As universities across the Carolinas begin and continue to nourish writing and English programs across their curriculums, the role of the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) becomes an essential player in the development of these schools. QEPs typically involve a multi-faceted proposal for how to improve particular aspects of student learning in a university through specific strategies that aim to achieve an overarching goal. In the case of East Carolina University (ECU), this goal is to “integrate, align, and reinforce writing instruction for students” throughout their entire educational experience. In this post, I will focus on how ECU’s QEP is geared toward and advances students in particular.
The title of the ECU’s QEP, “Write Where You Belong,” is representative of the initiative’s focus on making writing pedagogy more inclusive and applicable to all disciplines—not just English. In an interview with Dr. Wendy Sharer—the QEP Director at ECU and past President of CarolinasWPA—she said that, “Perhaps the unique thing about ECU’s QEP is that we’re mixing several things.”
One major facet of the QEP is the ENGL 2201: Writing About the Disciplines QEP curriculum initiative. This initiative is a synthesis of the collaboration with two other universities. Appalachian State University faculty shared their plan to create a “vertical curriculum,” in which students take a writing-intensive course each year of their undergraduate degree program. George Mason University, in turn, shared the value of their junior year discipline-themed composition courses, such as writing in the social or natural sciences. Together, ECU blended these two ideas to create ENGL 2201, which is to be taken in the sophomore year and offers several different sections of the course that are themed around various disciplines, from health sciences to education. The goal of this program, it seems, is to both ensure the continuity of student writing development and to encourage expanding this development across disciplines.
The ECU QEP reinforces this continuous student development through the implementation of the University Writing Portfolio (UWPort). As first-year students, ECU undergraduates are required to take the ENGL 1100 composition class, where they will create an electronic UWPort. This will serve as a foundation for each time a student takes a course with the university’s “Writing Intensive” (WI) designation. Students will be able to build, their UWPort, uploading writing samples with accompanying “writing self-analysis,” which describes the student’s writing process and explains/assesses the choices they made throughout their composition.
What separates ECU’s UWPort from other university’s electronic portfolios is that, because many ECU students take at least one WI course per year, the end product will have great longitudinal value. “This process is unique in that is makes metacognitive writing (writing in which a writer studies and evaluates his or her own writing) a practice that students engage in across their time at ECU,” says Dr. Sharer. “A good deal of research suggests that metacognition is critical to learning and applying what one has learned to new contexts, so we hope that students will, by the end of their undergraduate degree programs, students will be better able to assess and hence improve their own writing.”
So far, ECU is seeing several direct benefits from the QEP, one of which being the construction and staffing of an actual Writing Center space. The use of this Writing Center has doubled from 2,500 to 5,000 appointments per academic year since before the QEP. This seems to serve as a manifestation of increasing writing awareness in the student body across ECU’s campus. An upcoming post will examine how faculty, too, are benefitting from ECU’s QEP.
Jordan Stanley is currently a junior at Elon University. She is studying English with concentrations in Professional Writing & Rhetoric and Creative Writing, and works both in the Elon Writing Center and as a Writing Fellow.
As beneficial as Quality Enhancement Plans (QEPs) are for the students of a university, they are comparably advantageous for the faculty. In the case of East Carolina University, it is the institution’s goal that the QEP serves as “an opportunity to strengthen the educational experiences of ECU students.” This goal is coming to fruition via the cooperation and integration of faculty into the initiative. In the ECU QEP, faculty are comprehended as valuable assets to the student writing experience across all disciplines—assets that, under the new programs, are essential in working toward creating a uniform standard of writing that will unify the campus under a cohesive understanding for improvement.
One of the main features of East Carolina’s QEP that is geared toward faculty is the Writing Liaisons program. Writing Liaisons are faculty members from undergraduate programs across the campus who facilitate communication between their academic programs and the University Writing and Writing Foundations programs. This involves monthly meetings with QEP leadership, including QEP Director Dr. Sharer, where Liaisons are able to share updates and concerns about the implementation of QEP initiatives. This month, several instructors of ENGL2201 will share their syllabi with the Writing Liaisons so that the Liaisons can (1) gain a better understanding of what students are learning in the course, and (2) bring this information back to their programs so faculty in writing intensive classes across the disciplines can work off of what students know from ENG2201.
The goal of the Writing Liaisons is to ensure that faculty collaborate on ways to ensure that students receive consistent information on writing expectations and strategies. In the previous post on ECU’s QEP, the idea of a “vertical curriculum” was introduced, where students are required to take a writing intensive course for each year of their undergraduate education. “This kind of sharing of information across diverse degree programs at the university is critical if the ‘vertical curriculum’ is going to be most beneficial to students,” said Dr. Sharer of the Liaisons.
The university’s required writing portfolios were also highlighted in the previous post on ECU’s QEP as a unique feature to the initiative. These portfolios, or UWPorts, are not only an essential part to the students’ vertical learning, but also a staple of faculty involvement in the QEP. Although the UWPorts are geared toward student improvement, the QEP addresses that in order for consistent writing to be affective for students, the faculty, too, be able to assess this writing consistently. To achieve this cohesion, Section X of the ECU QEP—which may be found on the East Carolina website—outlines how faculty should approach and evaluate the UWPorts. A staple of Section X reads: “Portfolios can benefit instructors and improve instruction. Seeing students’ responses to course assignments and their perceptions of their own learning can suggest ways that faculty might improve assignments and pedagogy.”
