.

So how to do it?

Activities over the Last Six Months

  • The biggest achievement of the last six months has been the Departmental Writing Statements. Each department (except two) submitted to the Teaching and Learning Committee a statement in response to a series of questions about how writing is taught in that department (see the template, attached). My future plans involve working with departments to facilitate greater responsibility for writing within that department, especially after the student’s first year. The Departmental Writing Statements provide information about the sometimes remarkable differences in how writing is defined and taught across the curriculum. I hope that such information will help me work with departments more effectively and will also illustrate to us all the great variety of genres, abilities, and ways of thinking (none of them basic) included under the rubric "writing."
  • I taught a newly-designed intermediate class, "Writing with Power and Grace," for students who wanted to work explicitly on their writing. Another section of the class ran last spring as well, after a literature-based class did not fill and had to be replaced with an alternate course quickly. Because of the high enrollment numbers and positive student feedback, we plan to run these classes again next spring.
  • I continued to partner with the Teaching and Learning Committee to design faculty lunch discussions focused on writing, as follows:
    • Jan 21: "Why Should I Care About Departmental Writing Statements?"
    • Feb. 18: "We Need Wabash 2.0" 
    • March 18: "Let's Do Those Writing Statements" 
    • April 15: "A B+ is the new C"
  • With a gang of other interested faculty, I tried to figure out how best to organize faculty development. Throughout the spring of 2009, I partnered with the various groups on campus leading faculty development (SoTL, Teaching and Learning Committee, Cheryl Hughes as the new assistant dean, the Writing Center) to try to organize and centralize our work. We created and distributed a survey, which we are now studying, with the eventual hope of constructing a Teaching and Learning Center or similar. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like a writing project, but in fact it was the effort to provide sustained attention to writing that illuminated the lack of continuity among the various (very good) faculty development efforts on campus. The effort to find a home for writing led to the identification of and increasing cooperation of various components of Wabash faculty development.    
  • Writing and Technology: in February 2009, the Wabash Writing Project and the Teaching and Learning Committee hosted a visit by James Gee, one of the world’s foremost thinkers about technology, digital media, and education. He spoke directly to two writing classes and addressed a group of faculty and a group of students. We invited Gee to campus because of national interest in the effect of new media on writing.
  • Models for Teaching Writing: in March 2009, the Wabash Writing Project and the Teaching and Learning Committee hosted a visit by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, two leading composition scholars and the co-authors of a recent and somewhat controversial book—They Say/I Say—that teaches students the deep structures behind most academic writing. They spoke to several groups of faculty and students.

Student Involvement in Project

Students directly involved:

  • 20 students in the new intermediate writing class
  • 50 students attended a talk and/or lunch with James Gee 
  • 75 students attended a talk and/or lunch with Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein 

The indirect student involvement is much, much higher. The goal of the Wabash Writing Project is to strengthen writing education for every student. It is to be hoped that the results of this project will affect every student.

Faculty Involvement in Project

Faculty from every discipline attended the Teaching and Learning Committee lunches (although the humanities and social sciences were more healthily represented than math or the hard sciences). Only one academic department (in addition to C&T) failed to submit a Departmental Writing Statement, meaning that aside from the one exception every department actively discussed writing as a result of this project.

Beyond Wabash faculty, I worked with James Gee (Arizona State University) and Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (U. of Illinois at Chicago) to discuss writing and technology and template writing, respectively.

Additionally, I joined the Small Liberal Arts Colleges Writing Program Administrators (SLAC-WPA) group, and have relied on their collective wisdom for the development of this project.

What have I learned about . . .

a) Wabash Students? As earlier research in the course of this project suggests, Wabash students are eager to learn more about writing. They understand it as an important skill that has direct bearing on their success at college and in their professional lives after college. However, that is pretty much how most of them seem to see it. They tend not to understand writing as a way of thinking and discovering. They tend to separate ideas and writing, content and form. This finding was reinforced for me over the past six months based on conversations about writing and its role in one’s life—conversations I had with my Writing with Power and Grace class and with my Professional and Academic Writing class.

Students also tend to personalize differences in professors’ approaches to writing. That is, rather than seeing a difference between the ways two different disciplines expect knowledge to be generated, organized, and presented, they tend to see two different professors with personal likes and dislikes. This came up in student interviews, focus groups, and surveys that I conducted in the first years of this study. In the past six months, the Departmental Writing Statements were meant as a way to help us all understand these disciplinary differences and begin to find ways to talk about them with each other and with students.

