
Writing Across the Curriculum
2023 Writing Across the Curriculum Award Winners
Faculty Writing Across the Curriculum Pedagogy Award
Criminal Justice and Criminology
Dr. Sevigny demonstrated an impressive commitment to the mission of WAC through writing-intensive pedagogies that promote disciplinary knowledge and career competency, civic mindedness and engagement, and critical thinking skills.
Graduate Student Consultant Pedagogy Award
English
Serving as a WAC Consultant for Dr. Marilynn Richtarik’s English 3900: Irish Literature course, Ms. Gates’s effectiveness as a WAC Consultant was exemplified through the excellent feedback and mentorship she provides to students that supported their growth as writers.
Graduate Student Consultant Pedagogy Honorable Mention
Program Mission & Goals
The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program at GSU supports faculty in designing and teaching writing-intensive courses across a broad range of disciplines to provide an engaging learning experience for undergraduate students from all backgrounds.
The program also mentors and trains graduate students to serve as WAC Consultants in support of undergraduate student writers. WAC at GSU values writing-intensive instruction as essential to advancing undergraduate and graduate students’ critical thinking skills, disciplinary knowledge, career competencies, and civic capacities within the university and beyond.
WAC Course Grant Information:
Check back from applications to open in Spring 2024
Contact Ashley Holmes, Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at [email protected] with questions.
To support and collaborate with faculty across disciplines or departments at GSU in reflecting on their teaching, creating pedagogically sound writing assignments, and designing writing-intensive courses to enhance student learning of course content.
The program offers competitive WAC course development grants, workshops, feedback on writing-intensive syllabi and assignments, approval of WAC writing-intensive courses, and the potential for an embedded graduate student WAC Consultant in a writing-intensive course. Through these initiatives, the WAC program provides time, space, and collegial support for talk and exchange of ideas about teaching that cross-disciplinary boundaries.
To prepare graduate students to serve as WAC Consultants for approved WAC writing-intensive courses.
In response to WAC faculty requests, the program appoints graduate students to offer additional disciplinary-based writing support for students enrolled in writing-intensive courses. WAC Consultants attend a workshop where they learn WAC principles, strategies for consulting with student writers, and best practices for providing feedback on student writing. The WAC Consultant program is intended to provide a professional development and mentorship opportunity for department-selected graduate students to learn about disciplinary-based writing and pedagogy.
To partner with key stakeholders and programs across campus to increase the visibility of writing initiatives and to be a leader and advocate for writing at GSU.
The WAC Advisory Board provides an opportunity for the program to partner with key stakeholders, including writing-related GSU administrators, faculty, and graduate consultants, to envision and instantiate a prominent role for writing across multiple platforms and campus programs.
To enhance and sustain writing-intensive instruction as a high-impact educational practice that challenges students to apply their course-based knowledge to real-world problems.
The WAC Program aligns with GSU’s strategic goals to become a national model for undergraduate education that addresses the most challenging issues of the 21st century. WAC also helps advance the work of Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), an Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) campus action initiative with which the University System of Georgia partners.
The Faculty WAC Pedagogy Award recognizes excellence and innovation in using WAC pedagogies to advance the teaching of undergraduate students’ critical thinking skills, disciplinary knowledge, career competencies, and civic capacities within the university and beyond. The award highlights a faculty member who demonstrates the GSU WAC Program’s mission to enhance and sustain writing-intensive instruction as a high-impact education practice that challenges students to apply their course-based knowledge to real-world problems.
Eligibility: Any faculty member who has previously received a WAC course development grant and who has taught an approved writing-intensive course. Faculty submit self-nominations by March 1st. See the annual call for applications for details.
Graduate Consultant Writing Across the Curriculum Pedagogy Award
The Graduate Consultant WAC Pedagogy Award recognizes excellence in a consultant’s support of student writers and writing-intensive instruction. Nominees will be considered in terms of their effectiveness, leadership, and engagement with undergraduate students while serving as a WAC Consultant.
Eligibility: Any graduate student who has served as a WAC Consultant within the last year. Consultants must be nominated by the WAC faculty member with whom they collaborated for a writing-intensive course.
The WAC Advisory Committee reviews and helps make selections for the awards. Winners announced annually in April.
