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





