Neal Lerner

Rethinking Multilingual Writers in Higher Education: An Institutional Case Study explores the complexities of multilingual students as language users and learners, emphasizing the distinctive assets that they bring to their education and the ways in which institutions of higher education can better meet their needs.Teachers, university administrators, advisors, and other support staff will gain an understanding of the resources, challenges, and successes of this growing student population and become better equipped to provide them with the best possible educational opportunities. Through mixed-methods case studies focusing on the Northeastern University Writing Program and Writing Center, the authors unpack the complexity of multilingual students’ identities and languaging to challenge deficit and homogenizing narratives that overlook their linguistic assets and diverse educational experiences. Working within and against university categories for collecting information about students and assessing their writing, authors point out the limits of terms such as “international” and the problems with dichotomous L1/L2 and native/nonnative speaker labels. Finally, the book offers lessons learned about the importance of conducting program self-study to inform research and pedagogy for higher education institutions around the world.This book will appeal to writing studies and linguistics scholars with interests in multilingualism, assessment, and mobility, as well as institutional stakeholders and researchers of higher education and multicultural education.

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.

Case studies and pedagogical strategies to help science and engineering students improve their writing and speaking skills while developing professional identities.To many science and engineering students, the task of writing may seem irrelevant to their future professional careers. At MIT, however, students discover that writing about their technical work is important not only in solving real-world problems but also in developing their professional identities. MIT puts into practice the belief that "engineers who don't write well end up working for engineers who do write well," requiring all students to take "communications-intensive" classes in which they learn from MIT faculty and writing instructors how to express their ideas in writing and in presentations. Students are challenged not only to think like professional scientists and engineers but also to communicate like them.This book offers in-depth case studies and pedagogical strategies from a range of science and engineering communication-intensive classes at MIT. It traces the progress of seventeen students from diverse backgrounds in seven classes that span five departments. Undergraduates in biology attempt to turn scientific findings into a research article; graduate students learn to define their research for scientific grant writing; undergraduates in biomedical engineering learn to use data as evidence; and students in aeronautic and astronautic engineering learn to communicate collaboratively. Each case study is introduced by a description of its theoretical and curricular context and an outline of the objectives for the students' activities. The studies describe the on-the-ground realities of working with faculty, staff, and students to achieve communication and course goals, offering lessons that can be easily applied to a wide variety of settings and institutions.

The science of biology celebrates the discovery and understanding of biological systems that already exist in nature. In parallel, the engineering of biology must learn how to make use of our understanding of the natural world to design and build new useful biological systems. ""Synthetic biology"" represents one example of recent work to engineer biological systems. This emerging field aims to replace the ad hoc process of assembling biological systems by primarily developing tools to assemble reliable-but-complex living organisms from standard components that can later be reused in new combination. The focus of this book is ""genome refactoring,"" one of several approaches to manage the complexity of a biological system in which the goal is to redesign the genetic elements that encode a living form--preserving the function of that form but encoding it with a genome far easier to study and extend. This book presents genome refactoring in two ways: as an important aspect of the emerging field of synthetic biology and as a powerful teaching tool to train would be professionals in the subject. Chapters focus on the overarching goals of synthetic biology and their alignment with the motivations and achievements in genome engineering; the engineering frameworks of refactoring, including genome synthesis, standardization of biological parts, and abstraction; a detailed description of the bacteriophages that have been refactored up to this point; and the methods of refactoring and contexts for that work drawn from the bacteriophage M13. Overall, these examples offer readers the potential for synthetic biology and the areas in need of further research. If successful, synthetic biology and genome refactoring could address any number of persistent societal needs, including sustainable energy, affordable and effective medicine, and green manufacturing practices. Table of Contents:Tools for Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology / Bacteriophage as Templates for Refactoring / Methods/Teaching Protocols for M13 Reengineering / Writing and Speaking as Biological Engineers / Summary and Future Directions / Appendix A / Appendix B / Appendix C