Overview
Dates: September 2011-April 2012.
The Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) and the Thompson Writing Program (TWP) jointly offered a year-long Faculty Fellowship program to provide support for faculty interested in developing and evaluating new approaches to teaching research with writing to undergraduates in their disciplines. During the Fellowship, which ran from September 2011 to April 2012, participants worked together to learn teaching methodologies, pedagogical theories, and assessment strategies that enhance students’ critical thinking and overall engagement with writing and research.
Fellows Activities
Effective teaching of disciplinary research to undergraduates is one of the major goals of Duke’s undergraduate education. Writing is an inevitable part of undergraduate research projects, yet faculty rarely have the opportunity to consider how writing can contribute to the quality of students’ research and to their development as critical thinkers.
Faculty fellows from a range of disciplines in this year-long reflective learning group met monthly to discuss writing as a way of thinking, explore ways to cultivate student writing during the research process, workshop their plans and ideas for teaching research with writing in their spring course, and discuss the effectiveness of their new approach(es).
Planned Outcomes
Each faculty participant will developed a specific project or assignment in the fall and then taught and assessed that project/assignment in the spring, sharing the outcomes through posts to the CIT blog and other outreach opportunities with Duke colleagues.
Posts by participants in this Fellows program are located on the CIT blog.
Participants
The Fellowship is being coordinated by Jennifer Ahern-Dodson for the Thompson Writing Program and consultants Randy Riddle and Seth Anderson are supporting the Fellowship on behalf of the CIT. Fellows participating in the program are:
- Leslie Babinski, Child and Family Policy
- Nick Carnes, Sanford School of Public Policy
- Corinna Kahnke, Germanic Languages
- Craig Roberts, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences
- Karin Shapiro, History Department
- Melissa Simmermeyer, Romance Studies
Original program application form (.doc).