ByGeorge!

Feb. 4, 2004

The Voyage of UW20

The University Launches First Phase in Its Ambitious Writing Program as Part of the Strategic Initiative

By Matthew Nehmer

Buried in a nondescript Monroe Hall classroom overlooking Kogan Plaza on an early December day sit 11 freshmen finishing their first semester on campus. At first glance all seems very ordinary — an overhead projector displays outlines, a student nurses a half-empty Cherry Coke bottle, as usual nobody sits in the front row — but in a larger context the class represents something far more significant. These students are taking part in the inaugural stages of an endeavor that aspires to transform the way undergraduates are taught writing at GW.

“One of the attractions of this position as dean, when I was first considering it, was that the remaking of the writing program was in the works,” said Columbian College of Arts and Sciences Dean William Frawley. “I think this is one of the efforts at GW, which, when we work it through and have it running, will make GW a model school.”

The dean is referring to the new UW20 freshman writing class and a larger initiative to charter a University Writing Program. Once installed, this component of the University’s strategic plan will feature consistent writing requirements for all GW undergraduates and empirical data on student performance with the expectation that students will become better writers and more engaged in their education.

The first-year students in that Monroe Hall classroom were among 300 randomly selected pioneers from the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and Elliott School of International Affairs to enroll in one of 13 UW20 classes offered last semester. Another 400 students are taking UW20 courses this semester. These 700 students, one-third of the class of 2007, represent phase one of a multi-year project. Next year, two-thirds of the incoming class, or approximately 1,600 freshmen from all the schools, will take one of the four-credit courses. By 2005, all incoming undergraduate students will be enrolled.

According to Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald R. Lehman, all students enrolled now must finish the program. Once fully implemented, all GW undergraduates will be required to take this three-year journey.

“There’s no opting out,” said Lehman. “It doesn’t matter if you have AP English or already published five books, you still do it,” he said jokingly.

Lehman emphasized the importance of all undergraduates having a rigorous base of writing experiences prior to entering their sophomore year, where writing and communicating occurs in different venues. He said one learns how to write throughout their educational endeavors and careers.

In the previous writing program, different sections produced different volumes of writing.

Now, broader guidelines for outcome and performance have been developed, while preserving instructors’ flexibility in choosing topics and assignments. A fixed number of pages will be expected from students, as well as guidelines and expectations for revision (sometimes called “iterative writing”). This approach features a writing pedagogy where the repetitive cycle of submission, critique and revision is emphasized. According to Cheryl Beil, executive director for academic planning and assessment, such schools as Princeton, Cornell and Duke have similar writing-intensive programs in place.

“Previously, you could go through GW and not have to write past your freshman year,” Beil said. “The whole point is to really engage students. Research shows that writing is one of the ways that students become more engaged in education. There is a sharp increase in the number of hours studying when linked to writing.”
Meanwhile, because UW20 is a different approach to composition, and is University-wide, a new team of faculty had to be assembled from the ground up.

Building the Team
“We want people who understand writing and who are committed to intensive writing instruction for freshmen,” said Frawley on the faculty search. “In our search last year and in the one currently under way, we are looking for people who can work together as a team, who appreciate the broader context of writing across higher education and who understand the role of a freshman course in a larger writing program. Interestingly enough, the best credentials for such faculty are not only in the usual fields that feed composition programs — rhetoric and literature. Historians, philosophers and engineers often are excellent writing teachers. This variety is a lesson that Duke has learned very well, and we have shamelessly appropriated their wonderful insight.”

A writing program task force, co-chaired by Lehman and Frawley, recruited Phyllis Ryder and Mark Mullen, assistant professors of English, last March and charged them with forming a search committee and having the new faculty in place by the beginning of the fall semester.

“It was a very time-crunched search,” recalled Ryder. “We were looking for people who would be helpful in getting this thing off the ground.”

“Obviously we were looking for people who were already experienced teachers,” added Mullen. “We were looking for people who came out of different teaching and writing backgrounds. We have to make these courses intellectually demanding. One of the things we always thought would be important was if you’re going to have courses that are going to speak to the different interests of the student body, you want to have faculty members coming from different disciplines.”

By the end of May, the first hires were in place and a series of summer workshops were planned. According to the faculty, the two weeks they spent together over the summer generated a sense of camaraderie that continues today.

“It was our chance to help form the program,” said Robbin Zeff, assistant professor of writing, who was one of the new hires. “It really helped produce a great team.”

