Excelsior Receives a $200,000 Award from Booth Ferris to Create a Center for Writing Excellence
The Booth Ferris Foundation has awarded Excelsior University a $200,000 grant to create a Center for Writing Excellence. The two-year project began on September 1 and will advance the College’s strategic initiative around Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) by improving the way faculty develop, integrate, and respond to writing assignments across a wide range of courses and programs. A collaboration involving the OWL, the WAC group, and the upcoming Center for Writing Excellence will work to achieve the following specific goals:
- Review and implement the college-wide WAC strategic plan.
- Develop college-wide WAC policies and procedures instituted to support faculty training, the use of Portfolium, and writing assignment integration into courses.
- Create an open online WAC certification course for faculty and launch it with a cohort of 50 faculty successfully completing the training.
- Create a WAC repository in the OWL consisting of a portfolio of faculty materials, including exemplars of student writing assignments, effective scaffolding approaches, and exemplars of substantive and meaningful feedback.
- Integrate OWL writing support links directly into courses in 20 degree programs.
- Benefit 300 Excelsior students with genre-enriched courses resulting in improvements in sources and evidence, mechanics, audience awareness, and argumentation. “Genre-rich courses” refers to the implementation of reading and writing assignments that focus on teaching genres that are discipline-specific. This is the essence of Writing in the Disciplines (WID). We will be adding these assignments to existing courses.
- Apply uniform assessments to evaluate the impact of all activities.
The Booth Ferris project dovetails with the ongoing SUNY/Excelsior OWL collaboration to develop WAC training materials and train 50 faculty in writing across the curriculum/writing in the discipline (WAC/WID). The open WAC certification course will be the first of its kind and promises to be an invaluable resource for WAC programs across the country.
Source: Francesco Crocco
