N

ew

s f

ro

m t

he

P

ro

fe

ss

io

na

l W

rit

in

g P

ro

gr

am

No

ve

mb

er

2

01

4

Th

e P

ro

fe

ss

ion

al

November 2014

Blended and Online Learning in the Professional Writing Program

Scott Moses discusses the progress of PWP’s online learning initiatives .

With PWP now offering a number of blended learning (BL) and fully online versions of its courses, I want to provide some background on how this all came about and to initiate a discussion on what this might mean for the future of PWP.

As some of you may recall, in fall 2011 the Professional and Academic Writing Pro-grams became members of the Provost’s Blended Learning Initiative Pilot. This was a one-time award from the university to several departments across campus to devel-op online-enhanced, BL versions of established courses. Under the direction of for-mer PWP Director Lea Chartock and former AWP Director Linda Macri, the programs were funded to develop BL versions of ENGL393 and ENGL101, respectively.

For 393, Michelle Von Euw and I worked with Lea during fall 2011 to launch the course in spring 2012. Michelle and I taught six sections altogether, using a weekly schedule that combined one 75-minute in-class session with one online session for which students completed work on Blackboard and an online resource from Pearson. Despite a general feeling of success at the end of the semester, Michelle and I aban-doned the Pearson resource and chose instead to develop websites to host our own curated collections of exercises and resources.

While the university provided the initial funding, departments were then expected to provide future investment into growing and maintaining their BL programs. With this in mind, my position of PWP BL Coordinator, Lyra Hilliard’s position of AWP BL Coordinator, and Lauren Friedman’s position of Instructional Design Coordinator were created in 2013. These positions reflect the English Department’s commitment to providing support to faculty members interested in innovation. Beyond the de-partment, the university has since created the Teaching and Learning Transfor-mation Center (TLTC), combining the Center for Teaching Excellence with DivIT’s Integrated Learning and Technologies department. In addition to workshops and other events on blended and online learning, TLTC also funds the Elevate Fellows Course Redesign Program, among other awards.

Educators have mixed feelings and attitudes about taking education out of the class-room and moving it online. I think this is especially true among PWPLecturers, who

Continued on page 3

Notable dates (and deadlines)…

Nov. 27, 28

Thanksgiving holiday, campus closed

Dec. 12

Last day of classes

PWP Holiday Party

Dec. 24

Final grades due to UMEG

In this issue…

Blended and Online Learning 1

Teaching Research 2

Calendar 2

Privilege in the Classroom 5

News from Colleagues 5

2

The Professional

November 2014

Scott Wible, Director

Mark Forrester, Editor

Willie Schatz, Copy Editor

1220 Tawes Hall

University of Maryland

College Park, MD 20742

Tel: 301.405.3763

www.engl-pw.umd.edu

Fall 2014 Calendar

Mid Nov.

Spring 2015 teaching assign-ments out

Nov. 27, 28

Thanksgiving holiday, campus closed

Dec. 12

Last day of classes

Dec. 12

PWP Holiday Party

Dec. 24

Final grades due to UMEG

Jan. 22

Spring Faculty Development Day

Jan. 26

First day of spring semester

Scott Wible discusses the importance of thorough preliminary research.

One of the great challenges we face in teaching Professional Writing is helping students learn how to think flexibly and independently about their research needs and research processes. Too often students start their research process by plugging their topic keyword into a search engine to see what’s been published on the sub-ject. This approach can leave students feeling like they are either swimming in a sea of sources or wandering the desert in search of a single drop of water. The problem is that students start their research without a clear understanding of what research needs they should pursue and how they should pursue them.

One key in teaching research is to ensure students start by identifying what infor-mation they need to locate or generate for their projects and only then determining and employing the research methods that will help locate that information. But what’s the key to identifying the information one needs to generate for thorough research? Thinking rhetorically, of course, and anticipating the questions readers will have about the student’s topic.

Let me walk you through this approach to teaching research by working with a topic one student is pursuing this semester in a Writing for Social Entrepreneurship course. This student is creating a Social Venture Plan to support his plan for an “Idea Truck” that would visit neighborhoods facing significant social problems and low civic engagement, teach community members the design thinking process, then facilitate the community members’ work in using that process to study a community problem, develop and prototype solutions, and compose a proposal to implement that plan.

