Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
In addition to facilitating a conversation about active learning practices at Lamar University by co-editing a collection of successful faculty interventions in the classroom, I am pursuing two major SoTL projects of my own for presentation and publication, one of which was grant-funded.
“Effects of cooperative writing activities in small learning teams on retention, peer response, and philosophical argumentation in a large online course”
In 2013 and 2014, I conducted a grant-funded research study in a large online philosophy course.
In November, 2014, my project was featured by the granting agency. http://facultyecommons.org/faculty-spotlight-dr-amy-c-smith/
A full report of my findings can be found at http://facultyecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Effects-of-cooperative-writing-activities-in-small-learning-teams-on-retention-peer-response-and-philosophical-argumentation-in-a-large-online-course.pdf
I am at work on a series of articles resulting from this research.
"Team-based undergraduate research for a peer audience in a second-semester writing course" (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2015)
Implementing team-based undergraduate research in first-year writing courses is a risky endeavor with the potential for huge rewards. Downs and Wardle (2010) argue that students can most readily conduct "genuinely contributive research" in writing courses focused on writing and further that faculty’s likely familiarity with writing studies enables them to better mentor student researchers. While such an approach is clearly beneficial, many departments, especially in the southern US, require such courses to teach literary analysis alongside writing and research, and many instructors of these courses are literary scholars, not composition and rhetoric specialists. I am such an instructor in such a department.
In this presentation I describe a complementary approach to Downs and Wardle’s based on an evolving innovation in a second-semester writing course, the Lamar Critical Editions project. Student teams research and write websites modeled on Norton Critical Editions that serve as resources for other undergraduates studying these works. Students develop critical reading skills, embodying the advice of Alice Horning (2007) and Rebecca Moore Howard et al (2010), by researching and writing about relevant contexts and by summarizing criticism by the most influential voices in the critical conversation surrounding their chosen literature. They practice writing across genres that inform one another, culminating in a critical research paper that grows out of the team’s research. By collaboratively conducting contributive research that is made available to a readily identifiable audience of their peers rather than a remote audience of literary specialists (see Lunsford & Ede 1984), students make huge gains in maturity and confidence, producing valuable original research, developing ownership of the discipline (Lancy 2003), and taking their place in the university’s production of knowledge. By discussing the rewards and pitfalls I have encountered during two implementations of this project as well as changes implemented in Spring 2015, I seek to offer an ambitious model for successful development of undergraduate researchers in the first-year writing-about-literature classroom.
“Effects of cooperative writing activities in small learning teams on retention, peer response, and philosophical argumentation in a large online course”
In 2013 and 2014, I conducted a grant-funded research study in a large online philosophy course.
In November, 2014, my project was featured by the granting agency. http://facultyecommons.org/faculty-spotlight-dr-amy-c-smith/
A full report of my findings can be found at http://facultyecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Effects-of-cooperative-writing-activities-in-small-learning-teams-on-retention-peer-response-and-philosophical-argumentation-in-a-large-online-course.pdf
I am at work on a series of articles resulting from this research.
"Team-based undergraduate research for a peer audience in a second-semester writing course" (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2015)
Implementing team-based undergraduate research in first-year writing courses is a risky endeavor with the potential for huge rewards. Downs and Wardle (2010) argue that students can most readily conduct "genuinely contributive research" in writing courses focused on writing and further that faculty’s likely familiarity with writing studies enables them to better mentor student researchers. While such an approach is clearly beneficial, many departments, especially in the southern US, require such courses to teach literary analysis alongside writing and research, and many instructors of these courses are literary scholars, not composition and rhetoric specialists. I am such an instructor in such a department.
In this presentation I describe a complementary approach to Downs and Wardle’s based on an evolving innovation in a second-semester writing course, the Lamar Critical Editions project. Student teams research and write websites modeled on Norton Critical Editions that serve as resources for other undergraduates studying these works. Students develop critical reading skills, embodying the advice of Alice Horning (2007) and Rebecca Moore Howard et al (2010), by researching and writing about relevant contexts and by summarizing criticism by the most influential voices in the critical conversation surrounding their chosen literature. They practice writing across genres that inform one another, culminating in a critical research paper that grows out of the team’s research. By collaboratively conducting contributive research that is made available to a readily identifiable audience of their peers rather than a remote audience of literary specialists (see Lunsford & Ede 1984), students make huge gains in maturity and confidence, producing valuable original research, developing ownership of the discipline (Lancy 2003), and taking their place in the university’s production of knowledge. By discussing the rewards and pitfalls I have encountered during two implementations of this project as well as changes implemented in Spring 2015, I seek to offer an ambitious model for successful development of undergraduate researchers in the first-year writing-about-literature classroom.
