Working with Faculty Writers - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0874219019 ISBN 13 : 9780874219012

Editeur : Utah State University Press, 2013

Synopsis

 The imperative to write and to publish is a relatively new development in the history of academia, yet it is now a significant factor in the culture of higher education. Working with Faculty Writers takes a broad view of faculty writing support, advocating its value for tenure-track professors, adjuncts, senior scholars, and graduate students. The authors in this volume imagine productive campus writing support for faculty and future faculty that allows for new insights about their own disciplinary writing and writing processes, as well as the development of fresh ideas about student writing. 

Contributors from a variety of institution types and perspectives consider who faculty writers are and who they may be in the future, reveal the range of locations and models of support for faculty writers, explore the ways these might be delivered and assessed, and consider the theoretical, philosophical, political, and pedagogical approaches to faculty writing support, as well as its relationship to student writing support.

With the pressure on faculty to be productive researchers and writers greater than ever, this is a must-read volume for administrators, faculty, and others involved in developing and assessing models of faculty writing support.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Anne Ellen Geller is an associate professor of English and director of Writing Across the Curriculum in the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Michele Eodice is the Associate Provost for Academic Engagement and director of the writing center at the University of Oklahoma.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

WORKING WITH FACULTY WRITERS

By ANNE ELLEN GELLER, MICHELE EODICE

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-901-2

Contents

Foreword Robert Boice.....................................................
vii
Acknowledgments............................................................
xi
Introduction Anne Ellen Geller............................................
1
PART 1: LEADERSHIP AND LOCATIONS...........................................
1 Beyond the Curriculum: Supporting Faculty Writing Groups in WAC Programs 
 Chris Anson...............................................................
21
2 The Scholarly Writing Continuum: A New Program Model for Teaching and 
Faculty Development Centers Brian Baldi, Mary Deane Sorcinelli, and Jung 
H. Yun.....................................................................
38
3 The Idea of a Faculty Writing Center: Moving from Troubling Deficiencies 
to Collaborative Engagement Lori Salem and Jennifer Follett...............
50
4 Talking about Writing: Critical Dialogues on Supporting Faculty Writers 
Gertrude Fraser and Deandra Little.........................................
73
PART 2: WRITING GROUPS /RETREATS/RESIDENCIES...............................
5 How Teaching Centers Can Support Faculty as Writers Tara Gray, A. Jane 
Birch, and Laura Madson....................................................
95
6 Faculty Writing Groups: Writing Centers and Third Space Collaborations 
Angela Clark-Oates and Lisa Cahill.........................................
111
7 Supporting a Culture of Writing: Faculty Writing Residencies as a WAC 
Initiative Jessie L. Moore, Peter Felten, and Michael Strickland..........
127
8 Assessing the Effects of Faculty and Staff Writing Retreats: Four 
Institutional Perspectives Ellen Schendel, Susan Callaway, Violet 
Dutcher, and Claudine Griggs...............................................
142
9 Feedback and Fellowship: Stories from a Successful Writing Group 
Virginia Fajt, Fran I. Gelwick, Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez, Prudence 
Merton, Georgianne Moore, María Irene Moyna, and Jill Zarestky.............
163
10 Developing a Heuristic for Multidisciplinary Faculty Writing Groups: A 
Case Study Trixie G. Smith, Janice C. Molloy, Eva Kassens-Noor, Wen Li, 
and Manuel Colunga-Garcia..................................................
175
PART 3: ISSUES AND AUTHORS.................................................
11 Guiding Principles for Supporting Faculty as Writers at a 
Teaching-Mission Institution Michelle Cox and Ann Brunjes.................
191
12 Academic Publication and Contingent Faculty: Establishing a Community 
of Scholars Letizia Guglielmo and Lynée Lewis Gaillet.....................
210
13 Experiencing Ourselves as Writers: An Exploration of How Faculty 
Writers Move from Dispositions to Identities William P. Banks and Kerri 
B. Flinchbaugh.............................................................
228
14 Imagining Coauthorship as Phased Collaboration William Duffy and John 
Pell.......................................................................
246
15 Experiencing the Benefits of Difference within Multidisciplinary 
Graduate Writing Groups Elena Marie-Adkins Garcia, Seung hee Eum, and 
Lorna Watt.................................................................
260
16 The Promise of Self-Authorship as an Integrative Framework for 
Supporting Faculty Writers Carmen Werder..................................
279
Afterword Michele Eodice..................................................
293
About the Contributors.....................................................
298
Index......................................................................
303