So far, the QEP has contributed noticeably to the cohesiveness of writing pedagogies around the ECU campus. QEP leadership feels that there is a far greater awareness across the university of what students learn in composition courses and how faculty should build on this, and the Writing Liaisons have been integral to this. QEP Director Dr. Sharer said of faculty, “that they are much more aware of what they are looking for in student writing and are much more aware of how to design assignments and writing activities to help students success as writers.”
For how the ECU QEP further focuses on faculty enhancement, please read here.
Jordan Stanley is currently a junior at Elon University. She is studying English with concentrations in Professional Writing & Rhetoric and Creative Writing, and works both in the Elon Writing Center and as a Writing Fellow.
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.
Center for Undergraduate Publishing and Information Design at Elon University
Elon University’s Center for Undergraduate Publishing and Information Design (CUPID) has been an integral part of the university’s English department for the last twelve years and primarily serves students in Elon’s Professional Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) concentration. CUPID is intended to teach students real-world skills while providing them with the resources to practice in a classroom setting. In the CUPID computer lab, students have access to desktop publishing software, as well as video and audio recording equipment. The desks are organized in pods to foster an environment of collaboration.
Each semester, three Professional Writing students are chosen to be CUPID Associates. The associates, picked based on their breadth of courses in the PWR concentration and work outside of the classroom, organize workshops for the wider campus community and assist students with technological resources available through the CUPID lab. Recent workshops have taught students how to create a personal logo, how to use the website Digication to perfect their portfolios, and how to use hidden tools in Microsoft Word.
Students can become CUPID Associates only after they have taken the CUPID Studio course, which is a graduation requirement for students completing the PWR major. The PWR curriculum intends to bridge traditional liberal arts study with real-world application, and the CUPID course is one way PWR helps students stretch their knowledge and skills in a professional context.
CUPID Associates Rachel Lewis (foreground) and Dannie Cooper (background)
The CUPID Studio course begins with lessons about how to brand one’s self, tailor a resume, and start developing a portfolio. Rachel Lewis, a PWR student who works as a CUPID Associate, appreciated the opportunity CUPID Studio gave her to develop her professional identity: “It went beyond defining rhetoric and professional writing to applying those concepts to our identities. I ended the course with the ability to explain myself as a student, put experiences behind my skills, and a solid start to a resume.”
After spending time developing students’ professional identities, the CUPID course integrates client work to give students a hands-on opportunity to work in a professional environment. CUPID Studio, like many courses in Elon’s PWR concentration, focuses on service learning. The class often partners with local non-profits and university programs to create promotional materials, plan social media campaigns, and update existing organization documents. This semester, CUPID students are creating advertising materials for the university Writing Center and the Multimedia Authoring minor, writing a new edition of the English department’s newsletter The Back Page, and updating the website for Elon’s Professional Writing Studies minor. Past service learning partners include The Conservators’ Center, which rescues threatened animal species, and Family Abuse Services, a non-profit that works for domestic violence prevention in Alamance County. Through these projects, students of the CUPID course get practice writing and editing copy, using design software, communicating professionally with clients, and developing marketing strategies.
Dannie Cooper, a junior English major and current CUPID associate, valued the chance to work with clients in a real-world situation. “CUPID Studio taught me that working with clients challenges you to approach projects in a new way,” she says. “Our client was very set on the format of one document and it required my group to change the way in which we used the CUPID technologies in order to reach this goal. It was a rewarding experience to go through and I learned how to approach projects creatively and be open to new ideas.”
CUPID Workshop on CSS and Digication
CUPID also runs a collaborative blog to show the Elon community what’s going on writing-wise on campus. The three associates are regular contributors to and maintainers of the blog, but all students taking a CUPID course are expected to write posts about their experiences working on client projects and other class activities. Previous blog topics have included undergraduate research projects, visual rhetoric, and tips for resume design.
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.
LANG 120 students debating on UNC Asheville’s quad the legitimacy of graffiti as public art with social / political / activist purpose.
UNC Asheville’s writing program teaches approximately 676 students a year in our first year writing course (LANG 120). Through this course, we engage roughly 75% of the student body at some point during their tenure at our liberal arts university. We build our courses around a common set of student learning objectives focused on developing critical and creative thinking abilities, conducting and using academic research productively, building information literacy, and constructing new knowledge by writing for a variety of rhetorical situations. Our teaching faculty hold a wide range of graduate degrees (including MFAs, professional writers, theologians, rhetoricians, compositionists, and literature specialists), which results in a breadth of approaches to achieving the aims of LANG 120, each section reflecting unique learning experiences, themes, and rhetorical projects.
Dr. Wray’s LANG 120 students study power and race privilege through the lens of visibility and representation by interacting with Clarissa Sligh’s “Reading Dick and Jane” exhibit in an on-campus art gallery.
