Anne Ellen Geller

It seems obvious: students will have more meaningful writing experiences if we offer more opportunities for their writing to be meaningful for them. But what does that mean? What makes writing meaningful for students? What, really, makes students want to write? The authors of this practical little book asked precisely that, and the answers they gathered from students across disciplines, majors, and institutions over several years inform their advice in Making Writing Meaningful: A Guide for Higher Education. The critical lessons that Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner took from their survey research, as well as from their own classrooms and workshops, are these: Students want their writing to be consequential, to build on connections with their lives, their world, and their futures, and to foster an inclusive learning experience. The authors delved further into these findings by asking what role identities—whether racial, ethnic, or cultural—played in students’ approach to writing and by exploring what students found meaningful in writing during experiences such as disruption, dislocation, and loss; personal, economic, and health challenges; and political, racial, and societal conflict. The resulting guide pairs a wealth of new data with pedagogical strategies and reflective exercises to help instructors of all kinds connect more effectively with their students—and to help students connect their lives and their writing in meaningful and productive ways. Making Writing Meaningful writing makes for a richer, more successful learning experience, and this book invites students and teachers alike to take advantage of the guidance offered here to foster connections that will serve students—and the world—well beyond academia.

It seems obvious: students will have more meaningful writing experiences if we offer more opportunities for their writing to be meaningful for them. But what does that mean? What makes writing meaningful for students? What, really, makes students want to write? The authors of this practical little book asked precisely that, and the answers they gathered from students across disciplines, majors, and institutions over several years inform their advice in Making Writing Meaningful: A Guide for Higher Education. The critical lessons that Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner took from their survey research, as well as from their own classrooms and workshops, are these: Students want their writing to be consequential, to build on connections with their lives, their world, and their futures, and to foster an inclusive learning experience. The authors delved further into these findings by asking what role identities—whether racial, ethnic, or cultural—played in students’ approach to writing and by exploring what students found meaningful in writing during experiences such as disruption, dislocation, and loss; personal, economic, and health challenges; and political, racial, and societal conflict. The resulting guide pairs a wealth of new data with pedagogical strategies and reflective exercises to help instructors of all kinds connect more effectively with their students—and to help students connect their lives and their writing in meaningful and productive ways. Making Writing Meaningful writing makes for a richer, more successful learning experience, and this book invites students and teachers alike to take advantage of the guidance offered here to foster connections that will serve students—and the world—well beyond academia.

In the face of the continuing discourse of crisis in US education, The Meaningful Writing Project offers readers an affirming story of writing in higher education that shares students' experiences in their own voices. In presenting the results of a three-year study consisting of surveys and interviews of university seniors and their faculty across three diverse institutions, authors Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner consider students' perceptions of their meaningful writing experiences, the qualities of those experiences, and instructors' perspectives on assignment design and delivery.This study confirms that meaningful assignments offer students opportunities to engage with instructors, peers, and texts and are relevant to past experiences and passions as well as to future aspirations and identities. Meaningful writing occurs across majors, in both required and elective courses, and beyond students' years at college. Additionally, the study makes clear that faculty across the curriculum devote significant care and attention to creating writing assignments that support student learning, as they understand writing performance to be a developmental process connected to overall cognitive and social development, student engagement with learning, and success in a wide variety of disciplines and professions.The Meaningful Writing Project provides writing center directors, WPAs, other composition scholars, and all faculty interested in teaching and learning with writing an unprecedented look into the writing projects students find meaningful.

The imperative to write and to publish is a relatively new development in the history of academia, yet it is now a significant factor in the culture of higher education. 'Working with Faculty Writers' takes a broad view of faculty writing support, advocating its value for tenure-track professors, adjuncts, senior scholars, and graduate students. The authors in this volume imagine productive campus writing support for faculty and future faculty that allows for new insights about their own disciplinary writing and writing processes, as well as the development of fresh ideas about student writing. Contributors from a variety of institution types and perspectives consider who faculty writers are and who they may be in the future, reveal the range of locations and models of support for faculty writers, explore the ways these might be delivered and assessed, and consider the theoretical, philosophical, political, and pedagogical approaches to faculty writing support, as well as its relationship to student writing support.With the pressure on faculty to be productive researchers and writers greater than ever, this is a must-read volume for administrators, faculty, and others involved in developing and assessing models of faculty writing support.

In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ('the everyday') as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing centre staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger's concept of 'community of practice' into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centred pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing centre. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.