Elizabeth Wardle
My Approach to Teaching and Learning
Concerns about bad writing are longstanding in this country. Even in the late 1800s, people complained that students couldn’t write because they were “idlers and loungers” and had been negatively influenced by popular novels and badly written newspaper articles. However, research tells us that students don’t write any better or worse than they always have. Technologies and audiences and contexts change, but students are still what they have always been: learners. Research tells us that the way to help learners of all kinds write more effectively is to provide them with many opportunities to write in different contexts with feedback. There is no shortcut to doing this work, and it requires faculty from all disciplines to take shared responsibility for helping students learn to write. My career has been committed to taking what we know about writing from the research and putting it into practice — not only in my own classroom but also to help improve courses and programs across the university. This, to me, is the essence of the teacher-scholar model: that research informs teaching, and vice versa.
My Teacher-Scholar Journey
I study how writing works and how programs can be better designed to ensure that students learn to write effectively across all of their courses. Research, teaching, program design, and teacher development are integrally entwined in all of my work. I am nationally known for helping to lead a movement to change how we teach first-year composition in this country. My co-authored textbook on this topic, “Writing about Writing,” is used in over 400 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, and is now in its 5th edition. Since coming to Miami, my focus has shifted to studying and supporting the teaching and learning of writing across all disciplines. In the Howe Center, we innovated a program for doing this work, the Howe Faculty Writing Fellows Program, which is now a national model. With 22 Miami faculty who completed the program, we recently published “Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching across Disciplines.” Our goal in the Howe Center is to innovate teaching with and about writing from the research, with our colleagues across the university, and then study what works in order to then produce additional research about it. We are setting an example nationally for how to do this. Again, this is the teacher-scholar model in action — beyond one course or one classroom.
Knowledge is Power
“Miami takes seriously our shared responsibility to teach with and from the research about writing in order to provide the most innovative education in the country.”
Education
Ph.D. Iowa State University
M.A. University of Louisville
B.A. University of Louisville
More About Me
I have published six books about teaching and writing, and published over 30 articles and book chapters on these topics. I have led two different writing programs that won our field’s prestigious Writing Program Certificate of Excellence (2013 and 2022), and led the Howe Writing Across the Curriculum Program to receive the Exemplary Enduring WAC Program Award (2022). I have won multiple national awards for outstanding scholarship and was awarded Miami’s University Distinguished Scholar Award in 2020.