About Lehman Lehman College is a four-year liberal arts college located in the Bronx and serving nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. One of the constituant colleges within the City University of New York system, Lehman was founded in 1931 as the Bronx campus of Hunter College before becoming an independent college in 1968. The student body is exceptionally diverse, with students from over 90 countries around the world. To access the Lehman College website, please see: http://www.lehman.edu/lehman/ For more information about Lehman's Writing Across the Curriculum Program, please see: http://www.lehman.edu/lehman/wac/about.html

Background Since 1999, when Lehman College established its Writing Across the Curriculum program, Lehman faculty have had numerous opportunities participate in WAC. Faculty who receive grants to attend the year-long program receive intensive training in WAC pedagogy, collaborate with Writing Fellows, and share their work with a supportive group of colleagues. These instructors are often recruited to serve in a leadership capacity by giving presentations and leading roundtable meetings that are open to the larger college community. However, prior to the spring semester of 2007, Lehman's WAC program had not offered an opportunity for former participants in the year-long workshop series to deepen their engagement with WAC. It was assumed (or hoped) that faculty would continue to use writing in their teaching on their own. Ideally, ideas about the role of writing throughout the college curriculum would become part of a larger conversation within departments and throughout the college at large. Whether or not this has been the case, faculty participants in the year-long program have often remarked on the unique community created as a result of a year-long dedication to issues around teaching and writing and expressed regret once their year in WAC was over. Moreover, as we know from scholarship on education, learning is not something that stops once knowledge is gained: there is always room for growth and new insights; it is always possible to become a better teacher, to think more deeply about the role of writing in the classroom. These observations--about the value of community and the possibility of continued development as teachers--were behind the decision to implement a semester-long seminar for "returning" WAC faculty, a "refresher" course in which faculty participants from years past could revisit WAC ideas and reconnect with others interested in pedagogy and writing. The four-seminar series coalesced around individual inquiry projects designed and carried out by the participants. Inspired by current interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning, the workshop series invited faculty to analyze some aspect of their teaching with writing and to make that work public in project snapshots. These snapshots are the result of that effort.

Faculty Participants Professor Daniel Bautista, English Professor Brian Doyle, Journalism, Communication, and Theater Professor Cecilia Espinosa, Early Childhood & Childhood Education Professor Richard Holody, Sociology and Social Work Professor Robin Kunstler, Health Sciences Professor Abigail S. McNamee, Early Childhood and Childhood Education Professor Marietta Saravia-Shore, Early Childhood and Childhood Education Professor Carmen Saen-de-Casas, Languages and Literatures Professor Janette Tilley, Music

Leadership and Support WAC Coordinators Elaine Avidon Tyler T. Schmidt Marcie Wolfe Jessica Yood Faculty Development Associates Rachel Ihara Tanya Radford

Rachel Ihara and Professor Carmen Saen-de-Casas work together on a project snapshot.

Tanya Radford reviews work with Professor Richard Holody.

Summary of the Workshop Series At an initial planning meeting, the WAC faculty coordinators explained the goals of the four-session seminar: to give instructors an opportunity to pursue an area of inquiry in their teaching and to distill that work into a web-based display. Instructors were then asked to recall their experiences in the year-long WAC Faculty Development workshop series, to talk about what they hoped to revisit, and to start thinking about a possible area of inquiry. At the first workshop, the coordinators introduced the idea of "good work" as an overarching theme for the sessions. This theme had emerged at the opening planning meeting, where faculty raised the question of what constituted good writing in their own disciplines and in their classrooms. The group discussed articles by Anne Berthoff and Randy Bass, in order to put the idea of the scholarship of teaching and learning in a broader context. A faculty presentation allowed for a review of scaffolding as an approach to high-stakes writing assignments, a core concept in WAC pedagogy. At the second workshop, a faculty presentation re-introduced the notion of "creative" assignments as an alternative to the formal, academic essay assignment. Faculty brought in intial statements of purpose for their inquiry project and workshopped these in small groups. At the third workshop, faculty selected and brought in examples of student writing that they have identified as instances of "good work." A collaborative discussion of these samples led to a more grounded discussion of the particular features of good student writing in their respective disciplines. Faculty also reviewed selected projects snapshots to use as models. The final workshop was devoted to working with the KEEP Toolkit. Faculty spend time creating their project snapshots and sharing their works-in-progress. Faculty worked to complete their snapshots throughout the summer and met again the following fall to share their completed work.

Resources Bass, Randy. "The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?" Inventio 1.1 (Feb. 1999). http://www.doit.gmu.edu/archives/feb98/rbass.htm Berthoff, Anne. "Speculative Instruments: Language in the Core Curriculum." from The Making of Meaning. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton Cook, 1981. Bloom, Lynn Z. "Good Enough Writing: What is Good Enough Writing, Anyway?" from What is "College-Level" Writing? Eds. Patrick Sullivan and Harold Tinberg. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2006. Huber, Mary Taylor and Pat Hutchings. "Building the Teaching Commons." Change (May/June 2006): 25-31. O'Loughlin, Valerie Dean. "A 'How To' Guide for Developing a Publishable Scholarship of Teaching Project." Advanced Physiology Education 30 (206): 83-88

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