Home > News & events > Write Now newsletter > Write Now News - May 2010

Write Now News - May 2010

Contents

To view articles online click on the links below, or download and view in PDF format.

    Writing in the disciplines
    London Metropolitan Project for 2009-10

    Writing in the Disciplines (WID) initiatives involve subject lecturers and writing specialists working together to think about ways to improve student writing and to support lecturers to make changes to their assignments, modules and teaching designed to bring about a more effective learning and more engaging writing experience for students. 

    From 2006-09, the Write Now CETL at London Met carried out WID initiatives with many departments, including design, film studies, management and psychology. In 2009-10 Write Now initiated a new WID project, which aims to increase the sustainability of and research the effectiveness of its work in improving student writing and facilitating lecturers’ ownership of this key aspect of student learning.  The project was designed to offer a support framework to encourage lecturers to think about student writing in their modules, to implement possible interventions with Write Now support, and to evaluate the project.

    Eleven lecturers expressed interest and Write Now selected six modules to work with during 2009-10 academic year. Subjects chosen included accounting, business, film studies, international relations and sports science. Following a group meeting in June 2009, lecturers were asked to adapt Assessment Plus (www.writenow.ac.uk/assessmentplus/outcomes.htm) assessment criteria to their module-specific requirements and to apply them to a sample of student writing in their module in order to ascertain student writing strengths and weaknesses.  One particular aspect of student writing was then targeted for improvement through the intervention. This model is influenced by the practice of Paul Anderson, Director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University (Ohio), who visited the London Met Writing Centre in January 2009.

    Two one-to-one meetings were held in the summer of 2009 between the Write Now writing specialist and individual lecturers to discuss student writing and possible interventions.  Informal support – including learning technology assistance – was offered in implementing the changes. Projects have been diverse and very interesting.  For example, one lecturer focused on working on reflective writing through weekly writing tasks; another focused on examination writing; two lecturers focused on critical thinking and developed blogging-related writing exercises for their modules; and one lecturer introduced weekly exercises to help students write literature reviews. 

    We have been impressed by the amount of pedagogical change that this efficient model of staff development has been able to inspire and are currently researching the outcomes in terms of improved student writing and also lecturers’ attitudes to teaching writing.   In particular, it seems as if lecturers have been willing to embrace writing development as an integral part of disciplinary teaching.  Two key benefits of this approach are that it has the potential to reach whole cohorts of students and that it is incremental, with lecturers tackling one area of student writing at a time rather than dealing with “student writing” as an abstract and seemingly insoluble problem or concern.

    Three of the lecturers will join Write Now staff to discuss this project at the European Writing Centres Association biennial conference in Paris in May. Peter O’Neill (Write Now London Met) is currently co-editing with Mary Deane (Coventry University Centre for Academic Writing) a volume entitled Writing in the Disciplines for Palgrave MacMillan.  This book will showcase a variety of examples of this approach in depth and make the case for WID as an effective strategy in UK higher education.

    In next issue of Write Now News Liverpool Hope will report on their WID work.

    Writing Development in Higher Education international conference
    Book now for an early bird reduction

    WDHE logo

    Make sure that you visit the 13th Writing Development in Higher Education conference on “Sustainable writing development: approaches and challenges” on 28 to 30 June 2010 at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

    Over 120 workshops, seminars and presentations have been selected from a wide range of submitted abstracts and the conference will be an excellent forum for meeting colleagues from the UK and overseas to explore the future direction of student writing development and writing in the academic disciplines.

    We are delighted that our keynote speakers at the conference will be Dr Theresa Lillis from the Centre of Language and Communication at the Open University and Professor Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University, California.

    The Write Now CETL team are presenting an optional workshop: Using free online tools to support writing development, a whistle-stop tour of freely available online tools that support writing development for all, from research and composition to collaboration and communication. The workshop will provide a foundation for independent exploration of the tools throughout the conference, and further guidance will be available at the in-house cyber-station.

    Professor Andrea Lunsford’s presentation 'The changing nature of writing: findings from the Stanford Longitudinal Study' will also be part of the Write Now Expert Lecture Series, see below for more details.

