Spring 2010 Brown Bag Schedule

Brown Bags are held from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm at Conley House.

They offer an excellent opportunity for faculty and students to hear about issues important to writing across the disciplines.

For Spring 2010, the CWP will host the following Brown Bags:

February 10

Arthur Mehrhoff, Museum of Art and Archeology
“Pride of Place and Ekphrasis: Remembering Campus Heritage”

This presentation will introduce participants to the university’s Pride of Place Initiative. The purpose of the Pride of Place Initiative is to raise awareness and appreciation of our extraordinary campus heritage as a vital resource for education and community renewal. After providing an overview of Pride of Place, the presentation will briefly review the Museum of Art & Archaeology’s Ekphrasis program and explain how it offers MU students and faculty a way to deepen Pride of Place through creative written responses to campus landmarks and historic sites.

February 24

Stephen Lombardo, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
“Teaching Technical Writing in a Lab Course in Chemical Engineering”

Techniques are presented for improving the technical writing of chemical engineering students enrolled in an undergraduate laboratory course.  The principles of writing covered are adopted from the book, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams:  General examples of writing are taken from this book and then are recast into examples closer to the technical writing currently being practiced by the students as they prepare their lab reports.

March 10

Rose-Marie Muzika, Department of Forestry
“Themes in Forest Ecology”

In upper division science courses, there is a need to enhance scientific literacy while capturing greater depth in the discipline. This challenge is particularly acute in disciplines that find themselves featured in the popular press, e.g., the environment, medicine, human health. Issues related to the discipline of forest ecology appear daily in newspapers, online media, and books. For example, many of the critical global environmental questions directly relate to forest ecosystems, although the connection often goes unacknowledged. Additionally, issues of forest practice and policy enter into public discourse and generate considerable debate. Furthermore, most graduates of Forestry programs eventually find their professional niche as practitioners, or natural resource specialists with responsibilities that include public interaction. Using themes in ecology in writing intensive courses provides opportunities for depth, creativity and gaining competence in communication with a non-scientific audience. The use of themes in Forest Ecology emphasizes understanding, interpreting and communicating. Common themes in Forest Ecology classes (Forestry 4320 and Forestry 2543) in recent years include: ecosystem stability, disturbance, identifying the past through the present, interpreting forest history through varied sources. Example corresponding assignments have taken the form of examining art to understand forests, creating an idealized forest ecosystem, identifying ghosts in the forest, both physically (in the field) and conceptually.
March 24

Cynthia Reeser, Department of Human Development and Family Studies
“Telling the Human Development Story”

Sophomore-level survey courses can be daunting to students because of the amount of foundational material that must be covered. This is even more true when the course is extraordinarily large. For HDFS 2400, “extraordinarily large” means 300+ students from over 30 majors attending 29 weekly labs taught by a team of 13 Graduate Teaching Assistants. The issue was how to engage students in the study of theories addressing development across the whole of the human lifespan. The answer was “The Amazing Case of ___”.

This assignment uses narrative in a case history of a fictitious person at three different stages in that person’s life, i.e., from birth to age 14 (Part 1), from age 15 to emerging adulthood at age 25 (Part 2), and contemporaneously in a synthesized version of a person between the ages of 50 to 70 (”The Full Story”). Each student creates a fictitious person as a vehicle for applying human development theories germane to various stages of life and the developmental experiences likely to be encountered. The assignment encourages creativity within bounds and provides an alternative to the standard academic writing experienced in the majority of students’ courses. Results reflect an expansion of critical thinking while demonstrating a deeper understanding of the role of human development theory in explaining how we become who we are.

April 7

Chip Callahan, Department of Religion
“Mixing it Up: Using a Variety of Different Types Writing Assignments In Your Course”

Many courses only assign one or two types of writing. Yet different forms of writing teach different things, and teach them differently. This presentation will explore the use of multiple types of writing assignments in a single course, each serving specific purposes for teaching course content. It will focus on the example of Religious Studies 4130: Haunting and Healing, which assigns four unique forms of writing, and consider how such assignments (and others) might be modeled for other courses.