To conduct useful, meaningful research, students should not go directly to a com-puter and search for information on their topic. Instead, they need to generate the questions that will motivate this initial research. Toward that end, we need to ensure that students develop an understanding of the rhetorical situation for the genre (Social Venture Plan), including the audience (potential investors), the purpose (primarily, to persuade those investors to contribute start-up money, and secondarily, to persuade the audience that a pressing social need exists, that the writer’s plan can solve the problem, and that the writer has the expertise ― or has people on the team with the expertise ― to implement the plan). This student also needs to take time to understand the typical sections of a Social Venture Plan, such as “Needs Statement,” “Mission, Vision, Impact,” “Social Impact Demonstra-tion,” and “Budget.” Just as important, we must ensure students come to understand the rhetorical purpose of each section, regarding the aims writers typically pursue in—and the expectations and needs readers typically bring to—each of these sections.

Given this deeper understanding of the rhetorical situation, the student should spend time brainstorming questions the audience will want or need to have an-swered throughout this Social Venture Plan. Consider these examples:

• How will the Idea Truck process or method work?

Continued on page 4

Teaching Students to Be Flexible, Independent Researchers

3

Continued from page 1

have the privilege of working with students in a relatively intimate, small class environment. At one extreme, some believe the transition from classroom to online to be the death knell for a crumbling education system. Some who feel his way might have actually attempted online courses they did not like or in which they did not excel. For others, the concept strikes general discomfort, if not fear, since it often requires (re-)training and more precious time.

Undoubtedly, the process of reengineering a course in a new format can be arduous. While the literature on online and BL pedagogies grows, providing us with new ideas and research to arrive at best practices, putting content online and making it user-friendly and student-centered takes time and patience. Even more complex is the process of recreating opportunities for active and collaborative learning outside of the classroom.

Yet, BL can provide more options for reaching out to our diverse students in diverse ways. BL means creating more, and sometimes better, opportunities for students to engage with the materials and processes we are offering them. When thinking of groups like international and transfer students, for example, with whom it can be difficult to connect in the same way as other students, crafting dynamic online experiences can be a way to help them achieve important learning outcomes. In my own experience, many of these students, who are often hesitant to speak up during class, feel more compelled to participate, ask questions, and engage the material in the virtual company of their classmates than they do in the traditional classroom format.

Moreover, learning how to be successful in a BL environment is useful training for all students. As we all know, many of our students will be embarking on professional lives that will include telecommuting and using a variety of online platforms and applications. Whether it is using the chat feature in a Google Doc to craft and edit a document in real time, or using AdobeConnect, Skype or Google Hangouts to meet and collaborate with students, these types of exercises reflect the type of online rhetorical situations in which many students will soon be working. Reaching perhaps another extreme in perspective, one could argue that by denying significant online components to PWP courses we actually risk losing at least part of what is supposed to be “professional” about them.

This semester, nine Lecturers are teaching twenty-three BL sections of four different courses (391, 393, 394 and 395). This past summer, four Lecturers, including me, offered fully online versions of 393 and 394 for the first time, the success of which helped to curtail shrinking summer school enrollments. AWP has ten BL sections of 101 this semester, in addition to online summer sections. Undergraduate English offers numerous online winter and summer courses. The university has even transitioned into creating Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in partnership with Coursera.

Does this mean we all will be teaching online courses next semester? Certainly not. But the trend is clear: the online world is an important part of our students' world, and online resources are becoming increasingly im-portant in education. If the question used to be, “Which is better, traditional classroom or blended/online?” now it should be, “How do we make blended and online learning as effective as possible?” Moreover, what can those teaching traditional classroom-based PWP courses learn about accommodating diverse learning styles, teaching and facilitating collaborative writing, and other issues from BL and online pedagogical strategies?

In January we will be holding our third Blended Learning Retreat. With more details to come, I will be opening this up to all of PWP so that everyone who is interested may enter the conversation. Many of you have already invested much time and effort into developing the online profiles of your courses. In fact, many of you are already participating in the development of blended and online learning, even if your courses are not design-nated as such. I look forward to continuing the discussion.

—Scott Moses

Blended and Online Learning

4

Continued from page 2

• How will the Idea Truck leaders or facilitators keep the focus on idea generation, not complaint gathering?

• How will the writer (or who will) teach the community participants the design thinking process? Who will facilitate or moderate the activity?

• Who will forge connections to the community on behalf of the Idea Truck group, and how?

• Will it be effective? What is the social return on investment?

• How can the writer get community members engaged in the activity?

• What are the technical details and specifications of the truck itself?

• What are the liability issues related to placing this truck in a community and inviting the community to use it?

• Is there really a need?

It can be helpful at this point to have students submit this list of questions or brainstorm it with classmates to check whether they need to broaden or trim this list, or to refine particular questions.

The next step in working through the research process is helping students to identify the kinds of information they could use to answer these questions for their readers. For example, to answer the “Is there really a need?” question, the student might present a richly detailed story about a particular problem facing a person or group in the community. To address the question “How will the Idea Truck process or method work?” the student could present examples and evidence of similar projects in other communities. These questions and answers, then, help the student to identify what kinds of information she needs to locate or generate for this writing project.

