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Meeting Minutes

November 22, 2005

Announcements:

It was announced that Bob White supplied a book to the task force about study abroad and internationalizing the curriculum.

A letter to the chairs went out today asking for departments to submit a statement concerning their interest in general education. A March 10 deadline has been set for their statements to be received.

Alexandra Hellenbrand reported that there was good conversation in her small discussion group last week. Five people came. Participants said that in order to get the campus to buy into general education, we need to infuse the curriculum and ourselves with the enthusiasm needed to implement these ideas. We need to get departments involved. They felt that the process still needs a bit of explaining. People are still looking for ways into the process. They asked if there was a reward for being innovative in intro-level courses. They questioned how well we are doing in general education.

Keefe asked if there was a feeling that we’d like to continue these small discussion groups in the spring. There was general agreement that we would. It was suggested that there be more publicity for these discussion groups. The discussion groups will be scheduled every two weeks next semester. We could narrow the invitations to specific groups later on, e.g. math & science, arts & humanities.

Subcommittee Reports:

1. Models subcommittee
Friday, December 2nd, at 9:00 am, we will meet to look at all of the Gen Ed models from AAC&U in Sigmon’s office, in room 365 in the CAP Building. Two will be selected to present at the January forum.

2. Core curriculum critique subcommittee
This group will meet today after this meeting and on Nov. 29 at 1pm.

3. Alumni and Employers Subcommittee
They met last Thursday and will try having a focus group at the job fest.

4. Community College/High School Subcommittee
Joni Petschauer said there will be a meeting this afternoon at the Broyhill Inn. This will be an open conversation to set the stage for our group to provide a better curriculum to our students.

Presentation by Georgia Rhoades and Beth Carroll: Writing Across the Curriculum:

Faculty development will be important for writing across the curriculum (WAC). We don’t teach writing the way we used to. We used to give topics to students who weren’t prepared and who had a limited amount of time. Now we think of writing as a way to learn and discover what we think. People started looking back at classical rhetoric where writers have authority. Students don’t have this authority and must write “as if”. This is okay. We had been focused for a long time on the product. But students are not all English majors and we need to prepare them for all kinds of writing. One thing we began to do was talking to people about writing in other departments. Some began to do collaborative writing products. Reading and responding to each other’s writing. One of the things that might be wrong is that all of the writing instruction currently is focused in the first two semesters, and then the students forget. They need to write more extensively in order to develop their voice. There is the problem of many students who only know how to imitate and copy what their teacher wants.

Mostly, teachers of ENG 1000 and 1100 are non-tenured, and not very connected to the university. We need to connect them with the university better. ENG 1100 is listed as intro to literature and writing too. Some feel it’s very similar to something that they might have done in high school. Many say that students don’t really analyze but summarize. We want to change ENG 1100 to an analysis of texts with the focus on reading and writing. This should be a sophomore level class. We recommend a vertical model requirement with Capstone writing course in the major included.

We recommend a WAC coordinator for the university. In Freshman Composition, teachers are part of mentoring groups. This is one thing that has strengthened this course.

We recommend more positions for fulltime composition faculty and benefits for part-time faculty. Our faculty cannot teach if they can’t stay healthy. Some of our instructors teach writing sections at several colleges each semester in order to make a living.

We have linked writing with other classes including Freshman Seminar. We have linked with history through a NEH grant.

We are doing pilot studies with ENG 1100 involving things like textual analysis, visual analysis. We are doing a pilot with the book Fieldworking by Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater on ethnography. We don’t just have to focus on writing with analysis of literature.

The delivery of instruction is a problem area. I think we have to do something about the way we treat English teachers. They are mostly part-time with no health benefits. It’s worse than Wal-Mart. These people excited about teaching. They want to be connected to the job, to the university. A few have PhDs, most have only M.A.s. They often have been here for years and years. Some students finish their MA and want to stay for a few years. We have a real faculty who don’t have health benefits.

Dave Haney: English now has one fulltime composition instructor. We need more well paid, full-time, non-tenure track MA level faculty. We’ve got to get these people into full-time careers. In terms of courses, we offer 100 sections of freshman writing, only four are taught by tenure-track faculty. Twenty-six non-tenure faculty members are teaching it this fall.

Joni Petschauer: When people are appointed at the last minute, we have a hard time getting them to feel a part of things.

Georgia Rhoades: I included an article in your packet that explains why it’s to the university’s advantage to invest in these non-tenure track faculty. The university needs a cadre of fulltime non-tenure track faculty. With last minute hiring, we cannot integrate faculty into general education and we cannot link classes together. There is no certainty now.

There is lots of material about WAC. There has to be more support for this initiative than there was for the designators. I have been working at the Hubbard Center for three years. The Hubbard Center work gave me a chance to find out how people feel about writing across the curriculum. The W classes are being given to new teachers who don’t feel capable of providing it. We need to continue giving workshops on WAC. New instructors on campus don’t know what they should do.

I have three recommendations:
1. ENG 1100 needs to be moved to sophomore year.
2. There needs to be a Capstone Course in every field.
3. Writing classes should be small.

Beth Carroll, Director of the Writing Center:

I was hired as Director 3 ½ years ago. We are fully staffed and have moved to the new Belk Library. There are lots more students coming in. We have double the amount of visitors since last year.

The Writing Center helps on all kinds of writing. We work with students on assignments from lab reports to creative writing; we are helping students interpret assignments. We help at all phases of the writing. We see graduate students as well. The staff of the writing center is mostly English majors.

Some kind of administrative support for faculty teaching W courses would be good. We have faculty come to the Writing Center asking for help but our staff is all students! The faculty members have been assigned to teach a W course and don’t know what to do.

I would like to argue against a proficiency exit exam. James Madison University has this. There are other ways to evaluate students’ progress. Portfolio assessments can be done. Carlton College has a fair assessment model. You can use electronic portfolios and you can just evaluate a sample of them for assessment purposes.

The Stonybrook model includes many assignments but the student selects the best four for their portfolio. Students also write a portfolio cover letter to describe its contents. This involves some self-assessment that is critical.

Q: What is the ultimate goal of the writing center?

A: We see a lot of marginal people and the over-achievers. We miss the group in the middle. There is a stigma that the writing center is only for remedial people. How to reach these other students?

A lot of grad students do research in the writing center on how to work with disabilities and others study how to work with ESL students.

Sue Keefe: Are there models of how to get more fulltime non-tenure track writing instructors?

Georgia Rhoades: UNC-Charlotte has added 10 of these positions in the past several years.

Dave Haney: We’ve historically underfunded ourselves. We had 30 full time non-tenure track people at Auburn in English. At ASU, the English department has only 2 lines for fulltime non-tenure track teaching (business writing, composition). Our class sizes have been kept small. We allow 22 students in ENG 1000 and 24 in ENG 1100. The recommendation is 18 per section.

Joni Petschauer: Duke has practitioners. They have tenure track teachers hired for teaching rather than for scholarship.

SK: If English departments are given these kind of positions, then others might want the same things.

Georgia Rhoades: One of the concerns was how people would be able to continue in positions. Who would want to teach four composition classes in one semester? But they do now with 4-2 teaching loads.

DH: There is a person in our department teaching fulltime with no health insurance who has fallen ill.

Greg Rhoads: We have 15-18 adjuncts in Math.

We need to get instructors multi-year contracts. We need to get them health benefits. Perhaps a tuition increase could go for this.