member profile – Page 2 – Carolinas Writing Program Administrators

Learning to be Flexible: North Carolina State University’s Flexible Classroom

by Sarah Paterson

The word “flexible” brings a few things to mind. Yoga. Cirque du Soleil performers. Rubber bands. Rarely does “flexible” inspire thoughts of higher education. But NC State professor Susan Miller-Cochran and former NC State doctoral candidate Dana Gierdowski (now Visiting Senior Program Coordinator at Elon University) have designed and researched what they call the “flexible classroom,” which allows professors and students to restructure a classroom to fit different innovative day-to-day needs.

Gierdowski’s experiences as a teacher inspired her interest in classroom design research. For one first-year writing class, Gierdowski and her students were confined to a cramped, windowless, technology-free basement room. “I found that space really limiting in the types of activities I could do with my students, and I had to get really creative to try to overcome the cramped and sparse quarters,” she says. “Being in that room made me wonder if my students’ learning was affected as much as my teaching was.”

With this question in mind, Gierdowski and Miller-Cochran endeavored to create a space that made pedagogical variety possible. The flexible classroom includes many different technologies, like LCD screens, mobile whiteboards, and movable desks and ergonomic chairs. These technologies are meant to encourage students and faculty to use their spaces to their advantage and to break up the tradition of “lecture/transmission of knowledge” styles of teaching in university settings.

Miller-Cochran, who has taught courses in the flexible classrooms, has found that having different mobile and interactive technologies available affected her daily lesson plans. “The room was a variable in each lesson, and I found that if I didn’t consciously consider how to configure the room, we defaulted to a pod design that resembled the design of most of our fixed classrooms,” Miller-Cochran says. “I would say I consciously used the flexibility of the classroom about fifty percent of the time (one lesson learned was that I don’t have to do something remarkably innovative every single day).” Some of her more successful uses of the flexible classroom included group peer review using the LCD screens and “thesis gallery walks” where students would write thesis statements on the whiteboards and walk around to comment on what their peers had written.

In addition to the new lesson plan options that a flexible classroom provides professors, teachers that have worked in the classrooms have found that they shape the ways they teach in more traditional settings. “A number of them have commented that teaching in the flex room has helped them think about ways to ‘hack’ more traditional teaching spaces to make them work for more active, engaged pedagogies,” says Gierdowski, “and that’s really exciting to me.”

The flexible classroom has more than pedagogical benefits for professors. In surveys conducted by Gierdowski and Miller-Cochran, students reported that they felt a flexible classroom had a positive impact on their learning. These students also noted that the physical comfort they feel in a “flex” classroom helps them to pay attention and participate more.

Miller-Cochran and Gierdowski’s future research on the flexible classroom includes studies of its financial sustainability and experiences of diverse/ESL students in the classroom. They are also in the process of publishing an article about an ethnographic conceptual mapping method they use to study student perceptions of the classroom.

Sarah Paterson is an English major at Elon University with a concentration in Professional Writing and Rhetoric. She is completing an undergraduate thesis about multicultural rhetoric in adolescent slam poetry.

Patrick Bahls: Promoting Student Writing in the Quantitative Disciplines

by Sarah Paterson

In Dr. Patrick Bahls’s introductory calculus courses at UNC-Asheville, it is not unusual to see his students on trial. In addition to filling out pages of problem sets, Bahls’s students have the opportunity to live and write mathematics history as they perform a mock trial of the co-creators of calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.

While this is far from an ordinary mathematics assignment, Bahls says, “the students get into that kind of assignment because it’s fun. They get to use aspects of their creative side that they wouldn’t ordinarily access in a math class, an alternative form of expression. Getting them to write in a more conversational style can get them to really understand the ideas.”

Though Bahls teaches a range of mathematics courses at UNC-A, from precalculus to senior mathematics seminars, much of his class curriculum centers on teaching writing. Writing assignments, even in math, can help students to understand course content while giving them necessary skills they will need in their future careers. “No matter what a student’s major is, they’ll have to do some sort of written communication,” Bahls says, “whether it’s consulting work or lab work or academic study. They’ll have to communicate their ideas.”

Stereotypically, mathematics and other STEM students reject the idea that they need to learn to write in addition to learning about the specifics of their disciplines. However, Bahls has found ways around this resistance. “I am able to counter the resistance if I’m able to show students that writing really is helpful,” Bahls says. “Writing needs to be integral, not an add-on. If it’s pitched as an add-on, it’s definitely not something that gets internalized and valued. When you use writing in authentic situations, students will buy it, in that case.” He does this primarily by assigning “low-stakes” writing assignments that allow students to work through difficult ideas in conversational ways, making the concepts accessible and encouraging students to ask questions when they have them.

