The Writing Program’s Fall 2025 FYW Faculty Workshop took place on Monday August 28. View the presentation here for the agenda and more on administrative updates.
Welcome to Chair Brad Melekien
The group welcomed our new Chair of English, Brad Melekien. He shared some background on the various roles he plays here, as both Chair and Director of the Cropper Center for Creative Writing. He has been doing a lot of thinking lately about AI and what it means for our work.
Student Evaluation Response Rates
There are good reasons for paying attention to our student evaluation response rates. One is that high response rates make it easier to build a record of the quality of our teaching. From an administrative perspective, it also demonstrates our professionalism and commitment to what we do as a program. The group agreed that the best way to raise response rates is to set aside class time.
New English 200: Topics Class on Research and Critical Thinking
We have a new topics class, English 200 Writing the Research Paper, and we need your innovative ideas.
This class maps to what’s fairly standard for second semester composition at other institutions. And while our class is not a core requirement, it satisfies the Critical Thinking (CCTH) and Information Literacy (CILT) flags. We are hoping to offer this class in Spring. Come talk to us about your ideas!
There are some requirements. The class must:
- Be focused on information literacy and research-based writing
- Require students to formally propose and and pursue an independent research project
- Include a focus on critical thinking, rhetoric, or critical literacy, and incorporate readings from some type of textbook or reader
- Include a final student portfolio and reflection
We also have some recommendations for course design:
- Choose a topic that might be intriguing to students. Because this class is not “required,” we need to work a little harder to “pull” them in. For instance, you can try to recruit students from your English 150 class.
- Define “research” broadly: learning from the living? (interviews, case studies, mini ethnographies?) Archival research? Digital cultures, texts, and trends? “Action” research that contributes to a social problem? These are all research.
- Think about how to include out of the classroom, experiential-based learning, and “real” audiences of student writing where their research makes a difference.
Ready to propose a class? Browse through these two documents: the topics-class description, “ENGL 200 Writing the Research Paper” and example syllabus, “ENGL 200 Conspiracies and Cults,” and come pitch your idea!
AI Discussion: Trends We’re Seeing, Experiments We’re Trying
The group discussed trends related to Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in our classrooms. Some highlights: it’s pretty labor-intensive to police this business, but use is just so wide-spread AI, our students see us as woefully ill-equipped to keep up with them (perhaps, rightly so), and students are using AI for reading, and finally, how the traditional essay (and “dry” academic writing in general), feels more difficult to teach than ever.
However, the group also identified some areas for hope, especially in our ability to rethink teaching writing in ways that engage our students. One line of thinking may be that, rather than “retreating,” we double-down on the role of writing in learning and writing’s connection to students’ lives and identities. For example, simply requiring students to read their work aloud, to connect with their own voices, and insisting that forms of accountability and sharing writing be a regular part of class. Might this bring more ownership into what they write, and maybe (dare we think) a renewed enjoyment to discovering what “sounds like them”? What about changing our grading structures, to loosen “the pressure valve” of “getting it right”? If we want to refuse AI, there are positive ways to do so.
Other strategies explored by the group included bringing AI into the classroom for intellectual exploration and play, such as having “AI Monday,” or asking AI to play with voices and genres (and then students “teaching AI” how to do better, through prompt engineering). It can be very productive to challenge students to identify the limitations of AI, and to use AI to teach information literacy, where AI is a source of information that has advantages and limitations.
To conclude the discussion: Everyone was encouraged to write AI Policy Statements in their syllabi (or a handout), and make a point to draft something more specific than the standard “academic dishonesty” blurb. And perhaps, come ready for the Spring workshop prepared to share what they used this Fall.
How Creativity Works, by Professor Joe Babcock
Professor Joe Babcock shared an activity designed to teach students to read more actively and think more like creators. He starts off by acknowledging a fact: we all spend a large part of lives scrolling passively through a glut of content, conveniently delivered to us by “super computers we carry in our back pocket.” No wonder so many of our students believe they are not creative.
Joe suggests to students that they misunderstand how “creativity works.” It’s not some arcane, unknowable gift only a few experience, but can be a practice–even a concrete sequence of steps. It all starts with an active reception of content.
He models his own creative process using a piece of sculpture as an example. In a sequence of images, Joe walks students through how he first appreciates a piece of art, reflecting on what intrigues him about it. Next, he examines it to deconstruct how it was made. Then, he experiments with recreating the sculpture himself, first emulating the same techniques, then innovating on top of the initial design and coming up with his own version. This process is not copying or stealing. It’s one way creativity works.
In class, Joe asks students to pick a text they find compelling or effective, and walk through these steps: active reception, analysis, mimicry, and innovation. Interestingly, the texts students choose are sometimes baffling, but giving students this freedom to engage and play with texts they’re familiar with–things they passively consume everyday–seems to engage them more in the assignment.
Following Joe’s presentation, we chatted about ways we could use this model in our own classes. How could you adapt it for texts you teach? Could we apply this model even to dryer academic writing our students must learn?