Story by Dean Klinkerman
A university program that lost funding during the Great Recession is back, and it’s celebrating its return with a week of workshops focused on helping faculty enhance student learning, engagement and success.
Nov. 6-10 is “WAC Week”— a celebration of “Writing Across the Curriculum,” one of the original high-impact practices. It will focus on how faculty can use writing assignments to deepen students understanding and ability to apply course content.
“WAC Week sounds a bit hokey,” said Mike Palmquist, director of the University Writing Center and the WAC Program. “But it builds on more than four decades of work that has helped CSU earn an international reputation for its work with writing across the disciplines.”
Roots of the program
By calling attention to the role writing can play in the classroom, the workshops presented during WAC Week will lay the foundation for the resurgence of a program that was founded in 1984 by English professors Kate Kiefer, Steve Reid, Dawn Rodrigues and Bill McBride. During the early 1990s, it emerged as one of the first WAC programs to employ significant instructional technology support — and, importantly, to adapt and extend the early WAC models used at liberal arts colleges for use at research universities.
Now supported by the English department, the Writing Center, and the Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT), the WAC program continues to re-emerge as a critical force for advancing the teaching and learning mission of the university.
Sue Doe, executive director of key WAC sponsor TILT, is well versed in the role writing activities and assignments can play in enhancing student learning and success. Doe worked as a WAC program leader when she first arrived at CSU and who has continued to play a key role in supporting WAC efforts over the past decade.
‘Win-win’
“This is different from assigned paper writing where writing becomes a demonstration of learning and a performance of academic writing,” she said. “At CSU we have only begun to mine the rich storehouse of ways that writing can help students to engage more deeply with material…. Also, writing, conceived this way, need not involve the kinds of labor normally associated with the grading of papers. It’s a win-win – more learning through an engagement effort that doesn’t require a lot of grading and responding.”
Palmquist, similarly, as a longstanding professor of English and the founding director of TILT, knows as well as anybody the challenges and opportunities associated with using writing to support classroom instruction. One of the main goals of WAC Week is to enhance the faculty’s understanding of what writing assignments may look like in their classroom through various sessions hosted by writing specialists across the university. The workshops will address topics including introductions to WAC, designing writing assignments and responding to student writing, using generative AI to support student writing, and the contributions WAC might make as CSU pursues HSI status. (See full schedule below.)
“Writing, conceived this way, need not involve the kinds of labor normally associated with the grading of papers. It’s a win-win – more learning through an engagement effort that doesn’t require a lot of grading and responding.”
– TILT Executive Director Sue Doe
Writing for learning, not for papers
Writing as a lane to learning takes three primary roads: One is writing to learn, where students are often writing to remember, understand and reflect on what they have been exposed to in the classroom. In the classroom, this could look as straightforward as pausing during a lecture after speaking for 10 minutes or so on one main topic and asking students to write a short summary of the key ideas.
Writing to engage asks students to think more critically about ideas in the course. Writing tasks might ask students to apply knowledge they’ve learned, analyze alternative approaches to a subject and evaluate alternatives.
Writing in the disciplines calls on students to communicate professionally with audiences appropriate for their assignment: Students who put together a marketing budget proposal, for example, will write in ways that differ from those describing data collected for a peer-reviewed STEM journal. These assignments often require longer-form writing than the other writing styles.
Why have students write?
Simply put, by having students write as a part of the class curriculum, they will learn more about the material in the class specifically and will leave the university better prepared to communicate and analyze challenges they face outside of their education.
“We’ve seen a wide range of activities that can be used to support writing to engage,” said Palmquist. “For example, a colleague in sociology created an assignment in which students viewed a video on YouTube, wrote a summary of the video that called out salient elements in terms of their previous class discussions, selected one of two conceptual frameworks to apply to the situation presented in the video, briefly applied the conceptual framework and recorded their findings, and then explained their decision to choose one conceptual framework instead of the other. The assignment was designed to be about three pages in length, and students were provided with an outline that they could follow as they planned their document.”
Palmquist recommends several types of writing-to-engage activities, including the following:
- Application of frameworks to texts, media or cases.
- Evaluations of alternative approaches and methods.
- Reflections.
- Critiques.
- Comparisons.
- Proposals.
- Brief reports.
- Progress reports.
Deeper learning
“We know that it takes more time and effort to use writing assignments than it does to use quizzes and tests, but research shows that it produces deeper learning,” noted Palmquist. “It can also play a role in helping students engage with disciplinary content and processes, and it can help them prepare to participate in disciplinary discourse after they graduate.”
During WAC Week, workshop presenters will discuss ways to include writing in courses in ways that range from low stakes, relatively low effort, writing-to-learn activities to more challenging writing-to-engage and writing-in-the disciplines assignments.
For more information about WAC Week and to learn more about Writing Across the Curriculum before the events, visit https://writingcenter.colostate.edu/wac or contact Mike Palmquist at Mike.Palmquist@colostate.edu with questions.
Workshop schedule
Using Writing to Foster Learning, Engagement, and Critical Thinking
Monday, Nov. 6 | 3-4 p.m.
Presenter: Mike Palmquist
Zoom Only – https://zoom.us/j/96979907163 | Meeting ID: 969 7990 7163
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aeihH6NA4F
Engaging Students through Multimodal Writing Assignments
Tuesday, Nov. 7 | 2-3 p.m.
Presenter: Mike Palmquist
Zoom Only – https://zoom.us/j/92693722203 | Meeting ID: 926 9372 2203
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/acHQhLUVIW
Linguistic Justice in Writing Across the Curriculum
Wednesday, Nov. 8 | 9-10 a.m.
Presenters: Kelly Bradbury, Genesea Carter, and Sue Doe
Zoom Only – https://zoom.us/j/98213162129 | Meeting ID: 982 1316 2129
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abfjFcIU1C
Responding to Student Writing Effectively and Efficiently
Wednesday, Nov. 8 | 3-4 p.m.
Presenters: Sue Doe and Mike Palmquist
Zoom Only – https://zoom.us/j/97633845844 | Meeting ID: 976 3384 5844
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/adC1XYIEsT
Using Writing to Support Learning, Critical Thinking, and Inclusion at an Emerging HSI
Thursday, Nov. 9 | 2-3 p.m.
Presenter: Caleb González
TILT 104.
Join Zoom Link – https://zoom.us/j/98725966432 | Meeting ID: 987 2596 6432
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abMFaOOEgh
Using Generative AI to Enhance Student Engagement with Course Content
Friday, Nov. 10 | 10-11 a.m.
Presenters: Tim Amidon and Mike Palmquist
Zoom Only – https://zoom.us/j/98843232913 | Meeting ID: 988 4323 2913
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aeACF4R5dn
