After years of teaching history and humanities at the college level, I still found myself frustrated with the disparities between what I thought I was asking my students to accomplish within a writing assignment and the product they submitted. I could not see the forest for the trees. It was time to take a hard look at my writing assignments. The WAC program offered the time and space to revise... Read More

As we came into the 2012 Summer WAC Fellows Program, we each brought a desire to make student writing a more important part of our courses. The desire was nothing new, but for each of us it had become one of those things that had fallen victim to other things cutting in line on our “do to” lists. The 2012 Summer WAC Fellows Program proved to be wonderful opportunity for us to be immersed in... Read More

The Rosen College of Hospitality Management serves the industry that has helped make Orlando a great tourist destination as well as a great place to live. Our writing assignments are truly unique from any other college at UCF. Five faculty from two departments became WAC fellows between spring and summer in 2012. What a treasured opportunity to interact with and learn from colleagues across the... Read More

As faculty, we strive to provide our students with the finest learning experiences we can. Our journey with the WAC Fellows Program began by selecting one of our department’s courses to restructure with the goal of improving student writing and critical thinking. During the program we established an inventory of discipline-specific learning outcomes, modalities of knowledge acquisition and... Read More

"Wow!!! What a great start to the semester. Your discussion yesterday made a wonderful impression on the students and I think has set them up well for their assignments. I will keep you apprised of the progress throughout the Spring. I think with your help we may have been able to raise the bar on my expectations. Thank you for your expertise &... Read More

Writing is an element of every class I teach. I wanted to update my written assignments, but I was uncertain what to change and how. I met with Lindee, shared my existing syllabi, and described my written assignments. Lindee provided direct feedback, and suggested alternatives. Because I teach three subjects, in both lower and upper level courses, the areas of focus were quite different. As a... Read More

I met with Lindee Owens and Pavel Zemliansky in hopes of getting some guidance in how I could effectively introduce writing into my Computer Science courses. They helped me come up with ideas for assignments. After I received my first writing assignment for Discrete Structures II, Lindee examined a sample of my students' work to help me provide feedback to the class. Lindee confirmed my initial... Read More

In nursing, we have struggled with teaching students how to write professionally and technically for a nursing audience. Nursing students use many different styles of writing during the curriculum including writing informal journal entries, health assessments, case studies, and progress notes. These styles are very different from a formal paper. During the WAC Fellowship, the nursing faculty... Read More

The WAC Fellows Program created a unique space for us to explore, through interdisciplinary plenary sessions and departmental workshops, the connection between writing assignments and discipline-specific learning outcomes. Program coordinators Pavel Zemliansky and Lindee Owens provided us with a clear pedagogical framework for our work, combining mini-lectures and handouts with selected chapters... Read More

As part of the WAC Fellows program our team articulated departmental writing objectives in addition to targeting two high impact areas of the chemistry program. We concentrated on low stakes writing at the introductory level as well as high stakes writing at the senior level. As we shifted our focus on why we have students write, we better aligned our writing assignments to our learning goals.... Read More

The 2012 Summer WAC Fellows Program allowed us to work with a diverse set of colleagues to create writing outcomes and assignments for our courses. The feedback we received from Pavel, Lindee and the other groups helped us focus on the aspects of writing that are most important for our students. We were pleasantly surprised with the different types of assignments we learned about that will help... Read More