January 2022 Committee Newsletter

Our committees were busy last semester, regrouping, rethinking, and exploring new directions for curriculum, process, and faculty and student experience. It’s exciting to see all the ways our colleagues are helping to support the program and each other, often behind the scenes.

Read on for updates on our committees’ work and ways to get involved!

Writing Center Report

by Heather Barrett, Writing Center Coordinator

Our 28 consultants supported students in 1500+ appointments, utilizing 76% of the appointments offered (roughly double Fall 2020 usage and comparable to Fall 2019 usage). Students and consultants alike preferred in-person appointments, but remote synchronous appointments provided increased accessibility and flexibility; we’ll continue to offer both in Spring 2022. We drafted a WC-specific value statement and continued our social media efforts. In the WR 599 training course, new consultants envisioned future skill-based workshops, social events, and collaborations with the DEI committee as projects to broaden our efforts to support all students in honing their writing skills.

The Writing Center will open the week of February 7. We’ll continue our Tutoring with an Individual Plan for Support (TIPS) program for students seeking extra support. We’ll also be hiring consultants for the 2022-2023 academic year. Faculty are encouraged to share the position with promising past or current students, particularly those from BIPOC and multilingual backgrounds!

From the Curriculum Coordinators

by Kevin Barents, Jessica Bozek, and Malavika Shetty

In the fall, the Curriculum Coordinators reviewed syllabi, informally observed new faculty, graded placement tests, provided teaching support, collected submissions for a “pandemic time capsule” issue of the WR journal, sent out weekly emails with links to teaching resources (including Essential Lessons), and revised syllabus templates to be more user-friendly. This spring, we are excited to be working on the journal issue, which will contain poignant student work responsive to these strange times. We aim to release the issue by mid-semester, so that it can be a resource for WR 15x instructors as they transition to remediation and non-academic genres. We will also focus the weekly emails on resources for WR 153, continue to revise syllabus templates to make them easier to adapt and use, and research new possibilities for WR. We encourage faculty to reach out to us for support throughout the semester.

Faculty Issues Committee

by Carrie Bennett and Chris McVey, co-chairs

The FIC reviewed and edited the new WP’s Values Statement, created recommendations for how to make summer term teaching appointments more equitable, and began discussing the leadership team’s proposed changes to the promotion criteria. The committee will move forward with our discussion of the revised promotion criteria early spring semester and complete our FWRP/TIPs work. One issue that came up this past semester was clarity around TIPs: how many points each level of FTLs needs, what types of service (internal and/or external) fulfill the criteria, what specific type of service is required for promotion, etc. We will review TIPs allocations to ensure that they accurately reflect service commitments. In addition, we will continue to host listening sessions to provide open forums for faculty to communicate issues of concern to the committee.

Curriculum Committee

by Brandy Barents and Jacob Burg, co-chairs

We created a survey focused on getting feedback from faculty about how portfolios might best be structured, assigned, and (potentially) streamlined. We also started to consider future assessment procedures and best practices for grading, with special emphasis on contract grading and the pros and cons of P/F. Finally, the WR153 team (most of us are also on the Curriculum Committee) met to wrap up and think forward about the launch of WR 153 in Spring 2022. Looking ahead, once portfolio survey results are recorded, we will hold listening sessions to share ideas. We will also continue thinking about our assessment practices, both within the classroom and as an entire program.

Campus Visit Committee

by Marie McDonough, chair

Our committee is just getting in gear this semester. When our job candidates come to visit after spring break in March, we’ll be making sure they feel welcome and helping them get to where they need to be. We’ll be recruiting WP faculty to attend job talks, informal conversations, and/or lunch, so stay tuned! Finally, we’re also starting to reach out to other constituencies (writing consultants, students, DEI specialists) who might be interested in attending the job talks. We are hoping for a robust and enthusiastic turnout!

Observation Committee

by Aleks Kasztalska and Marisa Milanese, co-chairs

The Observation Committee designed and instituted what we hope will be a more objective, transparent, and useful observation process for everyone (this process was originally designed by Aleks). The committee members piloted the new process this fall, will meet to revise it in January, and will test it again in the spring, as we observe the WP’s numerous new part-time hires. Our goal is to make teaching observations an enriching experience for all faculty members–-the observer and the observed. The feedback from lecturers observed this fall has been positive.

Collaborative Mentoring Initiative

by Seth Blumenthal and Stephanie Kolberg, co-chairs

In the fall semester we reached out to GWFs and new part-time faculty to participate in CMI as mentees, creating three clusters of two mentors and two mentees each, and a fourth cluster that has grown to include two mentors and four mentees. We also created one CMI teaching cluster composed solely of lecturers. Each cluster met in late September for coffee compliments of the WP, and set their expectations and schedules for the cluster according to CMI guidelines, deciding upon opportunities for such things as observations, developing prompts, and discussing grading examples. We will convene in late January to discuss/recalibrate the mentoring plan to consider new challenges in the spring as we move into 15x.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee

by Caroll Beauvais, Noor Hashem, and Swati Rani, co-chairs

The DEI has worked on building an inclusive affinity and allyship community. We create community and change by: discussing and troubleshooting “problems of practice” in teaching as well as other program-wide equity issues, sharing schedules for informal in-person meet-ups around busy teaching schedules, and setting up a digital space for resource-sharing, updates, and acknowledgments of member accomplishments (Slack group up soon). Members send out Monday Memes to prompt “courageous conversations” within the larger WP, and many of our members are currently serving on the Spring hiring committee. We also collaborate on trauma sensitive pedagogy, decentering the culture of ableism, advocating on behalf of PT lecturer needs, and advocating for our wellness. We invite FT, PT, and graduate fellows to join.

Boston Now

by Allison Blyler and Holly Schaaf, co-chairs

Inspired by results from our Fall 2021 survey, Boston Now held a December 17th gathering “Imagining Future Adventures Beyond the Classroom.” This semester we will be hosting further brainstorming sessions to help faculty shape new course topics that use place-based, experiential learning and plan outside-the-classroom adventures and activities for spring and fall 2022. The first of these sessions will be Thursday, March 17th. 

We will also be designing new approaches for collaborations within the initiative and across the curriculum that will be first implemented in fall 2022. We invite any faculty interested in interdisciplinary, inter-class collaboration involving outside-the-classroom activities and/or guest speakers to email us at hcschaaf@bu.edu  and ablyler@bu.edu.