by Jessica Alfaqih, WIC GTA

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Jessica Alfaqih: Can you start off by telling us what a journal club is?

Shawn Massoni: Basically, there is a presenter for the week who picks a primary research article that they will present to the group. They read an article, digest it, and communicate their findings in a concise and knowledgeable way to their audience.

JA: How did you get started with journal clubs?

SM: In the microbiology lab in which I was working as an undergrad, all students–graduate students, post-docs, and even undergrads–had to participate in journal clubs. It’s great preparation for teaching because, essentially, you have to teach the class. In my case, the “class” were rooms full of established researchers! It was the school of hard knocks.

Being in the lab was hard because you weren’t in a safe space, necessarily.

We had a big screen on the wall and the other side would pop up in the conference room, full of professors.

There weren’t any students on the other side; this was just the way lab professors got together and had intellectual jam sessions over papers that were of specific interest to our particular work.

As a student in the lab, you were expected to present with the other professors, and you would get a credit for it.

In that scenario, there were medical school professors and other heavy hitters there waiting for you to present a document that they completely understand and will punch holes in it–and you–without compunction.

That was tricky, but that’s really what got me into it.

JA: How does the way you teach journal clubs now compare to your experience as an undergrad?

SM: When I started out you had to sink or swim.

I don’t want to do that to my students, but I do want to expose them to the literature. If you’re getting into this field in any way, shape, or form–from graduate school to working in a clinic or going on to medical school–it’s essential that you see what real-world science is all about.

Every student presents on one paper and that’s the way the class runs.

I give a mini lecture. They have writing prompts, occasionally, during a lecture in which they do their informal writing in a physical journal.

Sometimes those low stakes assignments are where students feel that they can be more engaged and committed because the stakes are lower.

Once they can informally wrap their heads around the science, they are more prepared for taking a deep dive into the material they have to present.

JA: How did you get started with Journal Clubs at OSU?

SM: I inherited BHS 323, Microbial Influences on Human Health, from a professor who is now at Lane.

Much of the writing had really gone out of it over the years and I worked to get the WIC component back in it.

Informal writing helps students get used to communicating to different audiences, so I brought that back in with journaling and would lecture very briefly so that we could have more of a two-way discussion on a particular topic. We would also have a particular reading to discuss for that day, so in a way my classes are also reading intensives, without textbooks.

For those of us in the science disciplines, courses are mostly taught out of textbooks, which are very generalized, full of inaccuracy, and rarely updated. Students don’t get exposed as much as they should to the primary literature, which is what science really looks like in the publication sense.

Instead, scientific literature became our textbook–real-world research.

My WIC class helps adapt students to reading the science article format. Reading a science article is not like reading a textbook; it’s not generalized. Students are challenged by it because they don’t already have a strong basis for understanding this material.

And so the journal club is what we do in class.

JA: They’re more difficult, but a journal isn’t as intimidating as a 300 page long, hard-bound textbook.

SM: Yes, these articles aren’t looking at the entire discipline. They’re looking at one little bit that I can relate to other things that we’ve talked about.

It is, in a sense, the culmination of an entire discipline applied to a single question. You need to understand everything that goes into it and start to know that that’s what you need. It’s challenging. It takes practice. And I think that’s good.

JA: I’m curious if there are notable benefits you’ve noticed the students coming away with?

SM: They learn how to access the primary lit (a skill in itself), how to read the literature, and how to be critical about it, which is a skill that they’ll need to have. They’re going to get papers from all sorts of different realms that they’re not experts in. I try to help them refine a method for themselves and figure out how best to approach difficult readings when they’re confronted with them.

That builds confidence too.

I wish I could offer this kind of exposure to freshmen, but there’s not that opportunity in that particular class. So I try to bring this element into all my classes now, in whatever way I can–bringing in the primary literature, exposing them to that, instead of textbooks.

JA: It sounds like there’s a feedback piece to all of this that helps with student development. Could you speak more about that?

SM: There’s a very heavy feedback element, and that’s what makes it so challenging because they often feel like they don’t have the chops to be able to judge whether a paper is good or bad in a lot of ways. But I tell them to bring in their opinion too, because the primary lit is full of veiled opinion as well.

They can say what they found to be beneficial, or not so beneficial. They can say, “What do I want to know more about?” And then they start to reflect on their own work as they make comments on others’ work. This process is internal and metacognitive.

