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Wednesday, May 18, 2005
9:30 to 10:45 AM - Halpern Centre 126

I.  From Outcomes to Input: Entrusting Departments to Improve Writing
Keynote Speaker Chris Anson
Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing and
Speaking Program at North Carolina State University

Writing across the curriculum often takes the form of a campus-wide requirement designed to increase the amount of writing students do in their coursework. But there is increasing awareness of the conditions that work against the cultivation and sustenance of cross-curricular programs when they are too standardized and imposed too strongly from above. Campus-wide requirements and criteria for WAC programs often fail to acknowledge crucial differences in disciplinary and curricular structures, resources, and departmental cultures. How can institutions create a system of continuous program improvement in writing and higher-order thinking that has internal value to each department? One promising approach is designed to promote localized attention to writing by investing academic units with an interest in achieving outcomes that are meaningful to them and specific to their own curricula. In describing this approach, I will provide examples of ways it is being productively implemented in several contexts.

Chris has received numerous awards, including the State of Minnesota Higher Education Teaching Excellence Award, the Morse-Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education, and the Governor's Star Service Award for his service-learning work at Minnesota.

An avid writer, Chris' last book project, The WAC Casebook: Scenes for Faculty Reflection and Program Development (Oxford University Press, 2002) is an edited collection of scenarios for faculty development in writing across the curriculum. (http://www.home.earthlink.net/~theansons/Portcover.html)

 

Wednesday, May 18, 2005
1:15 to 2:30 PM - Halpern Centre 126

II.  Writing as Learning and Defining the Discipline: California State
University, Monterey Bay's Integrated Writing Program in Earth Systems
Science and Policy
Keynote Speaker Daniel Shapiro
Faculty of Science and Environmental Policy
California State University, Monterey Bay

How might the development of disciplinary writing programs benefit students, faculty, and the disciplines? Over the past 8 years I have been part of a team developing a disciplinary writing program for undergraduate students majoring in Earth Systems Science and Policy, an interdisciplinary science and environmental policy program at California State University, Monterey Bay. Our writing program consists
of a series of core writing courses that meet both discipline-specific and university-wide writing outcomes.
I will present an overview of our program and writing outcomes, describe our processes for initial and ongoing development of our program, and show the ways students, faculty, and our discipline benefit from our integrated writing program.

Dan Shapiro received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University in 1996. He then coordinated Cornell's Knight Writing Institute's Writing in the Majors program for the Biological Sciences where he mentored graduate students developing disciplinary writing-intensive courses, taught his own disciplinary writing-intensive courses, and taught courses in basic writing. In 1997 he joined the faculty of Science and Environmental Policy at California State University, Monterey Bay where he has been teaching disciplinary-based writing courses, developing a disciplinary, integrated writing program, and coordinating
the senior thesis program.


Friday, May 20, 2005
11:00 AM to 12:15 PM - Halpern Centre 126

III.  Capturing Innovative Teaching through the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning
Keynote Speaker Teresa Dawson
Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning
at the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus

As faculty at institutions across North America revise undergraduate curricular offerings to better meet the learning needs of their students, questions frequently arise as to the role that such innovative work will play in faculty careers.  It is perhaps no coincidence that the new rounds of curriculum redesign are taking place at the same time as a new area of scholarship—the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—is emerging.  Decades of work by dedicated faculty and staff, curriculum designers, faculty developers, and teaching and learning centres, as well as initiatives by organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation and others, mean that we are much better prepared to understand both how to be successful in achieving curricular change and how to reward faculty for their crucial role in such initiatives.  Ultimately the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning provides an opportunity to think differently about faculty roles and rewards.  It offers us the chance to reduce the persistent and stressful dichotomies that exist in faculty lives between research, teaching, and service. It also helps faculty and their institutions be rewarded for the innovative work that they do in supporting student success, by encouraging them to become leaders in an international community of scholars dedicated to creating new disciplinary knowledge around teaching and learning.

Teresa Dawson is the Director of Teaching and Learning Services and Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Her areas of interest include effective teaching assessment, faculty and graduate student professional development, supporting and enhancing diversity in the academy, and achieving teaching and learning-related institutional change. In 2004 she helped draft UTSC's new official teaching guidelines, which now document concrete ways to value and assess various aspects of teaching including the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) for purposes of tenure and promotion. She has been instrumental in founding an Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines at UTSC. Nationally, she is a member of the steering committee for the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE). Internationally, she participates in the scholarship of teaching and learning both within her own discipline (for example as a consultant to the American Association of Geographers) and in collaboration with other SoTL colleagues in the US, UK and Asia.