CHAPTER 1

BEYOND THE CURRICULUMSupporting Faculty Writing Groups in WAC Programs

Chris Anson

An acquaintance, the director of a writing across the curriculum (WAC)program at a highly prestigious, research-obsessed university that sportsa number of Nobel prize winners, once shared with me her frustrationsattracting faculty to workshops and activities that focused on teaching.The program's heart beat to the rhythm of improving support for studentwriting. Outreach was its vascular system, circulating vital instructionalreform throughout the campus. Participation was its lifeblood.But no matter how hard the program tried to draw faculty to its events,they shied away, almost embarrassed to be seen vacating their well-appointedlabs and offices to attend a teaching-related event—even forthe best box lunch in the state or a wine-and-hors d'oeuvres receptionto rival an elegant fundraiser. Workshops, informal presentations, andcolloquia on student writing drew scattered interest and uncomfortablyfew participants. What goals and interests, the director wondered, motivatedher colleagues? Clearly, they feared wasting valuable time on somethingthey were trying to do less of. How could she get them to that placewhere the hope of gain lines up, like a rare celestial phenomenon, witha willingness to engage?

After much thought, she decided to put on a session about facultypublication. Widely billed as an event focusing on how to improve thechances of getting into print, it featured three faculty members fromdifferent disciplines who each edited a prestigious journal and couldprovide advice and strategies about publication from well-informed positions.The session included testimonials by prolific scholar-writers abouttheir own best practices, breakouts for small-group discussion, and presentationson campus resources.

Faculty packed the room, giving up office hours, lab time, lunch dates,and even class sessions to attend. Realizing that they had a captive audience,the director and her colleagues drew attention to their programand urged faculty to become involved in some of its teaching-relatedactivities. The faculty were there because, deep in their work ethic andreinforced through years of both explicit and tacit systems of rewardsand punishments, they held sacred the goal of academic publication. Buttheir need to understand and develop strategies for their own writing waspotentially a way to begin thinking more deeply and productively aboutthe role of writing in their courses.

Descriptions of WAC programs usually highlight their focus on instructionaldevelopment and curricular improvement. Although today theapproaches to this work vary considerably, shaped to specific institutionalneeds and cultures, it's still the exception to find activities andresources focusing on the faculty's own scholarly and professional writing.However, a number of WAC programs have mounted initiatives thatdraw on or support the writing experiences of faculty themselves. Whilethese efforts are scattered, their success suggests that, on a national scale,we should pursue more opportunities to assist faculty with their own writing,in addition to helping them more richly understand, and tend to, theneeds of their students. At the same time, we must continue to explorethe assumption that focusing on the professional writing of faculty leadsthem inductively to improve their support for student writing. Althoughseveral chapters in this collection offer useful arguments for this relationship,it still remains largely unexplored and theoretically questionable.

This chapter will first briefly contextualize faculty writing in the historyof the WAC movement. It will then turn to several types of writing-relatedactivities that WAC programs are currently sponsoring as a way to extendtheir reach into supporting faculty members' own professional writingand making stronger connections between that writing, their teaching,and their students' writing. Finally, it will offer some cautions, particularlywith respect to issues of agency, ownership, and disciplinarity, abouthow to encourage faculty writing in WAC programs even as this appearsto define the next stage of program development and the creation of aculture of writing on college campuses.