Students are confused about what counts as appropriate and inappropriate source use. They are confused because different members of the faculty (often because of their disciplinary training) have different ideas about appropriate source use. We need to find ways of making source use expectations more clear to students, even when they differ by discipline. Most importantly, Wabash continues to expel students over source use infringements, yet the plagiarism study (under Sandra Jamieson, see Lilly report for January 2009) clearly shows student (and faculty) confusion over appropriate source use. We need to revisit our policies to ensure a more fair and transparent system.

Further, there were several incidents this semester of students documenting their sources correctly, but relying on Internet "answer" sites like cliffnotes.com or sparknotes.com for all of their ideas. In addition, therefore, to teaching source use conventions more intentionally, we also need to communicate to students why scholars turn to "sources" in the first place (i.e., not only to "get answers"—also to find various perspectives, etc).

b) the impact of your project? This project has already had a great impact. Writing has become a part of the college’s conversation. My previous reports detail this, but here I want to stress that now, at the end of the project, it is critical to find structures for continuing the work of strengthening student writing. I believe this means a combination of faculty development efforts, curricular reform, and the institution of a director of writing studies (someone to oversee these efforts, teach composition, and perhaps help oversee Freshman Tutorial and C&T).

c) teaching and learning at Wabash? The seriousness (and even pleasure and humor) with which teaching and learning are met at Wabash is remarkable. I know that my colleagues at other institutions have to struggle to get some of their peers or administrators to take writing seriously. That is not a concern here. As I’ve said in earlier reports, writing well is part of the Wabash brand. At other colleges, this project may have been about convincing people that writing matters. Here, it has been about making explicit what was implicit, and in the process deepening our knowledge.

Upcoming Activities

Gary Philips, Cheryl Hughes, Julia Rosenberg, and Jill Lamberton and I have developed the following goals for the continuation of the Writing Project:

Departmental/Curricular Level

  • Write all-college writing statement, late summer/early Fall 09
  • Departments write versions of writing statements for student audiences, end of Fall 09 
  • Division-wide or departmental meetings to support this work, Fall 09 
  • Partner with two departments to strengthen/assess writing, year-long goal.

All-Faculty/Pedagogical Level

  • FT and C&T workshops, ongoing
  • Source Use, ongoing. (I would love to be able to make a concrete amendment to the two-strikes-and-you’re-out/no-questions-asked policy by the end of academic year. (note: this goal also lives on the "college policy" level)

Student Level

  • Continue listening to what students have to say about their writing experience, ongoing goal
  • Feed knowledge from WC back into course design (this also works on the curricular level), ongoing goal 
  • How to help students (and help faculty help students) figure out how to understand and utilize the different genres and disciplinary conventions they encounter, ongoing goal 
  • Possibility of workshops/minicourses that complement writing education in first year (or beyond), ongoing goal (we might look at that "chapel hour" FT students now share)

Departmental Writing Statements Template

Due to Joyce Burnette, Chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee, by April 1st

Departmental Writing Expectations

Throughout the course of the Wabash Writing Study, departments agreed that good writing is 1) clear, and 2) well structured. What, specifically, do these abstract concepts mean in your academic field?

In which specific genres and styles of writing do you expect your seniors to excel?

According to a recent Wabash survey, many freshmen are unsure about how or why to use sources in their papers. What does proper source use look like in your field? That is, what kinds of disciplinary source-use conventions (beyond citation style) do you expect your seniors to be able to follow?

Departmental Classroom Practices

The Wabash Writing Study showed that students want more explicit writing instruction (as distinct from writing experience). Where in your department’s curriculum do you (or could you) give explicit in-class writing instruction?

The Wabash Writing Study has shown that students credit drafting/revising with helping them develop and organize their ideas. Do you build in opportunities for drafting and revising? Where? Do these opportunities work in the ways you intend them to?

The Teagle Writing Study suggests that Wabash seniors write stronger papers than Wabash freshmen (and stronger papers than their SAT scores suggest they might). Based on your departmental practices, what are you doing that’s working, and how can you grow that?

Student Performance

Are your seniors meeting all your writing expectations (see first section)? How so (or not)?

What kinds of support from the college would help you with the work of mentoring student writers in your field (for example, more writing classes, innovative collaborations with the Writing Center, faculty seminars, etc.)?

**NOTE**

In October of 2009, the Wabash faculty voted to affirm an all-college Writing Statement (click here) for inclusion in the academic bulletin. The statement will guide our writing work in the future.