At the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication in Houston, TX, Alice Myatt, Jeanine Rauch and Rachel Johnson hosted a panel presentation entitled “Inspiring Action by Enabling Agency in Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing Courses.”
The presentation specifically explored the challenge faculty teaching advanced writing courses face of developing and delivering curriculum designed to prepare diverse, interdisciplinary groups of students for writing in upper-level courses for their majors while addressing writing concerns that are common to the academy as a whole — or writing outside the disciplines. Jeanine Rauch, the chair of the panel, presented on strategies for building student confidence through unexpected or unconventional writing activities. These approaches combine to inspire, motivate, and move students to take action, giving student writers the skills necessary to express their thoughts in clear, understandable language. Alice Myatt addressed the experiences of transfer students as well as strategies to encourage students to explore issues in their disciplines that would be served by action-oriented research, thus motivating students to become/think of themselves as active researchers. Rachel Johnson focused on a recent faculty/writing center research partnership on the regional campus, sharing how the results of this collaboration are used to customize/inform course instruction and inspire connections between students’ chosen fields of study and writing produced during the course.