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Faculty Writing Fellows Program

Every semester, Howe Writing Across the Curriculum (HWAC) hosts our innovative Faculty Writing Fellows Program. The Program supports teams of faculty in their efforts to teach students to write more effectively in their discipline and promote deep learning.

Resources for Fellows Alumni

We continue to support Fellows after their time in the program through alumni events, grants, and the Howe Writing Center's Writing Associate Program.

Fellows Program Alumni

Over 120 Miami faculty from every Miami division have completed the Fellows program since its inception in 2017.

List of Fellows' Final Projects

During the last third of the Faculty Fellows program, faculty teams work independently on a project of their choosing to improve the teaching of writing within their department.

Faculty Writing Fellows Overview

The Faculty Writing Fellows Program is a semester-long master class that supports faculty members and their departments/programs in their efforts to teach students to write more effectively in their disciplines and professions and to use writing in ways that encourage deep learning of disciplinary material. The goal of the program is to engage teams of faculty members in collaborative work together that will be of use to their departments.

All participants should finish the program with new ideas for writing assignments, new strategies for teaching writing, new writing-intensive course ideas, and/or suggestions for their departments on how to improve the overall teaching of writing of their majors, minors, and graduate students. At the end of the program, Fellows return to their departments to present their ideas and make suggestions for ways to integrate writing into their courses and programs to meet goals and needs that are specific to their context.

Participation and Commitment

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.

Incentives for Participating

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.

Topics and Activities

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 students 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 students? 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 student writing? What do we know about how students read and understand faculty comments?
In the last third of the program, each disciplinary team determines and works on their project together.

Howe Writing Across the Curriculum Programs

The mission of the Howe Writing Across the Curriculum Programs is to ensure that all Miami faculty and graduate teaching assistants can effectively include writing as a means to support learning in their courses and programs.

2022 Writing Program Certificate of Excellence

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2022 Exemplary Enduring WAC Program

2022 Exemplary Enduring WAC Program Award