Projects

This multi-year study documents how faculty and students across disciplines use classrooms designed for “active learning” with mobile furniture, writable walls, multiple projectors, and wi-fi. Drawing on survey data, interviews, observations, and classroom aerial photography, it uses quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate faculty and student perceptions of and learning activities in active learning classrooms, speaking to concerns across the university including facilities, registration, faculty development, and pedagogy.

While a wealth of scholarship theorizes collaboration and advocates for specific collaborative pedagogies, writing studies has yet to address the ways in which privilege tied to race, gender, class, and other identity characteristics replicates itself within student groups by shaping the responsibilities individual group members assume, thereby affecting students’ opportunities for learning. Such concerns especially pressing where civically- and professionally- valuable 21st-century digital literacies are concerned. This project uses theories of cultural capital and the participation gap to 1) analyze role uptake in case studies of diverse student composing groups and 2) suggest ways to expand writing studies’ current use of metacognition to address such inequities.

This study documents a 3-year interdisciplinary writing initiative (the SWiRL Initiative) coordinated through the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) and National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to build a writing in the disciplines (WID) program based on writing studies’ fundamental writing practices, high impact curricula, and explicit threshold concepts. It focuses on how stakeholders from five university units (political science, civil engineering, university library, writing program, and university assessment office) evaluate shared university writing culture, information literacy efforts, and critical thinking competencies to develop administrative and pedagogical mechanisms that respond to national and local assessment data in their shared WID program.