THE LEGACY OF WRITING IN FACULTY WORKSHOPS

Engaging faculty in writing stretches back to the beginning of the WACmovement in the 1970s, when most workshops were organized at smallerliberal arts colleges that had strong teaching missions (Russell, 2002).By the 1980s, WAC was rapidly taking hold at larger research-orienteduniversities, where writing continued to play an important role in teaching-orientedfaculty development activities. Art Young, for example,describes the genesis of the workshops he and his colleagues foundedat Michigan Technological University, one of the most self-studied WACefforts at a larger institution:

These workshops were hands-on-pen experiences that lasted two to fourconsecutive days and nights, and participants themselves spent much ofthe time writing.... Individual workshops were structured in such a waythat teacher-writers experienced firsthand the pedagogical theories ofJames Britton, Peter Elbow, Janet Emig, Ken Macrorie, James Moffett, andothers who advised teachers to consider the writing process in instructionand to emphasize writing as a learning activity as well as a means of communication.... Teachers who participated in the workshops experienced,in one way or another, collaborative writing exercises, small-group dynamics,oral and written peer feedback between successive drafts, writinganxiety, writer's block, writing for themselves, writing for others, writingfor discovery, writing to communicate, and feeling good about writing.(Young 1986, 9)

Having faculty write and share that writing during workshops thatfocused mainly on teaching was said to mirror students' experiencesin the classroom. Engaging in writing exercises could "reacquaint [participants]with the frustrations (and joys) of the composing process"(Fulwiler 1986b, 23). The struggle to write, and the humility of sharinghalf-baked drafts with colleagues who normally showcase the outcomesof their considerable disciplinary talents and expertise, yielded sympathiesfor students grappling with challenging course assignments;more important, those experiences could quite viscerally show facultywhy instructional support for writing is so important.

Initially, the process movement's emphasis on experience ("Whathappens when I write?") was meant to show faculty how to supportstudents' writing through various activities that made explicit whatwas needed for success—including revealing their own struggles.Integrating this sort of meta-awareness into coursework was also saidto encourage students and teachers to recognize each other as writers.Starting in now-classic works such as Murray's (1968) A Writer TeachesWriting and continuing throughout the history of the National WritingProject, teachers have been urged to "write along with their students."As one NWP participant rhetorically asks, "When we write with ourstudents and share with them our uncertainties about word-choice,a topic, or organization, won't they be much more willing to do thesame?" (Alber 2012).

Over time, the extensive writing experiences included in early WACworkshops were replaced with a stronger focus on teaching (Thaiss,personal communication). The forces behind this evolution are notentirely clear, but may have come from recognition of certain tensionsand contradictions between the domains of faculty and student writing,especially in higher-education institutions where scholarly publicationcarries such weight.

For example, while asking faculty to write helps to reform what Fulwilercalls "simplistic notions" about student writing (1986b, 23), it often servesno purpose beyond the workshop; the experience is context-bound andephemeral. Workshop participants may come to understand the linkbetween their own sharing of the workshop journal they are required tokeep and their students' potential thinking and learning that the methodfosters. But this and other tasks are, after all, usually nothing like whatthe participants do in their own professional circles. In the interests ofconnecting with faculty who hail from diverse disciplines and who writesophisticated material often impenetrable even to academics in otherfields, workshop leaders usually choose disciplinarily neutral prompts,purposeful for the socially significant moment but useless once the participantsleave the room. Faculty often do enjoy working with other colleaguesin a "community of scholars" (Fulwiler 1986a, 243), but the disciplinarymix can't allow much, if any, serious sharing of scholarly writing.And faculty do gain insights, but they are often short-lived, soon dissipatinginto the other complexities of their professorial lives.

At the same time, the strategy of weaving general writing experiencesinto WAC workshops was meant to overcome the fact that faculty andstudents often write in mutually isolating domains. The genres of theacademic professions are sometimes at such a distance from canonicalcollege assignments or the kinds of pseudo-disciplinary writing that studentsmust produce that it's difficult for faculty to imagine that it all existsalong a developmental continuum. While faculty are reporting the resultsof complex biological experiments in food science or arguing sophisticatedstatistical projections in economics, students are trying their best tosummarize articles, develop a thesis about two conflicting events, or puttogether accurate, concise lab reports. If there is any flaw in the principlethat "our reflective interaction with our own writing efforts informs andanimates our interactions with our student writers" (Gillespie 1985), it'sthat the processes and struggles of college-level faculty are most meaningfulto them in the context of the most meaningful work they produce,which is the least often included in cross-disciplinary WAC workshops.The wall between faculty and student writing is a construction based onmisunderstandings of the common processes and needs of writers at differentends of the sophistication continuum. But not directly appealingto the writing interests of faculty may simply strengthen that wall insteadof breaking it down.