The student must then identify how to locate or generate this information. Here we can have students think about the different kinds of research they could use to generate this information (including primary research such as interviews, observations, and surveys) or to locate it (using secondary research in peer-review journals, periodicals, and trade publications).

For example, this student working to establish a pressing social need not only could conduct secondary research in periodicals for articles about the community but also conduct primary research such as interviews and site observations to get to know individuals or communities and the problems they face. These interviews and site observations could help the student create concrete, compelling narratives to persuade readers that a pressing social problem does exist.

The need to generate or locate information to answer the “How will it work?” and “Will it work?” questions, meanwhile, could lead this student to conduct secondary research in trade journals or to search through publications created by research centers that specialize on particular topics (in this case, social entrepre-neurship and community engagement), non-profit organizations, or professional associations.

This structured approach to analyzing a topic and a rhetorical situation—anticipating reader questions, identifying information needed to answer those questions, and identifying research materials to generate or gather that information—can be an effective way to teach students how to think more independently about their research needs and strategies. I encourage you to try this approach in your classes this semester or next, identifying a topic you and your students can work with in class to model this process.

—Scott Wible

Teaching Research

5

On Nov. 11, four of us met in the PWP conference room for a roundtable discussion hosted by Kelly Cresap. The focus of our conversation was the role of privilege in the PWP classroom. Among other topics, we considered the different degrees and types of privilege students might possess—some earned, some unearned; some visible, others harder to detect. The sense of privilege or exclusion students experience might be based on their eco-nomic status, race or ethnicity, gender and sexuality, where they have lived, their language, their able-bodiedness, and so on. Often those students who come from less privileged backgrounds are less likely to speak to us about their problems because they feel they lack the standing to address an authority figure, or because they do not believe that figure will be able to relate to their experiences.

Caroline Wilkins talked about the value of welcoming a range of perspectives into our classroom discussions. Students who may feel uncomfortable speaking up due to problems with English, or because they feel marginal-ized for other reasons, can offer valuable insights precisely because their experiences are different. Because we are teaching our students that they need to understand their topics from all angles, finding ways to draw these differing perspectives—these often excluded voices—into our discussions is integral to our mission in PWP.

We also discussed the correspondence between privilege and language. Many students may lack confidence in their spoken or written voices because they struggle with formal English. While the conventions of standard English can be taught (though perhaps not in a single semester!), it is important we acknowledge these are only conventions and language always exists in relation to an audience and to a rhetorical situation, and it is im-portant that we value the ideas (and identities) of our students in their own voices.

Tom Lowderbaugh mentioned his experience taking an undergraduate French class this semester. He has found that he feels freer to speak up in class, even if he makes a mistake, because he has less at stake than his class-mates: while he is auditing one class, they are taking three or four (or five) classes for grades that will affect their futures in important ways. At the same time, they may be working, supporting families, and experiencing other time- and energy-consuming struggles we never hear of. In our classes, students need to move outside their com-fort zones and make mistakes if they hope to improve their writing. Students who do not come from positions of privilege may feel less comfortable taking such risks because they perceive the stakes to be so much higher for them if they fail.

I am grateful to Kelly Cresap for introducing and facilitating this important discussion. I hope we can continue this conversation, both more broadly and more deeply, throughout the Professional Writing Program. Address-ing the role privilege plays will benefit all our students.

— Mark Forrester

NEWS FROM YOUR COLLEAGUES

Danuta Hinc presented a paper, “Herta Mu ller’s ‘Der Ko nig Verneigt Sich U nd To tet’ and the Displacement in the Origins of Language,” at a Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures Panel at the October SCMLA Conference in Austin, TX.

At the International Writing Centers Association Conference, Oct. 29-Nov.1 in Orlando, FL, Leigh Ryan presented on “Sponsoring, Supporting, and Sustaining Undergraduate Research.” Leigh will also be serving as a faculty men-tor for Writing Center tutors James Gray and Dionte Harris, who have been awarded scholarships to attend the Naylor Undergraduate Writing Research Workshop at York College of Pennsylvania, Nov. 14-16.

Vanessa Wang has three news articles forthcoming in the Nov. issue of Asian Fortune , the only D.C. area Asian American magazine written in English. Her articles include the cover story on Indian writer Monica Bhide, a report on Asian Americans facing language barriers when enrolling in Obamacare, and a piece on Awesome Asian Bad Guys, a web series about Asian actors' minor roles in Hollywood movies. http://data.axmag.com/data/201410/20141026/U53562_F308563/FLASH/index.html

NOTE: Caleb Kriesberg’s name was misspelled in our previous issue. Sorry, Caleb!

Privilege in the PWP Classroom