Tim Peeples, Paula Rosinski
Five years ago, our university embarked on a wide-reaching Writing Excellence Initiative in an effort to transform the culture of writing across our entire campus. This endeavor is innovative in its scope and its goals, which are to alter student, faculty, and staff attitudes and behaviors toward and practices of writing broadly conceived, valuing equally writing-to-learn, writing in a discipline/profession, and writing as a citizen. The major goals aim to build and sustain a writing culture that recognizes that learning to teach writing and gaining writing expertise is an iterative, reflective, practice; that there is potential to transfer writing strategies and practices across contexts and disciplines; and that transforming a campus culture of writing is long-term and requires the dedicated work of all faculty, staff and students. Valuing a culture of writing means valuing the labor of teaching, doing, struggling with and talking about writing by all constituents, even as much of this important works seems invisible.
Planning, study, and assessments have been focused on not only traditional kinds of efforts, such as improving faculty development around writing pedagogy and enhancing student supports, but also more innovative efforts, such as increasing conversations about writing on our campus between students, faculty and staff; making the writing and struggles around writing already happening in so many places more visible; and encouraging meta-thinking about writing to improve the chance that students, faculty, and staff come to view writing more as a complicated, messy, rhetorical kind of activity by which we transform our lives.
Our initiative is firmly grounded in the scholarship of best practices in writing pedagogy, in particular, research on transfer (Anson and Moore, 2016; Robertson, Taczak, Yancey 2012), writing across the curriculum (Carter, 2007; Maimon, 2006; McArdle, 2009), faculty development (Condon, Iverson, Rutz, and Willet, 2016), and assessment (Anson, 2006; Yancey, 1999).
This poster will focus on theorizing and evidence an iterative organizational learning process that has been employed across our entire campus over the past five years, leading to emerging transformations in the culture of writing “for” learning (e.g., pedagogies and curricula), “of” learners (e.g., changing student, faculty, and staff attitudes toward learning to write and teaching writing), and “that” learns (e.g., sponsored research around writing). The poster will also generalize from our institutional experience some ways similar processes might be employed to transform learning cultures more broadly and across institutional types.
