Making Time for Writing Pedagogy: Introducing the UTM Faculty Writing Fellowship
Submitted by: Michael Kaler, Mairi Cowan, and Tyler Evans-Tokaryk
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University instructors know that in order to be effective, they need to continually update and refine their course materials, activities, and pedagogical strategies. They also know that the process of revising a course is an extremely labour-intensive one, involving not just planning in a specific course, but also time for reflection and, ideally, for research into contexts, precedents, and strategies employed elsewhere.
The UTM Faculty Writing Fellowship program has been developed to help faculty address this challenge. The Office of the Dean and the Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre have created this fellowship to provide instructors with three very precious resources—namely time, support, and community—to help them investigate innovative strategies for integrating writing instruction in their courses or using writing to improve student engagement and learning.
The time is created by providing Fellows with a 0.5 FCE course release from their regular teaching duties. The support is given by the RGASC, which provides office space and administrative support (as needed) for Fellows, as well as the collaboration of the RGASC’s Writing Specialist and the opportunity to draw on the skills of the other RGASC faculty and staff. As they conduct their research, Writing Fellows contribute to the writing community at UTM through participation in TA and writing instructor training at the RGASC, the creation and facilitation of a Teaching-Learning-Collaboration Group seminar on academic writing instruction, and the development of exercises or projects to be carried out in their courses. Thinking about community more broadly, we hope that the innovative work of the Writing Fellows will be showcased in other fora as well, contributing to research on writing pedagogy nationally and internationally.
The first recipient of this new fellowship is Professor Mairi Cowan from the Department of Historical Studies. Throughout the Winter 2018 term, Professor Cowan will be studying how a revise-and-resubmit assignment can help both students and instructors. Her research builds on her work in HIS101H, Introduction to History. In this course, students write a Primary Source Study, submit it, and get it back with a grade and feedback from the TAs. Up to this point, it is a conventional assignment; the next step, however, brings students into the less familiar territory of being held to account for how they use feedback. They revise their Primary Source Study in light of their TAs’ questions and comments, and resubmit it along with a cover letter explaining the changes they have made.
After talking with students and TAs about this assignment, Professor Cowan has noticed two important things about the benefits of revision. The first is that students’ writing skills generally improve over the course of revising, but not equally well in all areas: some suggestions for improvement are consistently addressed, while others tend to be ignored. This unevenness has inspired her to look more deeply into why students find some kinds of feedback easier to implement than others. The HIS101 TAs noticed the unevenness too, which led Professor Cowan to a second observation about the revise-and-resubmit assignment: when instructors see how students interpret (or misinterpret) feedback, they can learn whether their comments and questions are as clear and helpful as they hope or presume.
Professor Cowan will be using the Writing Fellowship to investigate her initial impressions more rigorously than the timeline of a course normally permits. She will analyze samples of student work to determine which characteristics of feedback are most likely to help students improve their writing, and then she will conduct focus groups with TAs to find out from them how seeing students revise in response to feedback encourages a reconsideration of how they offer this feedback. Ultimately, she hopes this fellowship will generate new insights into the most effective strategies for providing feedback on student writing, making this research very relevant not only to her own teaching in History, but also to instructors across the curriculum.
Professor Cowan will be discussing her work and her preliminary results at a Teaching-Learning-Collaboration seminar in April; we encourage readers to come and hear what she has learned!
We anticipate that one new Writing Fellowship will be awarded each Winter term. For those interested in applying, the CFP for the 2018-2019 competition can be found on the RGASC’s website at http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/asc/rgasc-opportunities. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 18, 2018.
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