Teachers' perceptions of their own writing abilities also play a rolein deciding how or whether to tap into their experiences (Young andFulwiler 1990). When working with faculty across a range of disciplines,WAC leaders are often asked, "How can I help students to write if I'mnot such a good writer myself?" The response, almost unanimous in theliterature, argues that all faculty write within their disciplines, and thatit's only their (mis)conceptions about "good writing" that make that factinvisible to them. The concern rises to even higher levels when it comesto grammar. Many faculty, whether English is their first language or not,confess to not knowing all the intricacies of grammar well enough to beof help. They are admonished to "focus on students' meaning." Whenfaculty argue that they're not great writers because what they teach isn'teven remotely about writing (dance, drawing, small engine repair),they're encouraged to see writing as a powerful medium for learningtheir subject, rather than as a skill to be mastered. Such a response suggeststo faculty that there is no necessary relationship between being anaccomplished writer as a teacher and supporting students' own writing.This strategy, wise for orienting faculty toward the uses of writing to learn,doesn't always clarify the differences between what students will write professionallyafter graduation and what they're writing in the classroom.

Another possible reason for the decline of heavily writing-focused WACworkshops was an eventual differentiation of K–12 and university interests.Early on, leaders of college-level WAC programs were inspired by thework of the National Writing Project, which focused primarily on teachingin the K–12 context (see Russell 1992; McLeod and Soven 2006). The aimof encouraging K–12 teachers to write grew from similar beliefs about therelationship between experiential self-awareness and the improvement ofteaching. But the teachers had to be encouraged to write in the first place,and to do so "in front of ... students, [so] they can see what a sloppy, difficultact writing is for all writers" (Gillespie 1985; see also Robbins 1992).This blurring of the needs of K–12 teachers with those of university facultyeventually gave way to sharper distinctions between the two groups.Books such as Teacher as Writer: Entering the Professional Conversation (Dahl1992) inspired overworked K–12 teachers to write. Meanwhile, faculty inmost colleges and universities needed no additional persuasion than theirpromotion and tenure codes, but few resources existed, alongside all theemphasis on student writing, to help them succeed.

Many teaching-oriented WAC workshops in colleges and universitiesstill involve some vestigial writing, usually in brief episodes to demonstratethe principles of writing-to-learn. But the production of entiretexts through cycles of drafting, sharing, and revising is now rare.Recognizing the loss of a focus on teachers' own writing, however, anumber of WAC directors are rethinking ways they can bring facultytogether to discuss and practice their own writing beyond the usualteaching workshop model. These opportunities appear to define thegoals of faculty writing quite differently by avoiding the use of writingas a subterfuge for focusing directly on issues relating to students' ownwriting and learning, and enhancing opportunities for faculty to reflecton and learn strategies for their own professional publication. As we'llsee in the next section, these more recent developments position facultyas writers in their disciplinary contexts and extend the role of the WACprogram from student learning to faculty support. In this expansion ofservices, WAC programs rely on decades of instructional work helpingfaculty to think more deeply about the role of writing in their courses,but at the same time move into less charted territories where new dangerslurk beyond the edges of prior experience.

FACULTY WRITING WORKSHOPS AND RETREATS

The most direct expansion of WAC programs into the realm of facultywriting is through seminars or presentations that focus on strategiesfor writing and publishing, or on workshops or retreats where facultywork collaboratively to support the development of drafts in progress.Because they are brief, the former don't involve extensive work on individualprojects, which will see progress at home or in the office as aresult of the new insights and energy the sessions inspire. They typicallyinclude discussions of how to overcome self-defeating habits, how to targetan article toward a specific journal, or how to create backward timelinesor use online tools such as Timelinemaker to systematically movea project toward completion. Sessions sometimes include strategies forpublishing a book and may feature invited editors from university andtrade publishers or faculty with experience on editorial boards. Clearly,these sorts of events are especially helpful for early-career researchersand graduate students who recognize the importance of writing andpublishing but have not yet developed tools for success.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WORKING WITH FACULTY WRITERS by ANNE ELLEN GELLER, MICHELE EODICE. Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of Utah State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Utah State University Press
• Date d'édition: 2013
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0874219019
• ISBN 13: 9780874219012
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 305
• Éditeur: Geller Anne Ellen, Eodice Michele
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne