Assessment Details
Academic Year: 2020-2021 Level: Undergraduate
Campus Department: Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences [UG and Grad]
Program Type: Core [UG]
Program Name: English First Year Writing Seminar Core (Link)
Description of Data Collection:
We conducted an external review of the FWS Program in 2011 facilitated by the Council of Writing Program Administrators. The assessment required an in-depth self-study and
resulted in a detailed report from the evaluators (housed within FWS program). One of the recommendations from the external review is that FWS Directorship should be shared
among two directors who trade on and off in 4- to 5-year increments. “No one should be director for life,” the report stated. Paula Mathieu has been directing the program since
2009 without a break. We conducted an internal assessment of student writing in 2013-2015, where we chose one outcome (critical reading and writing) to assess. We asked all instructors to submit three essays where all instructor and student names had been removed. We performed a two-step process: a norming session to determine what we meant by a 2, 3, 4 or 5 in each category. Then we randomly selected essays to evaluate. This assessment was completed by a committee of composition staff (the faculty director and three instructors and program mentors) performed the assessment: one selected a range of essays for the other three to norm. Then we all worked together to assess a random group of essays.
Review Process:
Our assessment process for the past two years has prioritized realizing the recommendation from the 2011 External Review that we hire another faculty member to take a turn directing FWS. In spring 2020, the English Department voted to request from BC Administration a Tenure-Track hire in Rhetoric and Writing Studies. That hire was approved in October 2021. We conducted a national search, received 145 applications, and our committee interviewed 15 candidates to identify three finalists. In the end, we hired Dr. Jessica Pauszek who has been writing program director at UT-Commerce and a PhD from Syracuse University. Once Dr. Pauszek is settled into BC, we will plan to review and possibly revise our FWS criteria and set new assessment goals and agendas. With her pending arrival, we will plan new innovations and revisit assessment plant with her input.
Resulting Program Changes:
1. A Focus on Online and Distanced In-Person Pedagogy: The Covid-19 pandemic has required all FWS support and resources be devoted to helping our faculty and students adapt to the spring 2020 switch to online learning, the uncertainty of summer 2020, and then a 2020-2021 year with a mix of mostly in-person FWS classes and some remote courses. All in-person classes have also had to accommodate students who were temporarily or permanently off-campus and attending remotely. Given that the vast majority of FWS classes
are taught by graduate-student Teaching Fellows or adjunct faculty, our challenges were especially high. Our program created google docs of best practices, sponsored zoom meetings particular to FWS, stayed in close contact with our instructors, and our FWS mentors worked closely with our graduate teaching fellows to help them adjust to the changing needs of the moment, from remote pedagogy, to in-person, and sometimes back to remote pedagogy. For fall 2020, we had 9 new MA teaching fellows and 4 PhD teaching fellows who taught FWS for the first time. They revised assignments and adapted workshop guidelines to allow for social distancing and to meet university rules against penalizing absence. Supporting these new instructors, while also supporting our ongoing faculty, was the most significant challenge we faced this year.
2. Hiring Long-Term Faculty Roughly 83% of FWS classes are taught by graduate-student Teaching Fellows or adjunct faculty, meaning only 17% of our students take FWS with an instructor who has a long-term relationship with BC. To better teach and support our students, the English Department requested a Professor of the Practice slot to work with First-Year students and direct the Writing Fellows Program. That decision was approved by the Deans office in 2020, but, given the hiring freezes due to Covid-19, it was changed to a visiting position for one year.
3. Tracking Who Takes FWS When We found that some students delay taking First-Year Writing until later in their undergraduate years. Having juniors and seniors in a class designed for freshman is not optimal. In spring 2020, we piloted a core writing course designed for upper-level students, where they could learn rhetorical awareness, critical reading and writing and, and revision, but apply them to their major area of study. We will look at these evaluations to judge this pilot, but might need to run it again due to the 2020 Covid-19 switch
to remote teaching.
4. Writing Center Pilot: The BC Writing Center, in its second year of a pilot phase, doubled its visits and maxed out tutor availability, even with a switch to remote tutoring due to the pandemic. The Writing Center Pilot was co-created by the FWS Director, the Director of ELL Writing, and the Director of the Writing Fellows Program and tutoring begin October 1, 2019. We have received funding for one additional year of pilot funding to explore future options for the program. While this program is not directly related the FWS Program, the
Writing Center and FWS share a common goal of encouraging students to be more effective, curious, and reflective writers—and it is a project the FWS
Director supports with time and resources. We look forward to FWS and a BC Writing Center sharing resources and supports for student writers during and beyond this seminar.
5. Enrichment Opportunities. In May 2018 and June 2019, the Boston College First-Year Writing Program hosted the 7th and 8th Annual Boston Rhetoric and Writing Network (BRAWN) Summer Institute, which is a free institute, open by application, to teachers of college-level writing in the Boston area. The institute, which has been supported with funds from MIT, Boston University, Northeastern, and U Mass Boston as well as Boston College, annually hosted 100 teachers of writing for two days with two keynote addresses by prominent local scholars (Neal Lerner from Northeastern and Tamera Marko from Emerson College in 2018; Jessica Restaino from Montclair State U in 2019) and
16 workshops on topics ranging from anti-racist assessment practices to visual learning strategies and designing effective writing prompts. Seven BC FWS
faculty took part in the 2018 Institute, and eight attended the 2019 event. There was no Summer Institute in 2020 but a 2021 institute will take place in June. The call has been circulated to all FWS faculty and Teaching Fellows, who have been encouraged to attend.
6. Core Renewal Through the Core Renewal Program, Paula Mathieu, FWS Director, taught an Enduring Questions paired course with Lisa Friedman in Educational Psychology, for Fall 2018 and fall 2019. The course, Writing for Social Action, pairs with social-science course on inequality in the US, to teach writing as a tool of inquiry and social transformation. Eileen Donovan-Kranz taught another pilot, Writing as Activism, open to students in the PULSE and other service programs. By reflecting on these pilot courses, the FWS Program
will seek more ways that students might engage in meaningful writing and the course’s relationship to the core overall. We will evaluate these core courses in 2022 and consider plan for moving forward.
7. Revised Graduate Pedagogy In Spring 2018, Paula Mathieu revamped ENGL8825, the graduate seminar to prepare new teachers of writing, to focus more directly on writing-to-learn activities and meaningful writing and to make the development of syllabi and assignments even more central to the work of the course. She invited both outside presenters to take part in the course and arranged for a highly effective graduate instructor (Mary Crane) to visit the class to offer feedback and support. It is an ongoing goal of the FWS program to continue to improve its preparation and support for all FWS faculty.
8. Streamlined Mission Statement In Spring 2017, working with Julian Bourg, Dean of the Core, the FWS Program wrote a new mission statement, to share the
goals of the program widely: The FWS Program invites students to explore why one writes, in order to help them see writing as an intellectual and personal tool for living that can be
developed and honed. Writing-core courses ask students to write and rewrite in a variety of genres, discuss their works-in-progress in class, and receive individualized feedback from their instructors. Classroom activities center around the ways writing and revising help reveal new insights, orient ourselves to broader conversations, deepen our ability to communicate with others, express what is important to us, and create changes in service of the common good.
9. Focus on Critical Reading and Writing. In our 2013-2015 writing assessment, we found that students were engaging in critical reading and writing fairly well but could use improvement in putting themselves into conversation with sources and ideas of other writers. Since 2014, we have adopted new approaches to teaching and mentoring new instructors, drawing specifically on Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, to focus on helping students work critically and creatively with the words and ideas of others. In 2015, we formally added a requirement to FWS: At least one assignment should ask students to work critically with an academic text and put it into
conversation with other texts and ideas.
10. Improving Our Mentoring of New Instructors Thanks to a 2015 TAM grant, we completed a mentoring handbook, to help train FWS mentors, who play a key role in training graduate students in revising their syllabi and making lesson plans. They coach TFs throughout the summer before teaching, and during the year meet regularly and visit classes. Form prepared by Paula Mathieu, Director, First-Year Writing. Associate Professor, English Department. Please email mathiepa@bc.edu with any questions.
Date of Most Recent Program Review:
1. A Focus on Online and Distanced In-Person Pedagogy: The Covid-19 pandemic has required all FWS support and resources be devoted to helping our faculty and students adapt to the spring 2020 switch to online learning, the uncertainty of summer 2020, and then a 2020-2021 year with a mix of mostly in-person FWS classes and some remote courses. All in-person classes have also had to accommodate students who were temporarily or permanently off-campus and attending remotely. Given that the vast majority of FWS classes
are taught by graduate-student Teaching Fellows or adjunct faculty, our challenges were especially high. Our program created google docs of best practices, sponsored zoom meetings particular to FWS, stayed in close contact with our instructors, and our FWS mentors worked closely with our graduate teaching fellows to help them adjust to the changing needs of the moment, from remote pedagogy, to in-person, and sometimes back to remote pedagogy. For fall 2020, we had 9 new MA teaching fellows and 4 PhD teaching fellows who taught FWS for the first time. They revised assignments and adapted workshop guidelines to allow for social distancing and to meet university rules against penalizing absence. Supporting these new instructors, while also supporting our ongoing faculty, was the most significant challenge we faced this year.
2. Hiring Long-Term Faculty Roughly 83% of FWS classes are taught by graduate-student Teaching Fellows or adjunct faculty, meaning only 17% of our students take FWS with an instructor who has a long-term relationship with BC. To better teach and support our students, the English Department requested a Professor of the Practice slot to work with First-Year students and direct the Writing Fellows Program. That decision was approved by the Deans office in 2020, but, given the hiring freezes due to Covid-19, it was changed to a visiting position for one year.
3. Tracking Who Takes FWS When We found that some students delay taking First-Year Writing until later in their undergraduate years. Having juniors and seniors in a class designed for freshman is not optimal. In spring 2020, we piloted a core writing course designed for upper-level students, where they could learn rhetorical awareness, critical reading and writing and, and revision, but apply them to their major area of study. We will look at these evaluations to judge this pilot, but might need to run it again due to the 2020 Covid-19 switch
to remote teaching.
4. Writing Center Pilot: The BC Writing Center, in its second year of a pilot phase, doubled its visits and maxed out tutor availability, even with a switch to remote tutoring due to the pandemic. The Writing Center Pilot was co-created by the FWS Director, the Director of ELL Writing, and the Director of the Writing Fellows Program and tutoring begin October 1, 2019. We have received funding for one additional year of pilot funding to explore future options for the program. While this program is not directly related the FWS Program, the
Writing Center and FWS share a common goal of encouraging students to be more effective, curious, and reflective writers—and it is a project the FWS
Director supports with time and resources. We look forward to FWS and a BC Writing Center sharing resources and supports for student writers during and beyond this seminar.
5. Enrichment Opportunities. In May 2018 and June 2019, the Boston College First-Year Writing Program hosted the 7th and 8th Annual Boston Rhetoric and Writing Network (BRAWN) Summer Institute, which is a free institute, open by application, to teachers of college-level writing in the Boston area. The institute, which has been supported with funds from MIT, Boston University, Northeastern, and U Mass Boston as well as Boston College, annually hosted 100 teachers of writing for two days with two keynote addresses by prominent local scholars (Neal Lerner from Northeastern and Tamera Marko from Emerson College in 2018; Jessica Restaino from Montclair State U in 2019) and
16 workshops on topics ranging from anti-racist assessment practices to visual learning strategies and designing effective writing prompts. Seven BC FWS
faculty took part in the 2018 Institute, and eight attended the 2019 event. There was no Summer Institute in 2020 but a 2021 institute will take place in June. The call has been circulated to all FWS faculty and Teaching Fellows, who have been encouraged to attend.
6. Core Renewal Through the Core Renewal Program, Paula Mathieu, FWS Director, taught an Enduring Questions paired course with Lisa Friedman in Educational Psychology, for Fall 2018 and fall 2019. The course, Writing for Social Action, pairs with social-science course on inequality in the US, to teach writing as a tool of inquiry and social transformation. Eileen Donovan-Kranz taught another pilot, Writing as Activism, open to students in the PULSE and other service programs. By reflecting on these pilot courses, the FWS Program
will seek more ways that students might engage in meaningful writing and the course’s relationship to the core overall. We will evaluate these core courses in 2022 and consider plan for moving forward.
7. Revised Graduate Pedagogy In Spring 2018, Paula Mathieu revamped ENGL8825, the graduate seminar to prepare new teachers of writing, to focus more directly on writing-to-learn activities and meaningful writing and to make the development of syllabi and assignments even more central to the work of the course. She invited both outside presenters to take part in the course and arranged for a highly effective graduate instructor (Mary Crane) to visit the class to offer feedback and support. It is an ongoing goal of the FWS program to continue to improve its preparation and support for all FWS faculty.
8. Streamlined Mission Statement In Spring 2017, working with Julian Bourg, Dean of the Core, the FWS Program wrote a new mission statement, to share the
goals of the program widely: The FWS Program invites students to explore why one writes, in order to help them see writing as an intellectual and personal tool for living that can be
developed and honed. Writing-core courses ask students to write and rewrite in a variety of genres, discuss their works-in-progress in class, and receive individualized feedback from their instructors. Classroom activities center around the ways writing and revising help reveal new insights, orient ourselves to broader conversations, deepen our ability to communicate with others, express what is important to us, and create changes in service of the common good.
9. Focus on Critical Reading and Writing. In our 2013-2015 writing assessment, we found that students were engaging in critical reading and writing fairly well but could use improvement in putting themselves into conversation with sources and ideas of other writers. Since 2014, we have adopted new approaches to teaching and mentoring new instructors, drawing specifically on Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, to focus on helping students work critically and creatively with the words and ideas of others. In 2015, we formally added a requirement to FWS: At least one assignment should ask students to work critically with an academic text and put it into
conversation with other texts and ideas.
10. Improving Our Mentoring of New Instructors Thanks to a 2015 TAM grant, we completed a mentoring handbook, to help train FWS mentors, who play a key role in training graduate students in revising their syllabi and making lesson plans. They coach TFs throughout the summer before teaching, and during the year meet regularly and visit classes. Form prepared by Paula Mathieu, Director, First-Year Writing. Associate Professor, English Department. Please email mathiepa@bc.edu with any questions.
Attachments (if available)