I think it’s beneficial they do this as this is what they’ll have to do as part of their careers later on. That’s maybe a bit of an assumption, but I think it’s critical for them to have this exposure.

One of the things we do as faculty is peer-review our co-faculty. We sit in on classes and check boxes: do they use updated, relevant material? Do they project what they’re saying? Do they give real world examples?

This is exactly why it’s so important and why I like to bring the peer review aspect of journal clubs into my classroom. Because this is science in the real world.

JA: Are there difficulties with journal clubs one could be on the lookout for and try to prevent?

SM: One critical question is how to motivate the students to actually read the article.

Only one person has to present each week and all the other people review it and give the presenter their review. They’re required to give at least one comment, critique, and there are boxes for them to check off to rank a presentation strong or weak. But there’s no accountability for doing the reading or not.

I want people to be there because they want to be, but at the same time this class is not an elective. Everyone’s there because they have to be for their degree, which is tricky. I want them to want the knowledge and to want to be there, but I don’t always get what I want.

JA: How do you or how might you get them to do the reading, short of assigning a letter grade? Are you considering any changes to your class in the future to help students better understand the value of doing the reading, and to encourage them to actually do it?

SM: To incentivize students to actually do the reading when they’re not presenting, I just started using a daily rhetorical precis.

Even if they haven’t read or have only skimmed the article previously, this forces them to at least re-access it at that moment in class, right before the presentation. This way, they can start to gain an understanding about the paper being presented, form an opinion, or even start to imagine possible questions.

I find that knowing they will have to write a live precis gives them motivation to have read the material and tried to understand it previously. It’s really all about priming their thinking to be present for the paper and the peer presenting, and to be able to offer some valuable questions and criticism.

This was impromptu just this term, born out of my frustration at students not appearing to have done the reading (and having no extrinsic motivation to do so), and so was not graded in any way, but in the future I will likely fold it into the graded “informal” writing category.

JA: Do you have any advice for other faculty who might be interested in starting a journal club?

SM: For me, it’s a no brainer. Journal clubs expose students to the reality of your work, of your discipline. The students get to discover science in the real world, not in a boring textbook. The research articles actually show a relevant, up to date thing happening, and they show how and why and this is what they do as opposed to just accepting what is written in a text.

It’s great to use primary literature no matter what discipline you’re in. It keeps things vibrant, dynamic and challenging. And it gives students a more accurate picture of what people in a given field actually do.

By Jessica Alfaqih, WIC GTA

The WIC team is happy to report on a successful Fall event series throughout our ongoing remote modality. Each of this term’s events is summarized below, along with a bonus announcement for an upcoming event this winter.

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Sept. 20 and repeating in winter via CTL– How to design accessible and engaging course material

In this interactive workshop, Design faculty members Christine Gallagher, Deann Garcia, and Andrea Marks taught easy-to-apply design principles. Attendees were shown how important design elements are to readability and engagement in syllabi design. Faculty were presented with examples and offered a range of practical tips for designing accessible and engaging course material. The workshop will be held across multiple dates in 2022. Check the CTL website for more information or watch the recorded workshop here.

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Oct. 11 – How to use informal writing to promote active learning

WIC welcomed back faculty this Fall with a Kickoff Event featuring an interactive workshop led by WIC Director Sarah Tinker Perrault. In this workshop, Dr. Perrault demonstrated how to include informal writing that accentuates course content that helps develop students’ content learning as well as their academic writing skills.

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By: Sarah Tinker Perrault, WIC Director

This quarter, WIC lost its founding director, Lisa Ede, and many of us in the program, at OSU, and in the field lost a guiding light. Lisa has been memorialized beautifully by her long-time friend and co-author, Andrea Lunsford.

The WIC program is part of Lisa’s enormous legacy, and one of our current projects is to digitize and share the program archives, which date back to the 1980s. The paper archive will be housed here in the OSU library, and an international organization, the WAC Clearinghouse, is interested in hosting the digital archive. WIC is one of the earliest and most successful WAC programs in the country, a testament to the work of Lisa and of long-term director Vicki Tolar Burton, and the archives should be of interest to scholars and to faculty working on creating or sustaining their own programs.

