General Education Resources for Faculty

Improving Writing Instruction at Hope College:  A White Paper

By mid 2009, multiple assessments of student learning at Hope College (including data from NSSE, the Wabash Study, Teagle Consortial, and the CLA) had shown that Hope students are weaker than their peers in writing ability and improvement in writing by their senior year.  In response to that data, a team of faculty (Barbara Mezeske, Jeff Polet, Rich Ray, Mike Seymour, and Carol Simon) attended an Association of American Colleges and Universities summer institute to devise a way to address the situation.  This paper is a summary of their work.

The Two-Pronged Strategy for Improving Writing at Hope. 

a. The first prong involves initiatives to raise faculty awareness about the need to make writing a priority, as well as the benefits for themselves and their students of doing so, and to better equip faculty to do this. This prong has several sub-strategies, including

• disseminating this report to all faculty,
• urging the Faculty Moderator to set aside a Faculty Meeting for the topic: “Five Simple and Effective Things to Do to Help Students Write Better and Make your Own Work Easier,”
• suggesting that writing be the topic of the 2010 pre-college conference, and
• urging Divisional Deans to hold a meeting of each of their divisions at which the importance of writing in the majors is addressed.

b. The second prong involves beginning the process of revising how writing instruction is structured within General Education and in the majors at Hope College. The curriculum belongs to the Hope faculty at large, and what should be done to improve it should be determined through a process mandated by the Academic Affairs Board. We have urged the Provost to ask the Academic Affairs Board to appoint an Ad Hoc Writing Improvement Committee.  That committee will begin meeting soon.  Its members are Teresa Housel (Communications), David James (Academic Support Center/Writing Center), John Jobson (Student Development), Barbara Mezeske (English), Jeff Polet (Political Science), Julia Randel (Music), Mike Seymour (Chemistry), Katy Matejka (student) and one other student as yet to be named.

This two-pronged strategy was the result of the team’s reflections in the following areas:

Hope’s Current Situation: Writing instruction at Hope College purports to be done in an English Department first year writing course and then in four other sectors of the General Education curriculum (in required Religion, Cultural Heritage, Natural Science II, and Social Science II courses).  Yet multiple sources of evidence show that (a) too few Hope students demonstrate significant progress toward being strong writers by the time they graduate, (b) students do not perceive the post-Introduction-to-Expository-Writing courses that are identified as having additional writing instruction as making any more contribution to their strength as writers than courses that are not so designated, and (c) not enough faculty outside of English who staff the designated writing-instruction courses are aware that they should be doing writing instruction or of how it can be effectively done.

Challenges:  Hope’s challenges include communicating effectively the rationale and design of the General Education program, as well as creating and nurturing a culture among students and faculty at Hope College that cares deeply about the craft of excellent written communication, both within the majors and in General Education.
 
Six Strategies for Improvement:

• Develop and promulgate a shared vocabulary, outcomes and standards for what constitutes acceptable beginning, intermediate and senior-level college writing;
• Ensure that students do more thesis-driven writing (in contrast to reaction, response or mere-opinion papers);
• Ensure that students take multiple courses that discuss the process of writing and revision, attention to audience, and effective integration of multiple reliable and relevant sources when writing;
• Ensure that students take multiple courses where they need to make revisions and write multiple drafts aiming at improvement;
• Train faculty in how to teach writing and revision effectively;
• Improve the training of student writing tutors and creating a culture in which the opportunity to work with a student writing tutor to improve papers is utilized by more Hope students to improve their writing at all levels. 

 
Costs and Resources.  We realized that writing instruction raises issues about enrollment limits in writing-instruction courses, which in turn raise issues about instructional costs, equity, and instructional quality. Faculty development opportunities aimed at improving writing instruction also have costs.  Hope needs a strong multi-purpose Writing Center, as emphasized in the report by the 2008-09 Writing Center Task Force.  Where will we get funding to make that possible?  What affordable changes can be made to improve writing-tutorial services until a full-scale Writing Center can be funded and implemented?

Presented to the Hope Faculty  
October 27, 2009

Barbara Mezeske, English
Jeffrey Polet, Political Science
Rich Ray, Dean of Social Science
Mike Seymour, Chemistry
Carol Simon, Philosophy and Director of General Education and IDS