Faculty members meet regularly, attend each other’s classes, circulate assignments and put their teaching philosophies up for question, all in an attempt to learn from each other.

“The faculty is very diverse,” said Zeff, “which is good because there isn’t just one way to teach writing. Faculty members who come from different perspectives allow us to cross pollinate.”

Together they fashioned 13 unique themes that shape the program’s first batch of courses. Examples include “Fear Factor: The Culture of Fear in America,” taught by Jessica O’Hara, another new member of the faculty.

“I chose my topic because it’s something that would engage students, give shape to the course but also in such a way that they’ll look at diversity of genres,” said O’Hara. “We’re trying to have a captivating list of course themes.”

O’Hara’s students were even able to discuss the theme with filmmaker Michael Moore, who was on campus last fall to appear on CNN’s “Crossfire.” Moore’s latest documentary film, “Bowling for Columbine,” was required viewing in O’Hara’s class as it examined contributing factors behind America’s violent society.

“He was amazed that there was a course on this topic,” O’Hara said. “They sort of informed Michael Moore about how to theorize a culture of fear in a way that he didn’t expect.”

Other theme classes include Abby Wilkerson’s “He-Men, Girly Girls, Tomboys and Sissies: Writing the Gendered Body”; Cayo Gamber’s “War and Memory in the Twentieth Century”; and Ryder’s class, “Sit in! Strike! Take it to the Street!: The Rhetoric of Social Protest.”

“The idea is that students have a greater sense of accountability for how they use their material because they are aware that everyone else in the class knows this stuff,” said Ryder. “It puts them in the role of scholar/researcher in a way that doesn’t necessarily happen if everyone is doing their own topic.”

One Semester Down
Now with one semester in the books, faculty members, administrators and students seem pleased with the progress.

“Coming out of high school I thought I was a pretty good writer until I got to college,” said Nathan Imperiale, a freshman UW20 student who took the course “You’ve Got Mail, The Social Side of Information Technology.” “The class gave me a better grounding in how to do research and better structure my writing. It’s helped me with a political science research paper in another class.”

For at least the first semester, UW20’s new format of students taking one four-credit course instead of a pair of three-credit writing classes has proved popular with the faculty, as has the new approach of capping enrollment to 15 students per class.

“From my own experiences this has made a huge difference,” said Mullen, who is in his fourth year at GW. “The one-on-one time has gone up. It’s given me the opportunity to customize the education, try different teaching techniques, to see where the class is as a whole.”

Meanwhile, the program continues to undergo extensive evaluations. Starting on the first day of class, again at mid-semester and once more at the end of the term, student progress is assessed and feedback collected. This process will continue each semester for the next several years.

The Next Step
In the interim, administrators and faculty are working to execute phase two of the project. Starting this fall, the 700 freshmen who took UW20 will begin the Writing in the Discipline (WID) component by taking writing-intensive courses in their field of study. Thirty-eight sophomore-level, three-credit classes are being developed. From there, these students will take the second and final WID course in their junior year. Like UW20, these classes will ask students to produce a fixed, targeted page-count of finished products using the iterative writing guidelines.

Meanwhile, an administrative structure is being expanded to accommodate the larger volume of students taking the UW20 and WID classes, which includes an executive director of the University Writing Program, director of freshman writing, director of WID and director of the Writing Center. This group will report to Frawley. A search is now underway to fill the executive director position. The team is expected to be in place by July 1. In addition, five more full-time faculty members are being hired to teach this fall’s expanded lineup of UW20 classes. Once the program gets rolling at full capacity, there will be roughly 4,800 undergraduates taking either UW20 or WID courses.

“It will be another four years before the writing program is fully implemented,” Lehman said. “If it achieves its goal, we shall have several indicators: number one, our students will be saying that they know how to write; number two, there will be evidence from the marketplace, through feedback to us, they really do know how to write; third, that as a consequence of this experience they will convey that they have been academically challenged; and fourth, that they really feel engaged in their education. It’s exciting, it just takes time.”

Looking back at the first stage of this endeavor, UW20, Frawley expressed satisfaction with its evolution.

“I believe we have established UW20 as an independent idea with its own community and its own sense of future and purpose,” Frawley said. “Two things that we hoped to produce as outcomes early on in the process were the development of an effective writing-intensive, closely-mentored experience in the freshman year and the establishment of an independent, pedagogically-aware, University-wide writing group. Both have been implemented.”


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