The work of WIC also continues, with some exciting things to report from fall:

• We had two events this quarter. In September, designers Christine Gallagher, Deann Garcia, and Andrea Marks gave a workshop on how to create readable and accessible student-facing documents; they will offer a similar workshop through CTL’s “Tuesday Teaching & Tech Talks” in February and May. Next, in October’s fall kickoff event, faculty learned about how to use informal writing to support students’ content learning and give them practice with academic writing. A recording and materials from this event can be found on the Past WIC Events page.

• Thirteen faculty completed the Fall 2021 WIC faculty seminar.

• WIC graduate assistant Jessica Al-Faqih and graduate intern Olivia Rowland have been working on new web materials. Both are M.A. students in Rhetoric & Writing in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film.

• We have a Visiting WIC Affiliate, Hannah Whitley, who graduated from OSU with a triple major in Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Sociology, and is now a PhD candidate in Rural Sociology and Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment at Penn State.

As we head into winter quarter, we are looking forward to virtually hosting renowned scholar, speaker, and performer Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young, for a public talk on linguistic justice and code meshing, and a faculty workshop on linguistic inclusiveness in teaching.

Finally, don’t forget to identify strong papers from your fall WIC course as possible nominees for the WIC Culture of Writing Award in your discipline.

Nominations will be due May 23rd, 2022.

The WIC team is happy to congratulate the thirteen faculty members who completed the 2021 WIC Fall Seminar.

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For five weeks, OSU faculty came together via zoom from around Oregon, and from as far away as Colorado. Along with members of the WIC team, participants talked about what it means to “write well” in the disciplines; about how they use informal writing exercises and formal writing assignments to help students develop field-, genre-, and audience-appropriate writing abilities; and about how to develop and refine effective and equitable practices for giving feedback and grading student work.

The 2021 graduates are:

• Tyler Anderson, Sociology
• Dominique Bachelet, Biological and Ecological Engineering
• Yong Bakos, Computer Science
• Hilary Boudet, Sociology
• Olga Custer, Sociology
• Sean Gestson, Civil & Construction Engineering
• Yvette Gibson, Animal & Rangeland Sciences
• Hoewoon Kim, Mathematics
• Elisa Monaco, Animal & Rangeland Sciences
• Jen Myers, Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences
• Kari-Lyn Sakuma, Health Promotion and Health Behavior
• Ingrid Scheel, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Ashley Vaughn, Health Promotion and Health Behavior

by Erin Vieira, WIC Intern

As my time as a consultant at the Writing Center comes to a close, I find myself saddened to leave the wonderful people I’ve worked with, but also proud to have been part of such a great community. In reflecting about what I will take from my experience over the past years I’ve worked with the Writing Center, I’m reminded of “writing transfer”. Writing transfer, in one of its many definitions, can be described as how “previous learning influences current and future learning” (Elon Statement on Writing Transfer) and how that knowledge is used in a specific way.

Writing transfer can act as a framework to explore in self-reflection, becoming a useful tool to engage with understanding your own writing and learning process.  Below, I explore how writing transfer has shaped my own writing journey as well as my work in the OSU Writing Center.

Writing Transfer as a Writing Consultant

1. Situational Awareness

Working at the Writing Center has been both beneficial to me not only as a peer writing consultant, but as a learner myself. When working with so many different students, I find there are so many fascinating stories and subjects that are outside of my traditional realm of expertise, from learning about professional writing in the media to science papers about fictional fish. As an English major, I tend to focus on literature and fiction, but working at the Writing Center has allowed me to see a much wider variety of different topics.

Understanding this allows for “situational awareness”; there are so many different methods and knowledge of writing and writing subjects at play during a consultation. Writing itself is such a broad category (persuasive, argumentative) that a person in one field may focus on more than another. Having a consistent reminder of the different genres of writing in consultations opened me up as a learner to take in new things. At the Writing Center, having situational awareness keeps me engaged with the different fields of writers that come in for assistance. Whether you’re a student, a professor, or a faculty member, it’s always important to continue expanding your awareness, both of your own field and of the world around you. When working with writers, it is important to continue having this in mind and understanding there are different levels of knowledge at play.

