ºÚÁÏÉçÇø

Faculty members from any college may apply to participate in teams from their departments/programs. Teams should consist of 3 to 5 faculty members from the same program/department. Teams bring a wider view of the discipline/department, can collaborate to generate ideas, and are more likely than a single individual to be able to return to their departments and effect change.

Faculty Fellows meet every week for 1.5 hours for a full semester during the regular academic year. If a summer session is offered, fellows will meet daily for 2 to 3 weeks.

During the program, faculty will complete short readings, engage in collaborative activities, and be immersed in research and exploration of writing in their departments and programs.

Each faculty member who completes the full program and creates the required materials will receive $2,000 in professional development funds and will be able to use the title “Howe Faculty Writing Fellow” for the duration of their time at Miami. These faculty members and their home departments will also be eligible for additional resources after completing the program.

The program acquaints participants with relevant theory and research about writing, teaching, learning, curriculum design, and assessment that they can immediately put in to use in their courses and programs. As a full group, participants engage readings and activities around the following topics for the first two-thirds of the program:

• Exploration of threshold concepts: Threshold concepts are concepts critical for epistemological participation in a discipline (see Meyer and Land). They cannot be learned in one course or via one assignment, but are learned across time, requiring ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs to engage central but troublesome knowledge in an uncomfortable liminal space. What are some of your discipline’s threshold concepts? What are some threshold concepts about writing that are of particular relevance to your ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs? Where and how can these be better integrated into your curriculum? How can writing support the learning of your discipline’s threshold concepts?
• Disciplinary values as embodied in writing: Writing is a social and rhetorical practice that both embodies and creates values and practices. Teams examine writing from across the represented disciplines to consider what “good writing” looks like in different contexts.
• Consideration of how learning and transfer of knowledge work: Frequently ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs do not draw on their prior knowledge effectively or at all when moving from course to course. What does the research on transfer tell us that can help you encourage ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs to more effectively use what they know to solve problems in new settings?
• Overview of best practices for designing writing assignments: What do you need your ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs to learn from your writing assignments? How do you design effective writing assignments that meet your particular disciplinary needs? How do you assign and teach those assignments for maximum learning?
• Overview of best practices for responding to and assessing writing assignments: How do you make the best use of your time when responding to ºÚÁÏÉçÇø writing? What do we know about how ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs read and understand faculty comments?

In the last third of the program, each disciplinary team determines and works on their project together.