    The conference is hosted by the Write Now CETL and the full conference programme is now available at www.writenow.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/wdhe-2010-detailed-programme.pdf

    Book by 17 May to make sure of your ‘early bird’ reduction!

    Write Now expert lecture series
    Venues: Liverpool, Birmingham and London

    The Write Now CETL is organising three expert lectures in which leading international experts in the field of academic writing and assessment will present their current thinking and research. By bringing together an audience of learning and teaching leaders and also practitioners from universities across the country, the expert lectures are intended to provide an opportunity for radical thinking, where participants can challenge the status quo and Write Now outcomes can contribute to that debate. Each lecture will be followed by a reception with drinks and canapés, to enable participants to network and discuss key ideas around writing and assessment.

    The first lecture entitled ‘Phasing out feedback; towards making it redundant’ will be given by Professor D. Royce Sadler from Griffith University, Australia, on 11 May 2010, at Liverpool Town Hall. This will be followed by a lecture from Professor Lisa Ede, Oregon State University, USA, on ‘Collaborative Learning: History, Theory, Practice’ on 15 June 2010 at The Council House, Birmingham. The series culminates with the third lecture by Professor Andrea Lunsford from Stanford University, California, USA, whose title is 'The Changing Nature of Writing: findings from the Stanford Longitudinal Study'. This will be on the 29 June 2010 at The Royal College of Physicians, London. This last event is part of the Writing Development in Higher Education conference which runs from 28-30 June 2010.

    Attendance at the expert lectures is by personal invitation and by colleagues applying for a place. The aim of each of these events is to be inclusive and welcoming, so colleagues who would like to attend any or all three of the lectures are asked to contact Vikki Grimbly at writenow@hope.ac.uk  as soon as possible, as places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. For further information on the lectures visit www.writenow.ac.uk/news-events/expert-lecture-series
     

    Peer tutor development at Liverpool Hope

    writing_centre

    Peer tutor development at Liverpool Hope combines needs-predicted pre-service workshops and a programme of in-service team meetings which serve both to ease tutors into the act of tutoring and to support their continuing development during their practice as tutors.  The programme is designed and taught by Julian Brasington, the Writing Centre Co-ordinator. Framed as a long-distance swim, the training programme comprises four phases.

    Getting changed is an 18-hour workshop programme over a four-week period focussing primarily upon difference – difference of process, of genre, of style and of role – and allows tutors to absorb ideas and enhance their confidence. It includes designing a writing help-sheet; taking part in tutorial cycles which allow them to tutor, to be tutored and to act as impartial observers; practising key skills such as active listening and note-taking; and observing tutorials run by the Centre Co-ordinator.

    Bracing the surf is a transition stage (from week five onwards) in which tutors start tutoring and are supported by further workshops, which allow them to reflect upon their sessions, to draw upon each other’s experience, and particularly to explore what works well during good tutoring sessions.

    The crossing is the main phase of the tutoring process, in which tutors give three hour-long tutorials per week and meet as a team with the Co-ordinator for one hour a week.  Scheduled observations enable tutors to observe each other in the process of tutoring, and to be observed by the Co-ordinator.  The team meetings provide opportunities to learn from each other’s experience and to identify further training needs.

    Points of arrival is a reflective stage when tutors are encouraged to capture the variety of their work and to build their expertise into future iterations of the programme. In 2007-08 the tutors designed a poster offering guidance to new tutors.  In 2008-09 they developed a three-stage process based around themed focus groups.  Two of the outcomes of this process were a presentation by tutors at the 2009 EATAW conference and an additional half-day training programme for incoming tutors designed and led by two of the tutors.