2. The Revision Process

Through my awareness of how writing transfer works, the methods of revising and drafting have transformed my process for my own work. With writing transfer, anything that is new or unfamiliar to the writer draws from the writer’s fount of knowledge via their methodologies, skills, strategies, and rhetoric. In learning new methodologies such as pedagogical approaches at the Writing Center, a new approach to writing can be taken. When approaching my own writing, I find I pull from all of these elements as well, with the current knowledge I have as a writer being taken into account before I begin to learn new skills and strategies to consider later work. When working with other writers, I ask questions like “how should I organize this piece for the best flow of information?” and “what audience should I be considering?” Asking myself these questions in turn is a great reminder of the writing process; the approach of my work draws on the transfer of knowledge. Keeping knowledge transfer in mind allows me to use my own when assisting writers to offer better guidance. 

3. The Power of Collaboration

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned as a writing consultant is the power of collaboration. When I first began the process of peer feedback in university, I thought of it from a critical standpoint, ready with my red pen in hand to highlight, circle, and strike through any error that came across my path. Through the Writing Center, I’ve since come to learn that this is no way to approach giving feedback—it’s all about the collaboration between the consultant and the writer.

Writers are sharing a personal part of themselves when they offer another a chance to see their writing; it can be a very raw, honest experience for them. When writers face a new task, they tend to draw on previous knowledge and strategies. What they’re currently working with is what feels comfortable to them, and it can be frightening to come to someone, step outside of that comfort zone, and open up to critique. In understanding this, consulting a writer becomes more than just critiquing their work—it’s lifting them up, understanding that what they’ve written comes from the heart and that there are features of every writer’s text that deserves praise, and features that invite revision. In moving forward with not just others’ work, but my own as well, this is something I’m going to continue keeping in mind. Offering both constructive criticism as well as praise creates confidence in writers and encourages them to continue improving.

My personal favorite sessions were brainstorming consultations, which act as collaborative and informative consultations with other writers. Depending on the consultation, they can range from the writer already having a broad range of ideas and needing to narrow it down or having no idea where to start at all. These reflect back on my earlier reflection of growing as a learner—discovering new things. Elon University notes that “prior knowledge is a complex construct that can benefit or hinder writing transfer”. This holds very true when it comes to brainstorming with a writer. When I’m brainstorming with someone, I get to challenge my own perceived knowledge and open up my mind to a broader field of things I haven’t considered before, while also keeping in mind that I may not possess all the information. Taking over a brainstorming session with my own perceived knowledge of the subject wouldn’t allow for the proper kind of transfer. Instead, a brainstorm consultation should give the ability to bounce ideas back and forth with the writer in a collective amalgamation of our own knowledge, challenging the both of us to consider new topics and how to integrate the kind of information they’re seeking to write about.

Looking to the Future

The beauty of considering what I will take away from working at the Writing Center is that it is a sweet harmony of everything else I’ve reflected on. As a graduate, I’m currently considering going into the editing field, becoming a novelist, or perhaps both! As an editor, asking those whose work you review requires consideration towards their metacognitive abilities, prompting them to self-reflect on what they produce. Being able to react, consider, and constructively critique any and all types of writing is an invaluable skill for an editor. As a novelist, I believe observing and understanding the environment around me serves to enhance my personal writing skills, and a drive to learn heightens the content I produce. Engaging in development, whether it be my own or prompting others towards their personal growth, is vital to growing myself and my expertise. No matter the field I end up stepping into, what I’ve learned from the Writing Center will certainly carry on to my future work.

The Value of Reflection

Thanks to my time at the Writing Center, I’ve fostered my own growth as well as others in my journey as a consultant. Allowing a moment of personal reflection for myself and applying it to the framework of writing transfer encourages me to continue practicing these qualities for my own sake. Understanding my transfer of writing from a consultant perspective helps me continue transferring my learning to future endeavors. I encourage anyone—student, consultant, or faculty alike—to consider how writing transfer affects their own proficiencies, and to provide the opportunity for self-reflection.

If you’re interested in learning more about writing transfer, you can read about here.

Congratulations to this year’s awardees!

