Writing in the Disciplines Teaching Awards Announced

The selection committee for the WID teaching award has just announced its 2012 Teaching Award winners. Awards are given for Distinguished Teaching and Best Assignment Design.


The selection committee for the WID teaching award has just announced its 2012 Teaching Award winners. Awards are given for Distinguished Teaching and Best Assignment Design. Prof. Randi Kristensen, Deputy Director of WID observed:

"We had a remarkably strong pool of nominees for the award, from across the university. However, the following dossiers stood out, even among so many other excellent candidates, as manifesting all that we could have hoped to find in the teaching materials and practices being employed in WID classes."

Prof. Joseph P. Dymond, WID Distinguished Teaching Award 2012
Prof. Dymond’s Cultural Geography class creatively and explicitly addresses the disciplinary expectations of writing in the field of geography. As his “Culture Map” assignment notes, “One of the key ways we communicate in ‘writing’ in Geography is with maps and corresponding map discussion.” Students in Prof. Dymond’s class work in groups to create spatial and cultural maps, and use them to examine emerging geographies in contested areas. His students and colleagues rate him highly for his extensive feedback and critiques that enable student writers to see the intrinsic connections between effective critical thinking and effective communication. From a WID perspective, Prof. Dymond’s connection of the theoretical and empirical aspects of the field to projects that engage discipline-specific forms of writing with multiple audiences – professional, peer, and community – demonstrates the best of what writing in a discipline, as an approach to teaching and learning, can achieve.

Prof. Shelley B. Brundage, WID Best Assignment Design Award 2012
Prof. Brundage’s rich Evidence-Based Practice Reviews provide an excellent way for students in the Speech and Hearing Senior Seminar to both consolidate their undergraduate learning and create a platform for their upcoming work in graduate school and as speech-language pathologists. In teams, students evaluate treatments for particular disorders in order to produce two evidence-based practice reviews: one written for a professional audience, the other for non-professionals, such as families, with whom practicing speech-language pathologists will also need to communicate effectively. This assignment is a stellar example of writing to learn in a discipline. It is clear, yet concise, in its purpose, audience, resources, and expectations. The formative activities – peer review and professor’s comments – are models of clarity, challenge, and encouragement to student writers. When the students then present their findings, in teams, to the rest of the class, they have also become teachers in the process, a significant achievement to crown their undergraduate careers.

The Philip J. Amsterdam Graduate Teaching Award 2012 was also awarded to Scott Larson. This teaching award is given to GW Graduate Teaching Assistants who have had at least two years of GTA experience and are nominated by their department. The Teaching and Learning Collaborative selection committee considers evaluations from students and supervising professors, as well as the quality of the GTA’s academic work. Scott's work as a WID GTA in American Studies stood out for his "[i]nnovative use of written materials he’s created to steer students through the process of critical reading, as well as visual formats to chart complex arguments alongside his students," and he was commended for "[h]is clear pedagogical style [which] shows willingness to engage student learning, but also directs attention to helping students work through difficult material."

Scott is an outstanding teacher, and graciously notes, "I've been truly fortunate to have had the guidance and support of both faculty and students in American Studies, and excellent training with GWU's Writing in the Disciplines program."

The University holds its award ceremony for all teaching awards on March 26th from 4-6pm. This will also be an occasion where we hope you can meet and congratulate the award recipients in person.

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Writing in the Disciplines Welcomes Guest Speakers

Scott Wible, Director of Professional Writing and Associate Professor of English from the University of Maryland, recently came to GW to have lunch and conversation with first year writing faculty, and to lead a WID workshop for graduate students teaching WID in the Business School.

Scott Wible, Director of Professional Writing and Associate Professor of English from the University of Maryland, recently came to GW to have lunch and conversation with first year writing faculty, and to lead a WID workshop for graduate students teaching WID in the Business School. All of these events, sponsored by the Business School, addressed professional writing and business school curriculum with an emphasis on the genres and best practices of this curriculum. Graduate student Leigha McReynolds summed up her experience of the workshop.

“Scott Wible’s workshop for the graduate teaching assistants who work on the Analysis of Business Issues course was an excellent resource and opportunity to expand our pedagogical arsenal. On the most basic level, it was our first opportunity to be exposed to a specific business writing pedagogy that can expand and develop our collective background in the humanities and composition. While we have all been trained to teach writing, this was our first training opportunity that was business specific. Second, Professor Wible provided us with concepts that will enhance our ability to frame the class effectively in terms of how business writing is unique as a discipline. Being able to articulate this among both those teaching the class and to the students taking it can only enhance the effectiveness of our endeavors. Finally, the workshop suggested ways to expand on and approach the assignments we already have that will help emphasize the disciplinary uniqueness and relevance, create great cohesion across assignments and the semester, and more effectively challenge students to go beyond a quantitative approach to problem solving and decision-making. We will take the concepts introduced and suggestions made in that brief workshop and immediately apply them to assignments and lesson plans in the second half of the semester. They will also shape our approach when we re-evaluate our methods and assignments for next semester and will likely provide a thread that we follow throughout the class.”

University Writing Professor Mark Mullen noted:

“I found the way he talked about making the intellectual content of business writing in particular visible to students to be very useful…[B]oth the formats and the occasions for business writing often seem so different, particularly to the degree that they take on a report structure rather than the explicitly argumentative one that we tend to favor. But Scott … looked behind the report structure, as it were, talking about the different kinds of analysis and intellectual investigation that the writing was often demanding and how these mapped on to more familiar categories.”

Professor Wible’s workshop was the second led by external scholars this year. In August, WID and the UWP welcomed Nicole B. Wallack, Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University.

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New Publication from University Writing Program Faculty

University Writing Program Professor Joe Fruscione's new book, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry. out this spring from Ohio State Press



Prof. Fruscione's new book "examines how Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and William Faulkner (1897–1962) vied for literary supremacy with competing-yet-complementary sensibilities. At times, each voiced a shared literary and professional respect; at others, each thought himself the superior craftsman and spoke of the other accordingly. Their rivalry was rich, nuanced, and vexed, embodying various attitudes—one-upmanship, respect, criticism, and praise. Their intertextual contest—what we might call their Modernist dialectic—was manifested textually through their fiction, nonfiction, letters, Nobel Prize Addresses, and spoken remarks.

Their intertextual relationship was highly significant for both men: it was unusual for the reclusive Faulkner to engage so directly and so often with a contemporary, and for the hyper-competitive Hemingway to admit respect for—and possible inferiority to—a rival writer. Their joint awareness spawned an influential, allusive, and sparring intertext in which each had a psycho-competitive hold on the other. This examination—part analytical study, part literary biography—illustrates how their artistic paths and performed masculinities clashed frequently, as the authors measured themselves against each other and engendered a mutual psychological influence."

Prof. Fruscione will be speaking at the Library of Congress on March 16 at noon. A Q&A and book signing will follow his talk.

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