    Strategies for thinking and essay progression skills

    The Write Now team at Liverpool Hope are currently collaborating with Hope students to develop an online student writing resource called STEPS (Strategies for Thinking and Essay Progression Skills), a website that aims to support students in the writing of their first HE assignments. The resource will consist of a first-class Humanities assignment and will show students how to achieve the higher grade range through engagement with titles and learning outcomes, brainstorming, development of effective reading and critical thinking strategies, effective structuring, appropriate use of evidence, referencing, developing appropriate academic vocabulary and so on. The resource will also focus on the use of feedback and demonstrate ways in which students can effectively use tutor feedback to augment self-reflection, action planning and independent learning.

    The principal value of STEPS is that it will move away from a traditional text-based approach and will use video capturing, pod-casting and multiple representations of content to engage a wider range of learning styles and modal preferences. Central to the design of the resource is maximising student usability and relevancy, and thus it is envisaged that students themselves will have significant input into the content as well as contribute to the presentation of the resource. It is anticipated that the website will be launched at the end of June 2010.

    Online evolving essay project
    Lynn Reynolds reports on using blogs and wikis to support academic writing

    lynreynoldsphoto

    In 2007 I was an undergraduate student in the psychology department at London Met and working as a peer mentor at the Writing Centre. Although I enjoyed academic writing and was good at it, one thing still troubled me; for most students, it seemed to be a solitary activity, carried out in secret with an emphasis on the finished product. Even those of us who were consistently getting reasonable marks had little opportunity to compare our experiences of the writing process.

    As a way of bridging this gap and reassuring other student writers that they were not alone in their endeavours, I used a blog and wiki to write a 1500-word psychology essay online and in real time. In the blog, the writing process was broken down into its constituent parts (for example, when to move from note-taking to drafting) which I discussed as they were negotiated. Drafts of the essay itself were constructed on the wiki.

    The project was very much a collaborative venture. It attracted significant international participation from academic staff, students and private individuals with an interest in writing. I found the blog in particular to be an excellent medium for collaboration. Contributions were overwhelmingly supportive and candid. There was also a refreshing amount of respectful dissent, underlining that a healthy collaboration is the antithesis of groupthink. Furthermore, the concerns of those engaged in academic writing turned out to be remarkably unified. Topics related to technical capability were discussed extensively, but contributors also proved keen to explore the emotions associated with writing and to talk about their respective identities as academic writers.

    The eight weeks of the evolving essay project were certainly exhilarating and enlightening. Happily, the conversations we shared during this time have been preserved for posterity and can be seen online at www.anessayevolves.com.  

     Assessment design, pedagogy and practice
    What do new lecturers think?

    Lin-Norton

    Professor Lin Norton and Bill Norton attended the 6th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) held at Bloomington, Indiana, USA and gave a paper on the latest Write Now study being carried out at Liverpool Hope University in the area of assessment. Other members of the Hope Write Now research team who contributed to this research included Lee Shannon and Frances Phillips.

    The presentation was entitled ‘Assessment design, pedagogy and practice: What do new lecturers think?’.  This work reported on a large scale questionnaire study which included 586 ‘new’ lecturers from 80 discipline areas and 66 institutions from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  276 of the respondents were currently on an HE teaching course and 308 had recently attained an HE teaching qualification. 

    The analysis is still in progress and will be reported in a forthcoming journal publication, but interim findings presented at this conference were that lecturers (both inexperienced and experienced) taking an HE university teaching course think that it has changed their views on the role of assessment as part of the learning process. Over three quarters of our respondents thought that assessment needed improving. It was interesting to note that there were some significant differences in responses between more experienced lecturers and those with less experience suggesting that the former may be more likely to find their way around the various constraints when designing their assessments. For further information please see the conference presentation.

    Students’ experiences of academic writing                                cccprogram_cover_170
    in an era of internationalisation of higher education

    Peter O’Neill (Write Now CETL at London Met) and Melanie Brinkschulte (Göttingen University International Writing Centre) recently presented their on-going research into a project entitled “Negotiating academic identities: students’ experiences of academic writing in an era of internationalisation of higher education” at the Four Cs conference (Conference on College Composition and Communication) in Louisville, Kentucky.