Student name	Paper Title	College	Nominating Major	Nominating Professor
Grace Burks	Attracting Pacific Northwest Pawpaw (Asimina Triloba) Pollinators Through Dual-Use Production Management	Agricultural Sciences	Agricultural Sciences	KJ Joseph
Katrina Doggett	The Racehorse Industry: ethical and welfare considerations of standard practices	Agricultural Sciences	Animal Sciences	Giovanna Rosenlicht
Erin Jackson	Starkey Experimental Forest and Range Prescribed Grazing Plan, Union County, OR	Agricultural Sciences	Rangeland Sciences	Claudia Ingham
Madeleine Reyes	Economic Analysis of Policy Options for Water Scarcity in California Agriculture	Agricultural Sciences	Agricultural and Food Business Management	Penny Diebel
Monica Vickers	Cost-benefit Analysis for Invasive Weed Control: The Case of Knotweed in Skagit County	Agricultural Sciences	Environmental Economics and Policy	Penny Diebel
Juriana E. Barboza Sagrero	Guinea pig model of mild hyperandrogenemia – is it a suitable model for women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)? A pilot study.	Agricultural Sciences	BioResource Research	Katharine Field
Sarah Ellis	Personal Ethical Action Plan	Business	Business Administration	Angelika Buchanan
Nicole Kotwasinski	Personal Ethical Action Plan	Business	Business Information Systems	Angelika Buchanan
Tiffany Huestis	Personal Ethical Action Plan	Business	Entrepreneurship	Angelika Buchanan
Katie Wallace	Personal Ethical Action Plan	Business	Finance	Angelika Buchanan
Dhrushil Patel	Personal Ethical Action Plan	Business	International Business	Angelika Buchanan
Kendyl Druffel	Personal Ethical Action Plan	Business	Management	Angelika Buchanan
Suzi McConnell	Personal Ethical Action Plan	Business	Marketing	Angelika Buchanan
Maria Baker	Cold Desert Climatology of the Patagonia Steppe in Argentina	CEOAS	Environmental Sciences	Andrea Allan
Christopher Egyed	Describing the Climate of the Lake Superior Basin: The Influence of Continentality and the Great Lakes on a Humid Continental Climate	CEOAS	Geography & Geospatial Science	Andrea Allan
Giulia Ann Wood	Determining Arctic krill spawning regions and impacts of warming on abundance and distribution	CEOAS	Ocean Sciences	Kim Bernard
Ranyu (Sienna) Shi	Neural Prosthetic Hand Design Impact Assessment	Engineering	Electrical & Computer Engineering	Rachael Cate
Rachel Villarreal	Connection to the Lan	Forestry	Forest Engineering	Jon Souder
Jay Sharpe	Cooperating to Address the Risk of Wildland Fire: A Policy Brief	Forestry	Forestry	Mindy Crandall
Alissa Liu	The Cultivation of Social Harmony: A Discussion of Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Styles and Popular Music	Liberal Arts	Music	Kimary Fick
Ana R. Pearse	Marina Abramović’s Rhythm O: Reimagining the Roles of Artist and Observer	Liberal Arts	Art	Lei Xue
Grace Knutsen	Colonial Combatants: Moroccan Soldiers in the Twentieth-Century French Army	Liberal Arts	History	Jonathan Katz
Tristan Mitchell	Scientific Realism and Trust as a Remedy for Coronavirus Vaccine Skepticism	Liberal Arts	Philosophy	Jonathan Kaplan
Kendrea Beers	Embodied Wisdom in Mahāyāna Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity	Liberal Arts	Religious Studies	Geoffrey Barstow
Shane Ania Louise Dela Cruz Ty	Individual Interventions for Social Justice	Liberal Arts	Ethnic Studies	Marta Maldonado
Rhythm Kristich	The Impact of Political Ideology on Aggression and Compassion	Liberal Arts	Psychology	Chris Sanchez
Maire K. Hargaden	Does Universal Early Childcare Affect Academic Outcomes?	Liberal Arts	Economics	Taylor Rhodes
Duncan Sean Kemp	The Economic Path Dependency of Foreign Extraction Duration: Why Colonialism Still	Liberal Arts	Political Science	Michael W. Trevathan
Whitney Thaler	Student Debt and the Alteration of Adulthood Independence	Liberal Arts	Sociology	Mark Edwards
Joshua Stickrod	Intertextual Revisionism: Recontextualizing The Eurocentric Literary Tradition In Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative	Liberal Arts	English	Megan Ward
Evaggelos Klonis	100 Dinge: Wie entkommt man der hedonistischen Tretmühle?	Liberal Arts	German	Sebastian Heiduschke
Christina Jackson	Capital vs. Capability: Evaluation in Early Childhood Education	PHHS	HDFS	Kathleen McDonnell
Katie Sawtelle	Women’s Health Narratives: A Cervical Cancer Prevention Program for College-Age Women in Portland, Oregon	PHHS	Health Promotion & Health Behavior	Kari-Lyn K. Sakuma
Andrew McKelvey	Condensation of 4-tert-butylbenzophenone via Friedel-Crafts Acylation and Characterization of the Synthesized Product.	Science	Chemistry	Christine Pastorek
Jared Jensen	RESEARCH PROJECT: Mosquito Sensory Modulation — Effects of a striped pattern and olfactory cues on mosquito host-seeking behaviors	Science	Integrative Biology	Meta Landys
Genevieve Connolly	Using Euclidean Geometry to Construct Objects in the Elliptic Klein Disk	Science	Math	Tevian Dray
Richard Puro	Photodimerization of Organic Semiconductors in the Strong Coupling Regime	Science	Physics	Ethan Minot