Cynn Chadwick, for example, relies heavily on a workshop model of teaching, holding thirty-minute conferences with individual students multiple times during the semester in order to work more intimately on craft and knowledge-formation. She builds group-based projects into her class in several ways. First, she asks students to read and study the rhetorical conventions of comics before they collaboratively create a comic to be presented to class. Additionally, Chadwick develops research labs that involve students meeting together in the library to work on collecting, annotating, and writing bibliographies. Students then produce a photo narrative project where they share their research findings during final exams.
Brian Graves emphasizes a “rhetorical perspective” in his LANG 120 courses. A central question that drives the course readings, discussions, activities, and projects is: How might critical attention to language—in context, as a toolbox of choices, and as an element of what and how we think—help us to participate more effectively, ethically, and meaningfully in our public discourse? To this end, Graves crafts projects that allow students to engage in genuine inquiry, dealing with real questions that matter to them. Students write personal narratives (focused on themselves as writers and learners) and rhetorical analyses of a public discourse text. Graves works to integrate attention to style (with the hope that playing with ways of saying things can make the writing class more pleasurable), critical thinking (as a reflective investigation of students’ and their audience’s assumptions), and contemplativepractices (as a means of developing students’ capacities for listening, attention, and focus).
Dee James offers a portfolio-based class designed to help writers develop whatever skills they bring to the classroom. Her class focuses on searching for and developing ideas to write about and on revision as a means of sharpening and clarifying communication. This means students write a lot: in almost every class students write informally for the first ten minutes; they follow a blog of their choice and share responses to that blog; and they do a good bit of reflective and analytical writing. In addition, formal assignments exist, including annotated bibliographies and academic research papers coupled with research narratives that blend narrative techniques with research. In short, students write a variety of pieces for an array of communication situations, they get as much feedback as possible, and then revise, revise, revise. At mid-term and at the end of the course, students select pieces that demonstrate their development as writers according to the Student Learning Outcomes the program has articulated as well as articulate the processes that have helped them achieve their writing goals.
Anne Jansen organizes her LANG 120 course around the theme of Monsters (specifically zombies and vampires). This semester, she is teaching it as a film studies course where they look at contemporary films and talk about monsters as representations of cultural anxieties. Course texts include films, a writing guide (They Say, I Say), critical essays, and some foundational texts on how to write about and analyze films. Students complete an annotated bibliography, a research proposal, two formal academic essays (one shorter, one longer and requiring library research), and a less formal presentation on the role of writing or monsters (their choice) in contemporary life (they’re required to conduct interviews and rehearse their presentations, ultimately presenting to their classmates). Jansen tries to emphasize the idea that writing is not an act that is / should be / has to be completed in isolation, but is instead about engaging in a “conversation” with peers, scholars, and “regular” people. She believes the success of her class rests on the relevance of the theme and texts to students’ everyday lives as well as the idea that looking at movies can be an exercise in critical thinking. Also, who doesn’t want to talk about monsters?
Jessica Pisano builds service-learning experiences into her courses, focusing in a most explicit way on community engagement. Students choose a topic that they are passionate about as the focus of their writing, research, and service for the semester. Cultivating and sustaining relationships with a variety of community partners is a time-intensive endeavor, but such labor ensures that the students’ required twenty hours of service during the semester is equally productive for community partners and for students as they actively develop their writing, research, and critical thinking skills.
Community partners propose service-learning projects to Ms. Pisano’s LANG 120 students at the beginning of each semester so that students can choose a learning experience that best fits with their research interests.
Erica Abrams-Locklear aims to teach students how to do good research and to communicate what they have learned through writing. She encourages students to select paths of inquiry that interest them and to continually revise their research questions as they gather new information about their topics. Students learn how to search catalogs and databases, as well as the ins and outs of discipline-specific citation methods. She assigns prompts that require students to put their sources in conversation with one another since doing so helps students organize what can seem like disparate information when writing research papers.
Amanda Wray’s LANG 120 curriculum asks students to invest in their lived experiences as a research tool and place for inquiry and critical thinking. Students engage in regular mindfulness practices throughout the semester, presenting to the class a monthly zine of reflection about their experiences. Formal assignments include a rhetorical analysis of a text, place, or visual that the student has encountered as a public discourse and a written research-based essay on a topic of their choice (with a proposal and annotated bibliography), which is repurposed into a multi-modal public argument for the university community.
UNC Asheville LANG 120 students
UNC Asheville LANG 120 students
Amanda Wray is an Assistant Professor at University of North Carolina – Asheville. She earned her PhD in Rhetoric, Composition and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Her research interests involve oral history, feminism, public scholarship, rhetorical practices of consciousness, visual rhetoric, professional writing, and creative nonfiction. She serves as faculty advisor for Roc(ky) the Mic Slam Poetry Organization and the Feminist Collective at UNCA, which is a student organization open to any student interested in equality, social activism, and/or feminist networking. She also works regularly with Undergraduate Research students conducting ethnographic, community-based, and/or activist-based research.