    The research project is focused on students’ attitudes to their writing process. The goals of the research are practical: to determine what we should be doing as European teachers of writing in an international environment, and to develop a pedagogy of teaching academic writing which takes into account the sometimes competing academic writing and language traditions with which students are faced.  We hope to disseminate the results of our work to the writing community and to academic staff within disciplines, making practical suggestions for the provision of an effective learning and writing environment for the increasing numbers of international and English-as-second-language students.

    Underlying our research has been a programme of exchange. During 2009 a London Met student writing mentor, Sara Cannizzaro, taught two workshops for Göttingen students; and a Göttingen Writing Centre staff member, Ella Grieshammer, visited London to help train London Met writing mentors on L2 (second language) writing issues.  This physical exchange has been accompanied by online tutorials between Göttingen students and London Met peer writing mentors.  In light of the European Union’s attempt to promote student mobility across the continent (in accordance with the Bologna Process) we believe that writing development staff will benefit from learning about the delivery of education in other environments.  The project has already had an impact on our practice. London Met writing mentors have been reflecting on their tutorials with L2 students this year and these reflections – along with transcripts of tutorials from the London Met Writing Centre tutorial archive – will be the subject of on-going research.

    Creating online writing resources
    Developments at Aston University

    In February 2010 Write Now at Aston appointed Rozeena Mazhar as a Learning Technology Officer. Rozeena’s role focuses on developing online writing resources developed by Aston’s student writing mentors for the Learning Development Centre. 
    These include:

    • Writing Mentor Tip sheets on essay writing and referencing. 
    • A series of podcasts exploring various aspects of academic writing – planning and drafting assignments, using source materials, making the transition between academic years and making the transition from essay to dissertation.
    • Video diaries created by two mentors, Emma Green and Ben Young, about their ‘writing process’. Emma and Ben recorded their thoughts and reflections on writing an actual assignment from its initial inception to receiving their grade/feedback.

    Rozeena is currently editing the podcasts and video diaries and adding interactive activities to existing writing development materials.  She is enthusiastic about how her learning technologies background and the resources being developed can support the aims of Write Now and believes that ‘Students all share common experiences in academic writing, so resources designed by students for students will allow them to share experiences and ideas in a more interactive way’.

    Once complete, these resources will be made available to the wider academic community, which is anticipated to be October 2010.

    Investigating the effectiveness of face-to-face peer tutorials
    London Met project update

    The London Metropolitan Writing Centre is conducting research into the effectiveness of face-to-face peer tutorials on student learning, achievement and retention. As part of this project, students from various disciplines were asked to complete the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) during the autumn term 2009. The LASSI focuses on ten areas: anxiety, attitudes, concentration, information processing, motivation, self testing, selecting main ideas, study aids, time management and test strategies. Students also had the opportunity to attend peer tutorials at the Writing Centre to discuss a particular module assignment during the study period. The next stage of the project involves matching students who attended the Writing Centre for a tutorial with those who did not attend, using the LASSI items, as well as demographic variables such as gender, age and ethnicity. Inferential statistical tests will be conducted to investigate differences in student learning, achievement and retention between the two groups.

    The LASSI is also beneficial for students’ learning;on completion of the questionnaire, they received individual feedback on their strengths and weaknesses in the different areas covered. The results of the LASSI questionnaire can be used by students to support their personal development planning (PDP) work, including the writing of reflective personal statements. All students who completed the questionnaire were entered into a prize draw and Deborah Ofagbomum, the winner of the first prize of a Digital Book Reader, can be seen in the photo receiving her prize.
    deborahofagbomum

    For further information about this study, please contact Savita Bakhshi, s.bakhshi@londonmet.ac.uk. This study is part of the larger ‘Pathways to Success through Peer Mentoring Project’ that is led by Aston University and is funded by HEFCE and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which we reported on in the March issue of Write Now News.

    Forthcoming events

    Academic Writing and Beyond in Multicultural Societies
    Israel Forum for Academic Writing International Conference, 28-29 July 2010, at the MOFET Institute, Tel Aviv.