By: Sarah Tinker Perrault, WIC Director

Spring in WIC is a season of awards and final reflections, and although we remain in remote mode, we have much to celebrate and look back on.

First, the awards! I am happy to report that this year 37 students received WIC Culture of Writing Award in their disciplines. The number alone does not convey how impressive their work is, but you can read their names and paper titles, and the names of the faculty who nominated them, in 2021 WIC Culture of Writing Awards: Celebrating Writing in the Disciplines. 

Numbers also cannot capture the excitement of WIC work, but they can provide some idea of its breadth:

• In fall, 12 faculty members completed the WIC faculty seminar, zooming in each week from Corvallis, La Grande, Bend, and Virginia.
• In winter, 207 faculty, staff, and students attended Mike Caulfield’s talk on “Teaching Truth and Trust in an Era of Digital Dissensus.”
• WIC’s six workshop events had a total of 85 participants; of those, faculty participants reached 7,812 OSU students this year, over 1,122 of them via WIC classes.
• OSU undergraduates now have ten new WIC courses in disciplines ranging from Polar Oceanography to Music Education.

Finally, spring is time to express gratitude to all members of the WIC team.

Thanks for this year’s WIC GTA, Alex Mahmou-Werndli, who is graduating this month with an MA in Rhetoric and Writing. Alex served as a WIC intern in 2019-2020, and his previous experience with WIC, as well as his steady, thoughtful management of his GTA duties, were invaluable assets during this pandemic year (not to mention my first year at OSU as WIC Director).

Thanks also to WIC undergraduate intern Erin Viera who is graduating this month with a BA in English. Erin has been an invaluable help in all the WIC events, and in many behind-the-scenes activities, and she also dreamed up and created a new newsletter column that offers faculty a first-hand view of how Writing Center consultations work.

I am grateful as well to graduate intern and first-year MA student in Rhetoric and Writing, Jessica Al-Faqih, whose interpersonal and research skills have enhanced WIC since she joined us in Winter 2021. Jess will continue with the WIC team as the 2021-2022 WIC GTA.

Thank you to Caryn Stoess, the WIC operations manager, who helps make my job as WIC director not only immeasurably easier, but also highly enjoyable.

Members of the WIC Advisory Board have provided indispensable guidance, and I thank them for their dedication to WIC, individually and as a group.

Last, but far from least, thanks to all WIC faculty, and all faculty who teach writing, no matter what the course level or discipline. Because of you, we have a strong culture of writing at OSU.

By: Alexander Mahmou-Werndli, WIC GTA

The WIC team is happy to report on a successful Spring event series throughout our ongoing remote modality. Each of this term’s four events is summarized below, along with a bonus announcement for an upcoming event this fall.

Additionally, you can view recordings and download materials from each event listed below on WIC’s website.

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April 9 – The art of asking questions: How to prime stronger student engagement

In this workshop, Jessica Al-Faqih, Erin Vieira, and Alexander Mahmou-Werndli (WIC Interns and GTA) explored how the way questions are phrased can inspire more engaged responses, clarify instructor expectations, and influence student learning. After exploring several examples, participants were asked to identify common questions in their instruction and academic support work, then to consider how those questions could be revised to better prompt the types of meaningful responses that participants hoped to elicit.