This workshop emphasizes assignment development, effective responses to student writing, revision strategies for students, managing the workload of a writing-intensive class, and working with graduate writing consultants (optional). Faculty develop their course syllabi and writing assignments over the summer and submit materials for review by the program director at the end of the summer.
The grant award includes a $2,000 summer stipend and support from WAC-affiliated faculty and staff. As conditions for receiving a grant, faculty must be able to do the following:
- attend both days of the training workshop in May,
- work independently on course development over the summer,
- attend follow-up training sessions as necessary,
- teach the course in the 2020-2021 academic year, and
- give a follow-up presentation for future WAC Workshops or report to other faculty members if requested.
The course you propose for the WAC Grant should be one that you'd like to redevelop as writing-intensive during the May workshop; this means the re-designed course will need to:
- be at the undergraduate level,
- typically enroll 25+ undergraduate students,
- allow significant opportunity for revision of student work, and
- take at least 40% of the course grade from writing assignments (including assignments such as papers, reports, in-class drafts, journals, blogs, essay exams, etc.).
Grant Eligibility: Full-time faculty instructors at any of the GSU campuses.
Note: The WAC course development grant is not available to part-time instructors or graduate students employed as Teaching Assistants.
The following applications will be given priority:
- Applications from departments that are under-represented in the WAC program,
- Applications for courses that don’t traditionally use writing as part of their course goals, and
- First-time applicants.
Contact Ashley Holmes, Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at [email protected] with questions.
Research in Writing Studies confirms that writing is a way of enacting disciplinarity, that disciplinary identities are constructed through writing, and that learning to write effectively requires different kinds of practice, time, and effort (Adler-Kasner & Wardle, 2015)—all concepts that are explored in the WAC faculty workshop at GSU.
WAC pedagogy holds that if students are to lay claim to these learning benefits, they must have frequent and significant opportunities to write and revise writing in their classes–from their freshman year to graduation, whatever their major course of study.
College-level WAC programs, therefore, advocate and support university and college-wide adoption of writing as a strong component of all classes in all disciplines, not merely in the composition courses run by English departments. Many WAC programs assist in the development and teaching of writing intensive (WI) courses. WI classes tend to use a variety of kinds of writing to help students build critical thinking skills, learn course material more effectively, and communicate their knowledge.
WAC approaches to learning can invigorate both teaching and student learning. Education research on the use of high-impact educational practices, to include Writing Intensive courses like those promoted by WAC, suggests that they result in increased retention rates and student engagement (Kuh, 2008). Teachers at GSU also report great benefits from training in and adopting WAC teaching methodology.
Ultimately, WAC, at GSU and elsewhere, aims to increase literacy and intellectual capacity across the board, improving the value of college education and paying dividends to society at large by training students in ways that can help them to become better academics, better professionals, and better citizens.
Notes:
Adler-Kassner, L. & Wardle, E. (2015). Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Kuh, G.D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
>>Graduate Writing Consultants: WAC works with departments to identify and train graduate student consultants to work with larger classes.
>>Faculty Workshops: WAC faculty workshops focus on the use of writing to teach in all disciplines. An interdisciplinary group participates in seminars on current writing theory and practice. Faculty have the opportunity to discuss assignments and student writing while reflecting on successful teaching practices.
>>Focused revision and feedback from peers and instructor
>>In-class and informal writing opportunities that encourage writing as a tool for learning.
WAC @ GSU would like to recognize and thank the following committee members:
- Lisa Armistead
- Molly Bassett
- Laura Carruth
- Lara Dahl
- Will Hodge (WAC Graduate Student Consultant Representative)
- Storm Murray (WAC Graduate Assistant)
- Sean Richey
- Lisa Shannon
- Marlena Salters
- Sutandra Sarkar
- Claudette Tolson
- Jianhua Wu
- Liping Yang (WAC Graduate Assistant)
Ashley Holmes
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Coordinator
Contact Information
Phone: 404-413-5831
Email: [email protected]
Ashley J. Holmes is Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. Her research and teaching interests include community-based writing and composition pedagogy, and her book Public Pedagogy in Composition Studies was published with the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series in 2016. Dr. Holmes’s research has appeared in Community Literacy Journal, Reflections, and English Journal, and she has chapters in the edited collections Mobile Technology and the Writing Classroom and Overcoming Writers’ Block: Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs. Contact her at [email protected] with questions about the WAC Program at GSU.