Faculty, Bahls says, are just as resistant to give writing assignments as mathematics students are to do them. Professors in the STEM fields often reject the idea of incorporating more writing into their curricula because they believe that they do not have the time to craft and grade writing assignments, or because they believe they are unqualified to teach it. “Not only are they not unprepared to teach writing,” Bahls says, “but they are the ideal person to teach writing in their discipline. Nobody knows better about writing in [mathematics] than a mathematician.”

Bahls recently published Student Writing in the Quantitative Disciplines, which he describes as a resource manual for faculty who want to teach writing in the STEM fields. His book responds to what he saw as a gap in educational literature. Typically, books about writing for STEM at the college level take one of two approaches: a disciplinary approach, which narrowly focuses on the products of writing in any given field, or a rhetorical/technical writing approach, which teaches writing but often ignores or only barely touches on the more specific needs of STEM. Bahls wanted his book to do both: teach necessary writing skills to college students, but acknowledge the real-world work of STEM disciplines. The book and his seminars on the subject have been well received at universities nationwide.

Bridging the gap between the STEM fields and the humanities, Bahls says, is important not only for preparing students for the workforce, but also for the world. “I think we do a disservice to our students and our society when we neglect the humanities,” he says. “Look at hiring practices, look at employers – they’re not just looking for technical skills. They’re looking for people with creativity and problem solving skills. Folks who eschew things like writing in their disciplines are doing everyone a disservice.”

Member Profile: Tony Atkins – WPA and Undergraduate Research Mentor

by Sarah Paterson

Dr. Anthony Atkins is an associate professor of English at UNC-Wilmington and the current president of CarolinasWPA. His work in writing program administration began while he was working on a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition at Ball State University, when he served as a graduate assistant for their writing program, and eventually ran a writing center and a “developmental” writing program. From 2007 to 2012, he was the Composition Coordinator at UNC-W and oversaw the university’s required two-course composition program. Currently, he specializes in integrating technologies, applied learning, curriculum development, and professional development, and involving undergraduate students in research projects.

Tony Atkins with Susan Miller-Cochran at the 2014 CarolinasWPA event at CCCC.

Research, he says, can teach English students vital skills that will help them later in life. Through working on a research project, students gain an understanding of style guides, research designs and methodologies, as well as how to formulate good questions and present data in both qualitative and quantitative ways. “Paramount to being successful in any field or occupation is the ability to understand data, but even more importantly to write about and communicate data to others,” Atkins said. “Cultivating undergraduate research helps students further understand the nature of argument and persuasion and illustrates that writers and communicators have the power to control the display and interpretation of types of data, statistics, and arguments.”

According to Atkins, Honors students at UNC-W who work on undergraduate projects are doing graduate-level work. Students completing research in Wilmington’s professional writing and rhetoric/composition programs “often become IRB certified, develop (and revise) research questions, determine the best method and methodology [for their projects], and often they also learn about technologies that can help them collect, distribute, and display data and results.”

Atkins is currently working on research projects with two ENG Honors students – one with senior Tabitha Shiflett on “The Rhetoric of Fashion” which includes a rhetorical analysis of Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines, and one with student Aaron Weekes, whose research about Gorgias and Nietzche he presented at the CarolinasWPA retreat last fall. With these projects, Shiflett and Weekes have been able to attend conferences, get involved with events for non-profit organizations, and win grants from UNC-W for conducting research.

There are some struggles to working on research with undergraduate students. “Undergraduates sometimes have a notion about what they want to do (or research) and when it does not quite work out the way they think it will, they sometimes become ‘frozen,’” Atkins says. Instead, undergraduates should be taught about research more broadly and have an open mind about what kinds of questions, methodologies, and styles they can use to conduct research, because “when things do not work out the way one thinks they will during a research project, that is often the place to begin.” Students should keep in mind that “one can research almost anything imaginable” and be open to their research going in unexpected – and compelling – directions.

Atkins notes that many professors are hesitant to engage students in undergraduate research projects due to a common lack of “tangible rewards” offered to university faculty for this type of teaching. He suggests an alternative. “I think that if universities recognized faculty who take time to teach undergraduates how to conduct research, publish research with them, or attend/present at conferences with them that it would be much more likely that university professors would involve undergraduates in their research,” he said.

Fortunately for Atkins, UNC-W encourages students to pursue research projects and often provides technology, equipment, travel funds, and even stipends for undergraduates doing research work. UNC-W also hosts ceremonies every fall and spring to celebrate student work. Additionally, they recognize faculty who take on a mentorship role in undergraduate research. “I can say, too, that this part of the job is definitely the most rewarding and the most fun I have every year,” Atkins says.