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April 20 – 3 quick hacks to build cognizance, agency, and logical flow in a STEM WIC class

Lauren Dalton (Biochemistry and Biophysics) shared advice from her experience teaching BB 317 (Scientific Theory and Practice), distilled into three quick “hacks”: Learn the importance of clear communication, Build agency through writing, and Teach transitions via analogy. A discussion about common challenges and how to apply these principles in practice followed, and participants left with some concrete suggestions to try out in their classrooms.

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May 5 – Whose language? Inclusive teaching of academic communication across disciplines

Adam Schwartz (OSU), Sergio Loza (UO), and Devin Grammon (UO) led this discussion on inclusive language practices and perspectives. They began by establishing guiding assumptions about language, including the existence of privilege and the importance of language to identity. They explored these further via the introduction of sociolinguistic concepts, and frequently prompted participants to analyze their own experiences with language through reflective questions. Finally, the discussion turned to the often problematic ways in which multilingualism and bilingualism are evaluated in the academy.

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June 9 – Using learning outcomes to create clear assignments

This workshop, led by Sarah Tinker Perrault (WIC Director), demonstrated how course learning outcomes and WIC learning outcomes can be operationalized in writing assignments. Sarah began by exploring how course outcomes could be divided into categories of factual, conceptual, procedural, and self knowledge that students must develop and demonstrate to meet learning outcomes. Participants spent most of their time using graphic organizers to explicate these types of knowledge in the contexts of their own course outcomes and discussing differences between disciplines. These graphic organizers are available along with the recordings on the WIC website.

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RESCHEDULED – How to design accessible and engaging course material

September 20th, 12:00-12:50 |Milam 215 and via Zoom

Due to factors beyond their control, the presenters have asked to postpone this workshop until fall. It will be held on Monday, September 20th, in order to allow participants to make adjustments to materials before classes start on the 22nd. COVID restrictions permitting, this event will be held in person, and pizza and beverages will be provided for in-person attendees. This workshop will also be accessible via Zoom regardless of in-person status.

Description: Do you struggle to make syllabi, assignments, and other course materials look inviting? Do you worry that they are hard to read, hinder understanding, or that they’re inaccessible to students with visual impairments or reading difficulties? Learn easy-to-apply design principles at the “How to design accessible and engaging course material” workshop on September 20th. (You’ll also learn what not to do!) In this 50 minute interactive workshop, design faculty members Christine Gallagher, Deann Garcia, and Andrea Marks will offer a range of practical tips and lead you through how to apply them to your own course materials.

Whether you’d prefer to attend in person or online, you can register via this link.

For a higher resolution version, download the following .pdf:

You can also view the talk in its entirety here.

“When Dr. Natchee Barnd presented me with the WIC award, I actually cried because, still, in my senior year, I wasn’t terribly confident in my writing and I think part of me thought I was undeserving of it for some reason. The award spoke far more to my skills than I realized, and it validated all my hard work that I’d put into my classes (I’m welling up just writing about it).”

Elena Ramirez Robles, College of Liberal Arts, 2018

“Thank you for your support.  The Culture of Writing Award was the first award I received during my academic career.  It’s an accomplishment with significant positive impacts on young scholars during a vital stage of their progressive young careers.”

Andrew Larkin, College of Science, 2010

Participation in the Culture of Writing Awards has thrived since 2006, as 326 total students have earned recognition and cash awards for both individual and collaborative writing projects. WIC would like to thank all participating units for their continued desire to recognize and reward outstanding student writing.

How to Nominate a Paper:

Units comprised of more than one major/designator may give an award for each major/designator (but not for each concentration). The manner in which a paper is selected is up to the unit, but here are three possible models to follow:

• Model 1: The academic unit might use the unit awards committee to ask faculty to nominate and submit their best undergraduate paper for the year. The committee chooses the awardee.
• Model 2: The academic unit wants the awardee to be from a WIC course, so one or more WIC instructors select the best paper.
• Model 3: The academic writing occurs in a capstone course with a team project. The unit selects the team with the best-written capstone project for the award. When the award goes to a team of four, some units divide the $100 award four ways, while other units contribute more than $50 so that individuals will receive a more substantial award.

Once a paper has been selected, fill out the nomination form in its entirety and submit the form to Caryn Stoess no later than 5:00 p.m. on May 25th, 2021.

For more information regarding the Culture of Writing Awards, please visit our website.