    • An exploration of a formative referencing intervention - Becca Westrup and Wendy Smeets
    • Researching the role of the Writing Centre in promoting “Writing in the Disciplines” in UK Higher Education – Peter O’Neill and Kathy Harrington

    12th International Conference
    EARLI Special Interest Group on Writing, 8-10 September 2010, Heidelberg, Germany

    • Investigating the impact of peer writing tutorials on student achievement  - Savita Bakhshi, Kathy Harrington and Peter O’Neill
    • Writing Narratives: Possibilities for developing students' autonomy and academic participation in essay writing  - Becca Westrup


    Sustainable writing development: approaches and challenges
    Writing Development in Higher Education conference, 28 – 30 June 2010, Royal College of Physicians, London

    • Marks+: a case study of a referencing intervention to help students to avoid unintentional plagiarism - Becca Westrup
    • Overcoming fear and resistance: supporting student writing in formal exam settings - Martin Agombar and Debbie Holley
    • Using free online tools to support writing development – Lynn Reynolds
    • Devising writing support strategies: a faculty based model - Wendy Smeets, Julian Brasington and Becca Westrup
       

    Forthcoming articles

    Norton, L., Aiyegbayo, O., Harrington, K., Elander, J. and Reddy, P. (2010 in press)
    New lecturers’ beliefs about learning, teaching and assessment in higher education:
    The role of the PGCLTHE programme.  To appear in Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 4.

    Who’s Who
    Write Now writing specialists

    peter
    Dr Peter O’ Neill        
    Writing Specialist
    London Metropolitan University
    Pete’s role is to offer specialised writing provision for staff and students at London Metropolitan. He works with staff who are interested in Writing in the Disciplines, helping them to develop effective techniques for teaching writing within existing academic modules and to incorporate “writing to learn” activities within their courses. His work also involves overseeing the operations of the Writing Centre and working with writing mentors and students.

    sarra-powell
    Sarra Powell
    Writing Specialist
    Liverpool Hope University
    Sarra’s role is to support Liverpool Hope University’s academic community in both their teaching and research responsibilities and to provide development opportunities in these areas. In particular she provides advice and guidance on the types of curricular intervention that support the development of student writing. She is also engaged in developing services that improve student understanding of, and engagement with, writing and assessment.

    wendy
    Wendy Smeets
    Writing Specialist
    Liverpool Hope University
    Wendy’s role is to support the work of the CETL at Liverpool Hope where she is the key contact person for the Faculty of Education. She is involved in the development of teaching materials, staff development initiatives such as task brief design, and liaising with the other CETL institutions, as well as research and evaluation. She is engaged in research on the collaboration with departmental staff on the development and implementation of writing skills curriculum components.

    becca_pic
    Becca Westrup
    Writing Specialist
    Liverpool Hope University
    Becca’s role involves the development of initiatives and resources to help students and staff with their academic writing, peer tutoring, research and evaluation. She also provides academic writing support for The Flying Start project which seeks to enhance students’ academic writing transition between A-Levels (and other pre-university courses) and higher education.

    Ellen Pope
    Ellen Pope
    Head of the Learning Development Centre
    Aston University
    Ellen is Head of the Learning Development Centre (LDC) at Aston University and she also  supports the work of the CETL at Aston, including overseeing the writing mentor programme at Aston. She is regularly involved with projects, including the CETL supported project ‘In Their Own Words’, which aims to develop online resources that enable students to share their experiences of academic writing and their journey throughout the student lifecycle.

    John Murray
    John Murray
    Learning Development Advisor
    Aston University
    John is a Learning Development Advisor in the LDC and works directly with students on developing their academic skills.  His role involves supporting and training the writing mentors at Aston.  In combining these two roles he is currently working with Ellen and other LDC colleagues and the writing mentors on the ‘In Their Own Words’ project.

    For further information on our writing specialists’ roles, research and publications, see www.writenow.ac.uk/about-us/contact-us

    Articles contributed by:
    Dr. Savita Bakhshi, Julian Brasington, John Murray, Rozeena Mazhar, Professor Lin Norton, Dr. Peter O’Neill, Professor Lynn Reynolds and Sarra Powell