April 14

Nancy West, Department of English

Plagiarism and Education

This recent article from InsideHigherEd.com argues that a tutorial on plagiarism does a better job of teaching students about plagiarism than the usage of plagiarism detection software. The conclusion is an obvious one: educate your students first regarding why we cite. But the article’s point does not go far enough. Citation practices are institutional practices. Most students do not encounter citation when they read outside of the university (newspaper articles, novels, magazine stories, and websites, for instance,  likely will not have citations), and thus the practice is mostly a foreign one. The academy invented citation for a number of reasons. If we want students to cite properly, we need to teach the rationale and logic behind citation and not rely on detection software which does little to nothing regarding such teaching. We cite to:

• Give credit its due (this is the most obvious reason)
• Provide a service to the reader (if you want to read where I got this idea from, here is the citation)
• Provide context (the reason I’m discussing this issue is because of how these other readings discuss the issue)
• Put ourselves into that context (let me show you where my thinking comes from and how I am adding to the conversation already occurring)
• Demonstrate how our research has informed our thinking

Citation, in other words, is not an afterthought. It is part of the writing itself. We do not cite to:

• Merely paraphrase someone else’s words
• Reconfirm an established point without any new information added
• Point out some texts after we have finished our writing

Before you turn to SafeAssign or any other detection software, you should ask yourself how you cover this information in class. If you are not covering this information, you might consider it as your starting point. After the fact teaching – after you show a student incorrect citations found via detection software – are extremely time consuming and counterproductive. Spending one class period discussing why we cite will be far more productive in the long run.

Writing@CSU

The Campus Writing Program encourages faculty to use the CWP wiki for WI courses. Wikis provide new opportunities for teaching writing across the disciplines. We encourage faculty, as well, to help us build new types of online teaching spaces that meet department needs.

We also recognize excellent options available elsewhere. Colorado State University’s Writing@CSU is one such space. Writing@CSU offers a suite of writing spaces where you can set up your courses. Best of all, it is free.

Custom Orthotics

I want to draw Writing Intensive faculty’s attention to Richard Holeton’s video “Custom Orthotics” in the new issue of Kairos. The author narrates a very personal story with graphs, bullet points, charts, and images. The video suggests how professional and business communicative writing strategies can be used for narrative writing. A PowerPoint presentation, by itself, feels limiting when trying to communicate a complex point. Yet Holeton is able to take the basic elements of a presentation device like PowerPoint and use them to tell a complex story.

Making Science Writing Accessible

Chad Orzel describes how he makes science understandable through two non-scientific ways of writing: dialog and narrative. His blog, Uncertain Principles, often features discussions with his dog on technical matters regarding physics.  The imaginary discussions are meant to explain complex ideas. Orzel’s point is one we should recognize as relevant for some WI assignments: Can students make complicated, disciplinary language readable by a non-disciplinary audience? Because the weblog has the potential for widespread dissemination, he chooses it as his medium. Thus, in addition to the exercise regarding complex ideas and writing, Orzel offers a lesson in audience awareness. The blog always has the potential to be read by a widespread audience; writers don’t work in isolation.

The New York Times on Critical Thinking

While the recent NY Times article on critical thinking and business schools may feel old hat to many of us, it does point to both the limits and promise of critical thinking across the curriculum. The article’s focus might be found here:

Learning how to think critically — how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives — has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr. Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.”

Few people in the business world would likely argue that they haven’t been imaginatively framing questions and considering multiple perspectives for some time. Still, as teachers of writing, we can push the concept slightly further – what perspectives would we count as “multiple” in a classroom situation? The cultural perspective is an obvious addition. But we should also consider the various forms of persuasion we encounter (in advertising, packaging, affective gestures, etc), we should consider the role popular culture plays in thinking, we should draw from what we have expertise knowledge in, we should understand the ways new media affect notions of communication, we should consider the role space plays in writing, and so on.  And the same is true for non-business school courses. The liberal arts don’t need to denounce the business school; the business school doesn’t need to consider the liberal arts as irrelevant. In other words, any writing situation – whether in business school, the liberal arts, or elsewhere in the curriculum should be exploring a networked approach (which a multi-perspective critical thinking might be) rather than a narrow taxonomic focus of one’s disciplinary knowledge (which, in reality, is never such a narrow focus). Critical thinking often is confused by teachers as being a process of “opening up” students’ eyes to various forces that are at play in a communicative act. A better approach would be to broaden writers’ contact with multiple perspectives, experiences, and disciplinary thinking as each might inform one’s own area of study. In a writing course, this would mean changing our approach to assignment design.

In the next issue of the CWP’s newsletter,  e-WAC, we will have a more detailed description of what such designs might encompass.