Working with Faculty Writers

7. Supporting a Culture of Writing: Faculty Writing Residencies as a WAC Initiative

DOI: 10.7330/9780874219029.c007 7 S u pp o r t i n g a C u lt u r e o f W r i t i n g Faculty Writing Residencies as a WAC Initiative Jessie L. Moore, Peter Felten, and Michael Strickland In a recent analysis of teaching and learning in US higher education, Hutchings, Huber, and Ciccone argue that “Educational innovation today invites, even requires, levels of preparation, imagination, collaboration , and support that are not always a good fit (to say the least) with the inherited routines of academic life” (Hutchings, Huber, and Ciccone 2011, 6). As we have worked to enhance and deepen faculty writing at Elon University, this statement has resonated with us. With increasing expectations for scholarship at our institution, as well as our own goal of growing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at Elon, we often find ourselves helping faculty work against the flow of their inherited teaching and service routines to make space for innovative writing projects. Faculty writing residencies offer a break from these routines so that faculty can jumpstart their writing—with imagination, collaboration, and support. Elon University is a 6,000 student private (primarily undergraduate) university in central North Carolina. Teaching traditionally has been the main criteria for faculty promotion and tenure, but expectations for scholarly activity have increased over the past decade. Elon follows Boyer’s (1997) definition of scholarship, making space for faculty to have SoTL as a component, or even the central focus, of their research agendas. However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, faculty SoTL projects usually existed in isolation on campus, and many did not result in peer reviewed publications or off-campus scholarly presentations. In 2005–2006, when the authors of this chapter assessed the gap between the number of SoTL inquiry projects at Elon and the number 128   J essie L. Moore, Peter Felten, and Michae l Strickland of SoTL publications being produced by our colleagues, we identified two common problems faculty encountered related to SoTL writing. First, while faculty receive some training in writing for a particular discipline (although Ambos, Wiley, and Allen, 2009 note that training’s limitations), SoTL writing requires faculty to consider, often for the first time, how to write about classroom practice and evidence of student learning, raising sometimes troubling questions about genre, voice, and expertise (Cambridge 2004). Without such support, faculty may not successfully publish even otherwise high-quality SoTL work (Gale 2008; Peters, Schodt and Walczak 2008). Second, many Elon faculty felt relatively isolated in their SoTL work—particularly in what Lee Shulman (2004) calls the “going public” portion of the scholarly process. Since research suggests that feeling part of a supportive community of writing peers is important to productivity (Eodice and Cramer 2003; Lee and Boud 2003; Belcher 2009), the silos that separated faculty and their projects represented a real barrier to SoTL writing in our context . Faculty struggled to identify viable publication venues for SoTL projects (particularly if the main journals in their discipline did not regularly publish SoTL work) and for strategies and feedback on how to write about SoTL. Throughout their graduate educations and professional careers, faculty develop strategies for writing in their disciplines, but most do not encounter professional development on learning to write for other audiences or how to describe research methods and results that are outside of their narrow disciplinary training (Hutchings, Huber, and Ciccone 2011). To fill those gaps, the authors created a “faculty writing residency.” This approach represented a new kind of faculty development on our campus. Our well-established Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program traditionally offered practical workshops for faculty using writing in their courses, while our new Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) focused on other pedagogical concerns . Neither had a record of supporting faculty doing their own scholarly writing, and they had only begun to work together during CATL’s first year of existence. The writing residency, then, represented just the kind of new collaboration that Hutchings, Huber, and Ciccone identify as necessary in academia. While we do not claim to have created an ideal model, our experience over the past six years demonstrates the power and potential for faculty development partnerships to promote faculty writing and to enhance writing pedagogy. Supporting a Culture of Writing    129 Cre ating and Refi n i n g Elon ’ s Facu lt y Writ ing R es idency Typically, the professional writing of faculty is not considered within...