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In this talk, Pamela Flash (University of Minnesota) describes what can happen when faculty colleagues within departments talk candidly about what they see (and hope to see) in student writing. Her work with scores of undergraduate departments reveals that conflicting conceptions of “writing,” coupled with a lack of awareness about where and how writing is being addressed within departmental curricula, can exhaust individual course instructors and impede students’ ability to develop as discipline-relevant communicators. Drawing from her work developing, implementing, and assessing the faculty-driven Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) model, she’ll propose methods for moving writing out of isolated courses and into networked curricula. REGISTER HERE

Pamela Flash serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, Co-Director of the Center for Writing, and Affiliate Graduate Faculty for the Literacy and Rhetorical Studies Minor at the University of Minnesota where she has taught and administered teaching-oriented programming since 1991. Flash is the founding director of both the University of Minnesota’s Writing-Enriched Curriculum Program and its interdisciplinary Teaching with Writing Program. Her research, publications, consultations, and presentations focus on the WEC model, writing pedagogy, composition theory, discourse communities, and the use of qualitative research methods (particularly inductive consultation, collaborative action research, and ethnographic methodologies) to enable sustainable pedagogic change on individual, departmental, and institutional levels. She has consulted extensively with colleges and universities interested in adapting the WEC model to their institutional contexts. Flash serves as Co-PI in a five-year, multi-institutional NSF grant investigating the impact of brief writing prompts on conceptual learning in large-enrollment STEM courses.